Racist Tweet Costs 20 Year Old Her Job

A young woman is now unemployed almost immediately after posting a very racist tweet on her Twitter page.

Erika Escalante, 20, a Texas native, was a paid intern at Isagenix, a health company located in Arizona, until this week. On Sunday she took to social media to post a picture of herself and a friend in a cotton field with the caption, “Our inner n****** came out today.”

Twitter users became outraged. Escalante quickly went back and deleted the tweet–but not before it had been read and screenshotted by many Twitter users.

“I deleted it, but it was much too late,” she said in an interview.

Several users even brought it to the company’s attention directly via Twitter and provided Isagenix with screenshots of the tweet in question.

“Excuse me @isagenix do you know that your intern @Eri82195 is usually racially offensive words & images online?” read one tweet.

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Meanwhile, Escalante has issued subsequent apologies, as has become routine from those responsible when their offensive postings go viral on the Internet. “I apologize fully, I take full responsibility for what I have done, it’s just not ok,” said Escalante, who insisted that she knew better and that the whole thing was “a joke” and “a lack of my better judgment.” “I am sorry if you took this to heart, I am so sorry, I didn’t mean it at all, it was a mistake, that’s all I can say,” she said.

{snip} A more interesting–and positive–takeaway from this instance, though, is Isagenix’s swift and appropriate handling of the situation. Isagenix wasted absolutely no time. Within mere hours of Escalante’s original post, the health company responded to the incident on its Twitter and Facebook accounts to announce that Escalante had been fired from her internship.

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