Racist Tweet About Michelle Obama Gets Mortgage Lender Fired

Social media is notoriously harsh with people who step outside acceptable societal mores, stomping on and grinding them down until they’re little more than virtual oil spots on the floor.

Lisa Greenwood wasn’t just cyber-squashed over her denigrating, racist tweet after Michelle Obama spoke from her heart as a wife and mother at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, she’s standing in the unemployment line in real life — further evidence that social media is blurring the tenuous line between employees’ personal and public lives.

The first lady’s soaring speech brought convention delegates and national television audiences to tears. She declared, among other things, that because of Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, her daughters “take for granted that a woman can be president.” Without naming him, she called Republican nominee Donald Trump a playground bully and shared her family’s strategy for dealing with them: “When they go low,” she said, “we go high.”

“Beautiful,” Twitter users said in a flood of effusive praise. And then there was Greenwood's tweet: “@FLOTUS beautiful?? Seriously she is an ugly black bitch.”

Twitter users turned with a fury on the mortgage loan assistant for Home Point Financial, an Ann Arbor, Michigan-based lender that has about 30 branches around the country. Some appealed directly to the bank, which gave her the boot, saying in a statement the company does “not agree with nor condone such comments.”

Greenwood’s tweet was on her personal account. In the statement, Home Point Financial said its action against Greenwood was a reflection of a core philosophy that extends beyond the workplace and into the communities it serves.

Greenwood appears to have deactivated her account, but not before screengrabs gave the Tweet eternal cyberlife. One Facebook user, Michael Hicks, tracked the Tweet to her social media accounts and job at Home Point Financial, suggested it was an example of institutional racism that many people don’t grasp and questioned how equitably she treated Home Point’s diverse base of clients.

Hicks said Greenwood lives in Ann Arbor, but her LinkedIn profile lists her residing in the Providence, Rhode Island, area and working in suburban Cranston, Rhode Island.

Such cases are increasingly common under policies like the one at Home Point Financial, which holds that an employee's conduct outside the workplace can affect the employer's reputation.

Earlier this year, a white award-winning Pittsburgh television anchor was fired after fans on her professional Facebook page called out a post about a backyard barbecue shooting as racist and demeaning, The Washington Post reported.

“You needn’t be a criminal profiler to draw a mental sketch of the killers who broke so many hearts ..., ” WTAE-TV anchor Wendy Bell wrote in a Facebook post that has since been deleted. “… They are young black men, likely in their teens or in their early 20s. They have multiple siblings from multiple fathers and their mothers work multiple jobs. These boys have been in the system before. They’ve grown up there. They know the police. They’ve been arrested.”

Hearst Television, the television station’s parent company, said in a statement that Bell's “comments on a WTAE Facebook page were inconsistent with the company’s ethics and journalistic standards,” the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported.

Last month, her attorney filed a federal lawsuit claiming that if Bell were black, she wouldn't have been fired.

Public sector employees have been disciplined as well.

In Iowa on Wednesday, a criminalist with the state’s Department of Public Safety was fired over a social media post that addressed her personal fears about black people, the Des Moines Register reported.

“Yes, not every black person is going to shoot me because I look at them wrong, or because I happen to be attending a training so I’m wearing a DCI shirt that day — but I know that there is a stronger chance that they will today than they would have 5 years ago,” Amy Pollpeter wrote in a July 8 Facebook post.

In a statement, the Department of Public Safety said Pollpeter was fired in accordance with the department's social media and general conduct policies.