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Man fired from job for racist response to friends and followers on his own Facebook post

A selfie taken with Gerod Roth's co-worker and three-year-old son went viral after his initial reply incited further callous remarks

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Man fired from job for racist response to friends and followers on his own Facebook post

Social media can be costly.

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It cost a local man his job after a photo he posted of himself and a co-worker’s three-year-old son became a target for racist trolls.

And it cost the mother of that three-year-old her privacy, and her son his innocence, both of which she is trying to reclaim.

“Cayden is a child. He is not abandoned. He is loved,” Sydney Shelton said about her son. “If people are going to see my son, I want them to see my Cayden. I want them to get that image out of their heads.”

That image is a selfie posted last month on Facebook by Gerod Roth, who at the time was a co-worker of Shelton’s at Polaris Marketing Group, an Atlanta-based firm.

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The photo, which shows little Cayden, who is black, standing behind Roth, who is white, is seemingly innocuous. Yet it drew a torrent of racist and bigoted comments from Roth’s friends and followers. They called Cayden a “slave” and likened him to the pivotal character in the book Roots – Kunta Kinte, whose name was changed to “Toby” after he was stolen from Africa.

Someone even posted an image of Little Black Sambo to draw a cruel comparison.

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