About

His Name Is Cayden, often expressed as the hashtag #HisNameIsCayden, is a response most frequently used on Twitter to express disapproval of the racist Facebook comments made about a young African-American child by the friends of the child's mother's coworker.

Origin

On September 16th, 2015, Gerod Roth, an employee of the Polaris Marketing Group in Atlanta, Georgia, took a selfie of himself with the child of his coworker and posted it to Facebook, where Roth went by the name "Geris Hilton;" several of Hoth's friends made racist comments.^[1] One commenter, Emily Irene Red, wrote "I didn't know you were a slave owner," while other comments included "But Massuh, I dindu nuffin, and "Pls Tell me his name was Toby." Roth himself referred to the child as "feral."

Facebook users began commenting and sharing the post, mostly during what Roth described as a 6-day vacation with limited Internet access. When he returned to his Facebook account, he found that his post was going viral. (The post has since been deleted, but there are many screen shots available picturing the extent of the comments.) Soon after, Roth was terminated by his company, although it is unclear if the firing is directly related to his post; an initial statement by the company, published by The Atlanta Black Star,^[2] claims that he was, but a posting to Polaris' official Facebook account claims that he was fired before the post gained traction.^[3] Another commenter was let go from her job as well.^[2]

Sydney Jade, the mother of the child, created a post on her Facebook soon after the incident using the hashtag #HisNameIsCayden in an effort to reframe the debate and to explain that her child was not feral, as Roth had said.^[4]

Spread

The hashtag has been used over 7,000 times^[5] on Twitter^[6] and more than 1,000 additional times on Facebook^[7] as of October 7th, 2015. The instances include, notably, an apologetic Facebook post by Roth himself, created on October 6th.^[8] In the long post, Roth protested his treatment by those on Facebook and the media who shared his post out of context, and claimed that he was in the process of explaining his position in several interviews. The story was reported in several large media outlets, including The Huffington Post,^[9] The Inquisitr,^[10] and The New York Daily News,^[11] spreading the hashtag further. On October 4th, 2015, a GoFundMe page was created for Cayden's College fund, which has raised more than $3,000 of its $5,000 goal in three days.^[12]

Search Interest

External References