Intern Fired After She Tweeted ‘Our Inner N****r Came Out Today’ While In A Cotton Field

A 20-year-old intern was fired from her job after she posted pictures of herself and a friend on Twitter of the two picking cotton in a cotton field this past Sunday, October 25.

It might not seem like a good reason for the intern to be fired, except the woman posted the pictures with an incredibly racist caption.

“Our inner n****r came out today.”

Unsurprisingly, the extremely offensive tweet went viral, and as Vibe reports, the young woman was fired from her paid internship not long after.

The intern, Erika Escalante, quickly deleted the post off of Twitter, but as she told FOX10 Pheonix, it wasn’t quick enough.

“I deleted it, but it was much too late.”

Even though the intern had taken the picture down, someone had taken a screenshot of the Tweet, and that screenshot started to circulate around social media.

Once the picture started gaining negative attention, the intern decided that she needed to contact her employer, Isagenix, to let them know what was going on.

The company, which makes health and wellness products, made a swift decision on what needed to be done about the situation, and the fate of their intern with the company. Kevin Snyder, who works for Isagenix, said that the decision to have the intern fired was not hard to make once it was known what had occurred.

“We were shocked when we saw, it’s not what you would expect… When I looked at it, I immediately knew we had to make a swift action. It was unanimous, it is a complete conflict of who we are, and what we stand for as a company, so within roughly two hours we ended our employment with her.”

After the intern was fired, she spoke out about the incident and apologized for what she had said and the damage she had caused.

“I apologize fully, I take full responsibility for what I have done, It’s just not ok… I want to apologize to whoever I offended, 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.”

Escalante said that she had meant the tweet as a joke, and it was not her intentions to be offensive or racist. Obviously, no one found her joke to be very funny, and the young intern suffered the public backlash that comes with being blatantly racist.

The woman said that when she had posted the racist tweet, she “was not thinking at all.” The reporter from FOX10 Pheonix who was interviewing the intern asked her if she knew better than to post something so offensive on a social media platform where “everyone in the world can see.”

“Well ya, people have been telling me that, and I do know better, my parents tell me you need to watch what you post, everybody tells me you need to watch what you post, and it was just a lack of my better judgment. I was not thinking at all.”

After Escalante was fired because of her racist post, she soon deleted all of her social media accounts. However, the young woman says that someone has created a fake account using her name and picture. The Twitter account, which uses a handle that is very close to Escalante’s original handle, has apparently been posting racist and offensive Tweets. Escalante says she is not associated with the account at all. Escalante’s disabled handle was @Eri82185 and the fake account is @Eri82185_.

Isagenix made it very clear that the Tweet did not reflect the company or its values and that the intern had been fired.

We too find this tweet offensive & we are shocked. This does not reflect our values & culture. The intern is no longer with us.

— Isagenix® (@isagenix) October 26, 2015

[Image via Twitter]