In June 2020, Gopal tweeted "White lives don't matter. As white lives" and "Abolish whiteness", in response to a banner flown over a Premier League football stadium that read "White lives matter Burnley". She received abusive messages, including death threats, following her tweets. Gopal told the media that her comments were opposing the concept of whiteness.
Gopal has written and commented extensively on the subject of race and how it operates in contemporary society. She argues that whiteness is primarily a cultural category, not a biological one, and is useful for explaining how western societies work in terms of how society is structured, and how such structures determine power relations between dominant and non-dominant groups.
