Tit for tat: Vol Network personality calls out racially-charged tweet, gets fired for racially-charged tweet
University of Tennessee sports reporter Kasey Funderburg has apparently been fired by the university following the revelation of tweets containing racist slurs that she apparently made when she was a high school student nearly a decade ago.
As Outkick first reported Thursday, Funderburg’s profile page has been deleted from the Tennessee athletics website. She was an on-air talent for VFL Films and a sideline reporter for the Vol Network.
Her termination — if that is indeed what has happened — came at the end of a cycle that, ironically, began with Funderburg.
Earlier this week, a Twitter user who calls himself Richard G. West and purports to be a news reporter said that UT would be asking fans to paint their faces black as part of the “Dark Mode” for the Vols’ game against Kentucky on Saturday.
West isn’t really a news reporter, nor is he a real person. His Twitter account is a parody account, and he is constantly hooking unsuspecting followers with “news” about Tennessee sports.
“All fans will be asked to wear black clothes and paint their faces all black as well,” West wrote.
For those who might not know, blackface — facial makeup typically worn in theater in the late 19th century and early 20th century, a practice that was abandoned because it came to be considered highly offensive — has come under renewed scrutiny in recent years.
Funderburg decided this week to point out how offensive West’s tweet was.
“It’s disgusting that this person thinks putting out a joke like this is okay,” she tweeted. “Please don’t believe everything you read on Twitter.”
Less than two days after Funderburg called out West, she found herself being called out for — ironically — racially-charged tweets.
A former University of Tennessee tennis player named Elizabeth Profit screen-shotted tweets from Funderburg from 2013 and 2014. In them, she used the word “nigga.”
The tweets were made when Funderburg was a high school student.
“As a former @Vol_WTennis and @Vol_Sports black student athlete im disappointed to see that people with these viewpoints continue to work in this sacred parts,” Profit tweeted. “She made my time as a post grad at vfl films MISERABLE. Hope something is done about this.”
A day later, Funderburg had been scrubbed from the UT Sports website.
There’s rich irony in the fact that Funderburg called a parody Twitter account to the mat over a racially-charged joke, then wound up being exposed for her own racially-charged tweets.
However, the fact that someone is fired over a dumb tweet that was made when they were basically a kid is mind-numbing, even in this day and age.
The fact that someone would want to see a person’s livelihood destroyed because they apparently have a beef with that person is unbelievably petty.
At the end of the day, West’s tweet was in poor taste but didn’t really hurt anyone. It was a race-based joke, but it’s hard to say that it was racist in nature.
And, at the end of the day, Funderburg’s tweets from nearly 10 years ago were in poor taste, but it’s also hard to believe they hurt anyone. It’s impossible to read racist intent into her tweets; more likely, she was a naive high school student trying to fit in.
Yet, round and round we go. One person wants to expose a dumb parody account that is known for saying outrageous things. Someone else wants to get that person fired for long-past dumb tweets. And, no doubt, there are Vol fans sifting through Profit’s Twitter history as we speak to see if she’s said anything that can be used against her.
Where does it end?
In a perfect world, parody accounts like Richard G. West wouldn’t be able to fool innocent people, and they wouldn’t find humor in racially-charged jokes. In a perfect world, even young high school students wouldn’t use racially-charged language, however innocent their intent might be.
But we don’t live in a perfect world. We live in an imperfect world populated by flawed human beings. Sadly, we’ve converted ourselves to a society that holds no secrets, using social media apps on our phone to leave our entire lives and our every action forever exposed to the masses. It’s unfortunate that people with axes to grind are working hard to find any flaw in our past to use in their quest to tear us down. It’s even more unfortunate that people in positions of authority cave to the pressure that’s created by those petty-minded justice warriors.
And it’s almost surreal that we live in a world where a football player can punch a young coed who poses no threat to him, without repercussion, because he’s “afraid” but a professional in the same industry can be fired for a mild comment she made as a high school teenager nearly a decade ago.
We’re devolving. You all know that, right?