Jessica Leandra dos Santos has had her share of attention in recent days following on her racist tweet. It again illustrates the dangers of giving your personal opinions via BBM or Twitter, especially if they are racist, homophobic or insulting to your company or family. People get fired over comments they write, especially if it’s about a company they work for or people they work with. Facebook or BBM is not the place to express disgust with fellow employee’s, supervisors or employers. Those conversations used to be kept private for the family dining room table at dinner, and its probably safest to continue to do so!

Jessica’s tweets of course were racist and there is no excuse for talking like she did in public or private. It says much about her upbringing. A lot has been made of her winning the FHM Model competition which is really for models who are not well known, and who now promote themselves on the internet via the FHM site hoping to get votes. FHM quickly dismissed what is their own competition by calling it a “mere online poll”. How precisely you get stripped of a title you have already won and been paid for, I don’t know, but the loss of sponsorships – albeit likely to be very small with very small companies – must at least sting as I doubt the sponsorships amount to much more than R1000 a month.

Jessica’s photo’s which can be found on her website at www.jessicaleandra.com illustrate that she campaigned very effectively for votes. She won the bikini/lingerie style competition by using a number of artistic nude photographs undoubtedly to attract votes. So, she clearly know how to go the extra mile – and now what she needs to do, rather than blaming it on men always sexually harassing her, is get over herself, admit that the real problem is racism and go for counselling to tackle that. A quick history of apartheid South Africa would certainly help.