Duke Lacrosse Player Wears Blackface and the Athletic Department Posted the Photo

As if the Duke Lacrosse has not faced enough negative attention with those charges of rape from 2006, but the poor judgment of team members continues to prevail. A member of the women's lacrosse team dressed up in blackface for Halloween. Members of the team dressed up as characters from "The Little Rascals" for a party held at head coach Kerstin Kimel's house. Junior Taylor Virden dressed up as Buckweat and she donned blackface.

What is even more asinine is that the Duke Athletic Department allowed the blackface photo to be posted on its blog. The photo was taken down after complaints.

Statement from Duke University:

“The Duke Women’s Lacrosse program celebrates Halloween with an annual gathering. This year, some of our costume choices were insensitive and entirely inappropriate. No offense was intended, but that does not matter because we should have realized how these choices would be viewed by those outside of our program. On behalf of our coaching staff and our student-athletes, we apologize to anyone we may have offended and understand while we believed we were making decisions in good fun, we should have been much more sensitive to the implications of our actions.”

Read more.