A Georgia State University soccer player was suspended from the team and will withdraw from the university because of her poor social media choices.
Natalia Martinez reportedly used the N-word on her Finsta page, a private version of Instagram.
According to Associate Athletic Director Mike Holms, school officials became aware of the social media situation with their soccer player on Friday morning and have since acted on it.
“We are handling the matter internally at the present time,” Holms told The AJC.
The university also condemned the social media post in a statement, saying, “We do not tolerate the language the student used in her post.”
Martinez’s name no longer appears on the team’s roster online.
Outrage from the students
Several students at GSU signed a petition calling for the freshman defender to be expelled.
“As a progressive, diverse university, we … feel like this sort of behavior should not be tolerated,” said India Bridgeforth, the creator of the petition.
By Monday afternoon, the petition had more than 500 signatures.
This isn’t new.
Sadly, this is just another story in a long string of college students coming under fire for being racist on social media.
For example, Harley Barber, a former University of Alabama student, recently made headlines for a social media video in which she repeatedly said the N-word and claimed that she was allowed to do so because she lived in the South.
Brittney Thomas, a Black student from Atlanta, saw the video and told theGrio that her initial reaction was complete shock.
“Wow, she is really bold to have recorded herself saying these things,” she recalled thinking at the time.
Outraged, Thomas quickly retweeted the videos of Barber hurling the N-word.
“My intentions were to inform students and have a call to action so that the school knew that we were taking this seriously and they should too take it seriously too,” Thomas told theGrio.
Barber was ultimately expelled from the university, but she isn’t the only college student out there saying racist things, as Martinez’s actions show.
But thanks to Thomas and other students like her, we can at least hold these people accountable when they think racism is an acceptable look in the year 2018.