Florida State Blasts 'Racist Social Media' Image Aimed at Its Head Coach
When your school’s football team has just suffered through a 5-7 season and failed to qualify for a bowl game for the first time since 1981, student anger is understandable.
And when that 5-7 season is capped off with an embarrassing 41-14 loss to your school’s biggest rival in a game that would’ve made you bowl eligible with a win, student anger is inevitable.
But when that anger translates into a grotesque display of racism, that’s just crossing the line.
Florida State coach Willie Taggart, who is black and whose Seminoles lost to the Florida Gators in the rivalry game Saturday, found himself the subject of an ugly, classless display on the part of a “fan” on social media over the weekend.
The person posted a meme depicting Taggart getting lynched and, taking a page from Nike’s “Believe In Something” campaign featuring Colin Kaepernick, captioned it, “Believe in something. Even if it means sacrificing your rep.”
Given a chance to walk back his extremist speech by a commenter on the meme, the original poster instead doubled down.
“I’m dead f—ing serious. This is how far I’m willing to go to get rid of that clown.”
Let that sink in. There’s a poster on social media who not only wants to murder a man over the sport of football, but who chose to express that lunacy in an explicitly racist way.
Florida State president John Thrasher was having none of what the social media lone wolf was selling and instantly denounced the post by coming to the defense of his football coach.
“A recent racist social media post aimed at our football coach is ignorant and despicable,” Thrasher said in a statement, which FSU announced via Twitter Sunday.
“I speak for the entire FSU community in expressing our disgust and extreme disappointment, and I am glad the state attorney is investigating. Coach Taggart has our full support and as true Seminoles know, he is a respected member of the FSU family.”
Taggart’s invoking the state attorney refers to Florida state law provisions on hate crimes, which “[provide] for the reclassification of any felony or misdemeanor, including property crimes, where the commission of such offense evidences prejudice based on the race, color, ancestry, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, national origin, mental or physical disability, or advanced age of the victim.”
Making a death threat is a second-degree felony in Florida as well. While it would be up to the court to determine if the social media poster literally intended to lynch Taggart would determine which side of the line between a death threat and First Amendment-protected speech the post falls on.
All the same, the fact still remains that Taggart is on the figurative, if not the literal, hot seat. Coaching the school to its first losing season since 1976 is not something that will go over even with the sorts of Florida State fans who are as kind and nonviolent as Mr. Rogers.
Then again, coaches are often given multiple years to rebuild a program, and the Seminole program that Taggart took over was in sorry shape after the departure of coach Jimbo Fisher. One of Florida State’s seven regular-season wins was nearly vacated after a controversy involving the Division I opponent eligibility of Delaware State, and a team that started the season ranked No. 3 in the nation finished 7-6 and could easily have been 5-6 and missed both the Delaware State win and the Independence Bowl.
Taggart has a true mess of a program to clean up. Race-baiting by so-called fans on social media isn’t helping.
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