A high school teacher in Louisiana is facing discipline after penning a racist Facebook post attacking Nike’s latest ad campaign featuring embattled NFL free agent Colin Kaepernick.
In the now-deleted post, Slidell High School math teacher Valerie Scogin said Black people “act like animals” and deserve to be stereotyped accordingly, according to the New Orleans Advocate. A spokeswoman for the St. Tammany Parish school said the incendiary post was “removed voluntarily” and that disciplinary action had been taken.
“I can’t comment further due to this being a personnel matter,” spokeswoman Meredith Mendez told the newspaper.
The teacher’s post was reportedly in response to Nike announcing Kaepernick as the face of its latest “Just Do It” campaign. The ex-San Francisco 49ers quarterback sparked outrage when he began kneeling during the national anthem to protest racial injustice in America.
Scogin’s racist remarks about the ad did not go unnoticed by Slidell High School alums. Skylar Broussard told The Advocate her “blood boiled” when she saw the comments posted on another graduate’s Facebook page.
“They don’t have to live in that country … They could go back,” Scogin wrote in the post. “But it was their own people selling them into slavery to begin with and tearing (sic) them even worse in those countries of origin.”
She added, “Want to not be stereotyped? Tell people of that color to quit acting like animals and perpetuating the stereotype.”
After getting flak from other users for her statements, Scogin backtracked and tried to apologize, saying “the last thing I want to do is hurt anyone.”
“Recently I posted a comment that may have been hurtful to some of you,” she wrote on her own Facebook page. “In my reaction out of frustration at another Facebook post, I made some remarks that were against my better judgment and sensibilities. I now wish I hadn’t.”
“I apologize for what I said and sincerely wish to avoid this in the future,” the teacher later added.
Broussard wasn’t buying it, however.
“Imagine comparing people of color to animals, then when you get caught you try to say you didn’t think it would hurt anyone,” she told the newspaper, adding that Slidell has always been a school that embraced equality and diversity.
One parent told local station WWL-TV the posts made her “furious.”
“It makes me furious to know that an adult like that is able to influence our children for eight hours a day without our say so,” she said. “That just makes me really upset.”
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