A woman who identified herself on Facebook as the mother of one of the students in the LSU Black doll video says the doll belonged to her daughter, who is Black.
The video was recorded in the Louisiana State University Student Union in Baton Rouge at 12:43 p.m. on Wednesday, August 19. It shows two young women wearing LSU t-shirts walking through the building. One of them, who appears to be white, is pulling a Black baby doll along the ground by a rope tied around its neck. A student filmed it on her phone and sent it to her mother, who posted it online. It spread across social media within hours and drew immediate condemnation.
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Louisiana State University has said it is aware of the footage and that its Office of Student Affairs is investigating. Beyond that the university has declined to comment, and it has not issued a public statement. Neither woman in the video has been officially identified.The account that has complicated the story came from a Facebook user named Eunice Pichon, who said she is the mother of the Black student seen alongside the woman pulling the doll. According to her post, her daughter was given the doll a year ago and had mentioned that she planned to carry it around campus. Pichon said the two students told her they were trying to be funny and did not intend any racist meaning. She said she instructed them to speak with their resident adviser, apologize, and get rid of the doll, and that her daughter wanted to apologize to university staff directly.
None of that has been confirmed. It comes from a social media post, not from the university, not from either student, and not from any newsroom that has verified it independently. It is worth knowing because it is circulating widely, and it is worth treating carefully for exactly the same reason.
What it does not do is settle the question, because intent was never the whole issue. A dark skinned doll pulled across a floor by a rope around its neck is not a neutral image in Louisiana or anywhere else in this country. It reads immediately as lynching, and it reads as dragging, which is not distant history. James Byrd Jr. was chained to the back of a pickup truck and dragged to his death in Jasper, Texas in 1998. Students walking through their own student union on a Wednesday afternoon did not have the benefit of anybody’s explanation. They just saw it.
That is the point Dr. Roishetta Sibley Ozane made in an email she sent to the LSU president’s office. Ozane, whose daughter is a Black freshman at the university, wrote that she could not treat what happened as “harmless, funny, or simply a matter of poor judgment,” and said that regardless of what the students involved say they meant, the effect on Black students and their families cannot be waved off. She asked the university to be transparent about how it is responding and what it is doing to support Black students on campus.
A number of theories about the LSU Black doll video have been floated online, including that it was tied to a sorority, that it was some kind of social experiment, and that it was a protest statement about abortion access. None of those have any support behind them. They are comment section guesses, and they have circulated as confidently as the facts have.
What an Office of Student Affairs investigation can actually produce is worth understanding too. That office handles the student conduct process, which is internal and separate from anything criminal. It can result in discipline ranging from a warning to suspension or expulsion, and because student conduct records are protected by federal privacy law, the university may never publicly disclose the outcome even after it reaches one. That is a real possibility here, and it is part of why the pressure from parents is landing on the president’s office rather than on Student Affairs.
For now the university is investigating, the students have not been named, and the explanation that has traveled furthest came from a Facebook post by somebody’s mother.
