Students, others forwarding racist online posts for public shaming
GAINESVILLE — Students and others across the U.S. are publicly shaming young authors of racist social media posts and in some cases forwarding copies to college admissions offices, athletic coaches and employers to press them for punishment.
The effort is intended to impose realworld consequences for hateful speech online. It is complicated by free-speech legal protections and questions about holding youths accountable for terrible judgment in what they say or write, even as minors or when they share such posts among small groups of friends.
The phenomenon — derided by some as a form of “cancel culture,” or shaming anyone who expresses a controversial or unpopular opinion — already has led to universities withdrawing admission offers or discouraging prospective students from attending, loss of at least one college athletic scholarship and job firings.
So far: Louisiana State University said this week that a white student who appeared in a brief video online saying, “I hate n-----” will not be attending the school, but it did not say whether it revoked his admissions offer or the student withdrew his application.
The city of Gainesville last week revoked an employment offer to a University of Florida former student government official who wrote racist comments in private messages in 2015 when he was in high school. The student apologized in a statement and acknowledged what he wrote was unacceptable.
Marquette revoked the athletic scholarship of an incoming freshman earlier this month over a Snapchat post that compared George Floyd’s death with Colin Kaepernick’s NFL protest.
A private women’s college in Georgia, Wesleyan College, expelled a student earlier this month over offensive social media posts
The effort picked up dramatically amid Black Lives Matter protests in the wake of Minneapolis police fatally suffocating Floyd during an arrest in a minor criminal case. Racist posts are frequently tagged with “Twitter, do your thing,” encouraging users to investigate who might be behind the account and how to punish them effectively, such as complaining to an employer or prospective college.
The public shaming can follow students across schools and careers, even when a prospective university won’t take action, said Kishawn Kitson, a Jamaican immigrant and student at Miami Dade College in South Florida. He said being labeled a racist online can be a permanent reminder of a grave mistake.
“At the end of the day, it’s on social media,” Kitson said. “That would have more of a hit than a university kicking them out.”
The University of Florida, which has struggled to attract black students, announced last week on Twitter that a student who posted racist comments on social media will not be attending school there in the fall.
The university did not identify the student, but an online campaign earlier this month had targeted Liberty Woodley, 17, of Cape Coral, a Republican, mostly white and upper-middle class community in southwest Florida. Woodley wrote in a private Instagram post in 2019 that two black female classmates were annoying and “most definitely crackwhores,” adding that “people like them actually do nothing for society.”
Woodley did not return phone messages, and she shut down her Instagram account. Her parents did not return phone messages or emails. But in earlier interviews, Woodley told her local newspaper, the News-Press of Fort Myers, that she had sincerely apologized and that she wrote the post out of anger. She said she called UF’s admissions office four days before the university made its announcement on Twitter.
“I haven’t engaged in any hate,” Woodley told the newspaper. “I am not racist at all and I am not full of hate.”
A UF spokesman, Steve Orlando, confirmed last week that Woodley was no longer a prospective student. He declined to say whether UF rescinded her admissions offer or she changed her mind.