The Office ’s Leslie David Baker Shares Racist Messages Sent to Him on Instagram

The Office’s Leslie David Baker is opening up about the racist messages he’s received in response to his fundraising campaign for a new project.

Last month, the actor, who starred as Stanley Hudson on all nine seasons of The Office, began teasing his character’s potential return to TV in a series of videos on Instagram.

In his captions, Baker, 62, directed fans to click the link in his bio, which navigates to a Kickstarter page for a project called Uncle Stan: Coming Out of Retirement. Since launching, the page has surpassed its $300,000 goal.

In the wake of the fundraising campaign, however, Baker has received a variety of racist DMs on Instagram containing slurs and other messages of hate.

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“For those of you who don’t believe racism is still alive in the world... here’s the proof,” Baker wrote alongside his post on Wednesday, sharing screenshots of the messages.

“Our goal has simply been to entertain and give the fans a quality series,” he added. “These rants are evidence that there is still a great deal of work that needs to be done here in America regarding racism.”

“Bigotry and hate will not be allowed to irradicate art or Black people. Enough said,” he concluded.

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In an interview with ComicBook, Baker discussed the messages, saying, “America has a very sick problem with racism and racists.”

He added that he intends to keep any racist messages up on his profile for people to see rather than deleting them.

"In order to affect change, you can't just press the delete button and pretend that it didn't happen or say, 'Oh, it'll go away,' If I press the reset button, press the delete button, wipe it off the screen, then everything is okay," he said.

"America has done that too long and too often, because when you confront people and you acknowledge that these things are happening in this country, people say, 'Well, that makes me uncomfortable. I don't want to have that discussion. I don't want to talk about it,'" Baker continued. "Or they will scream that in some way it's reverse discrimination [that] exists, which is no such thing. Nothing like that exists."

To help combat systemic racism, consider learning from or donating to these organizations:

• Campaign Zero (joincampaignzero.org) which works to end police brutality in America through research-proven strategies.

• ColorofChange.org works to make the government more responsive to racial disparities.

• National Cares Mentoring Movement (caresmentoring.org) provides social and academic support to help Black youth succeed in college and beyond.