By Jessica Lewis, News Editor
In the midst of the Student Government presidential elections for the 2010-2011 school year, a flier showing vice presidential candidate Luke Miedreich in blackface was distributed.
The Chronicle received the flier from sophomore Christian Fuscarino on Friday April 9. "I saw a bunch [of fliers] on a table and felt like something was up, so I came straight to The Chronicle and gave one to Luke [Miedreich]."
The flier is a picture of Miedreich at a Senate meeting wearing a shirt reading, "I smack hoes," and in blackface. Below the pictures the flier reads, "Do we really want that representing the student body?!...We CANNOT have someone that thinks this is okay representing our student body…"
"It is really disheartening because Jimmy and I have run a fair and clean campaign up until this point, and we still are," Miedreich said, "and we have been nothing but respectful to the other ticket and their staff and this is how I get repaid."
Opposing vice presidential candidate Anil Beria said, "I never even seen [the flier], somebody in the elections commission told me about it, so I started calling up different people in our campaign… honest to God, me and Frankie and Lukas and Jimmy have been working together this whole time were all friends and we agreed that nobody would be doing idiotic stuff like this."
"I called up my campaign to make sure that it was nobody there, and I promised [parliamentarian] Michael Brandt that if I see any of these fliers around, I will personally throw them out myself, beause I'm a fair player, so is Frankie, and these guys are our friends, too, so we wouldn't do something like that," Beria said.
Current vice president Akeem Mellis commented that he was surprised about the distribution of the flier, but "these things happen in elections and this was bound to happen due to the outgoing personality of the student services chair [Miedreich].
"When he [Miedreich] originally did this [wore the outfit], I was horrified and shocked but I was strong enough to not let it get to me. Eventually as the senate meeting went on, it looked like the blackface was wearing off," Mellis said.
"Regardless of how I feel about this, this is no way a potential vice president should act, regardless of whether or not he thought it was a joke, because it's not, because to myself and other African Americans on campus this is very offensive."
Presidential candidate Jimmy Wells, Miedreich's running mate, stated that he "thought it [the flier] was very juvenile and inappropriate. It's not professional, additionally it does not represent my running mate for the extremely qualified vice presidential candidate that he is."
This flyer, showing SGA Vice Presidential candidate Luke Miedreich in blackface at the Halloween Senate meeting, was recently distributed to students in the Student Center. (Ryan Broderick/The Chronicle )