A Drake University graduate student still suffers from an episode five years ago in which he was falsely accused of racism for wearing a dark-colored acne mask.
Holden Hughes notes that he was only 14 when the photo of him wearing the acne mask was taken and only 17 when a social media post about it went viral.
“I am not ashamed of anything that happened,” Hughes said in an interview with The Free Press. “I have made a lot of mistakes in my life. I make them every single day, but doing an acne face mask in eighth grade was not one of them.”
The 22-year-old graduate student notes that the outcomes of the false racism accusations included expulsion from his Catholic high school, lost football scholarship opportunities, having to move to a different state – and, more recently, troubles with dating.
Being labeled a racist “changed the whole entire trajectory of my life, separated our family, changed me as a person, and is something that not only sticks with me now, but will stick with me forever,” he adds.
“Literally, in the blink of an eye, in a matter of 24 hours, you can lose everything,” Hughes says.
The College Fix adds:
The situation erupted in June of 2020 when Hughes and his family were living in California. One morning, as the death of George Floyd and Black Lives Matter protests dominated the news, Hughes said he woke up to find out that an old photo of him and a few friends had gone viral.
The photo, he said, showed the friends wearing dark green acne masks. However, some people misinterpreted it as “blackface,” according to the report. Commenters described the boys as “Hitler’s Kids” and their actions a “hate crime” and “racism.”
Less than a week later, he said he and another boy in the photo were expelled from their private Catholic school, Saint Francis High School.
Between that and the threats of violence, Hughes said his parents soon decided to move him to another state.
The boys and their families later sued the school, collectively winning damages for being denied the right to a “fair procedure” by school disciplinary officials.
The Free Press reports that
Last year, shortly after the lawsuit was settled, he started dating a girl he liked. On their second date, he told her about his past and after that, he said, she stopped responding to his texts. He told me that it’s hard to accept that “something completely out of my control kind of inhibits that relationship from going farther.” But he can’t change the past.
In most years, there are at least a dozen hate crime hoaxes on college campuses. There were at least 21 campus hate crimes hoaxes uncovered in 2024.
