Teen says parents disowned her over black boyfriend, raises $10K for tuition

(Photo: GoFundMe)

After a Tennessee teenager posted online saying that her parents had cut off her college money for dating a black man, and she has since raised $10,000 in donations.

Allie Dowdle posted on the fundraising site GoFundMe that her parents had cut her off because they disapproved of her boyfriend Michael “strictly because of his race.”

She said that she had been seeing Michael secretly, but then, over Christmas, her parents told her that they would “no longer support my future,” taking her car and her phone as well as her college money.

But her father, Bill Dowdle, says that the issue isn’t about race but about the fact that she had been dating Michael in secret.

He admitted that he was worried about “issues” that could stem from a biracial couple in the South, but still, he is aware that now that she is eighteen, he can’t control who she dates.

The decision not to pay for her college, he insisted, was to teach her independence because she had been spoiled and “it became obvious that she needed to go out in the world and grow up.”

Her claims that it was about the race of her boyfriend, he said, were “a justification and gave her the moral high ground.”