We’ve seen this script and act quite frequently over the past couple of weeks:
- Racist person is caught on camera making offensive racist comment.
- Social media and CSI Twitter catches wind and exposes said person.
- Racist deletes their social media and/or LinkedIn.
- Said person asks for forgiveness and claims the video is not an accurate depiction of their true nature.
Drew Dollar is the latest to follow the playbook. Dollar, who was previously admitted to LSU, will no longer be attending this fall. Rejecting racists from your campus should be a slam dunk, no-brainer decision. The decision by LSU was reached after the school received over a week of feedback from alumni and a petition which collected over 10,000 signatures.
Citing privacy protections for student discipline, LSU spokesman Ernie Ballard says the school will not be commenting on the matter beyond a tweet issued on the school’s social media account. Here are more details courtesy of The Advocate.
If LSU indeed denied admission to Dollar, law experts say, the former incoming student could sue the universities claiming violations of First Amendment rights, and, due to protections of speech in the U.S. Constitution, the student would likely win such a lawsuit.
Devin Woodson, an LSU junior and co-chair of the LSU Black Male Leadership Initiative, said if LSU didn’t deny Dollar admission “that will be slightly disappointing,” because “at the end of the day, it’s about setting the tone that LSU won’t be accepting this behavior.”
If Dollar withdrew on his own, Woodson said, LSU’s student activism has still found its strength. “The fact that Drew Dollar won’t be attending LSU speaks to what we’ve done as student leaders,” Woodson said. “If we didn’t bring this to light and push extensively, this may not have happened.”
Traces of Dollar’s Instagram account have vanished, however on a June 4th now-deleted video Twitter post, Dollar explained why his actions weren’t that bad.
Flip the pages to check it out.
