A white tenth-grade student in Virginia is being sued by a Black high school history teacher after the boy was caught placing a banana in the entrance of his classroom for months.
A 21-year-old history teacher at Menchville High School, says he first observed a banana at his classroom doorway in October 2021.
He said, “Someone left a banana at my door. The banana was perfectly placed in the doorway,”
The teacher initially dismissed the experience as a coincidence until it became a repeated practice, with the banana appearing in the same position at least once a month.
“It was clearly a deliberate act,” he said, after 6 occurrences.
He then approached school officials, who dug up CCTV footage of one of his white 10th-grade students strolling down the corridor with the fruit in his hand.
The teacher claimed that after catching the offender, he gave the pupil an opportunity to confess, but he denied any culpability.
“I gave the student a chance to come clean. I asked him, ‘Hey did you do this?’ He said ‘No,’ he played dumb, ‘No idea what you’re talking about.’ So I said ‘OK, go down to the assistant principal.’ I’m the only Black teacher he has. He has six other teachers. No other teachers were involved,” he said.
When the parents were contacted, he said they were first ’embarrassed,’ but that after the boy was suspended for two days, they got ‘irate.’
The black teacher had to take a day off work because he was so disturbed by the scenario.
“It’s 2022. Just to have some type of hate crime is absolutely ridiculous. I was sickened,” he said.
He is now seeking legal action as a result of the racist insult.
He said, “I’m just fed up with the racism around, especially at our academic institutions. Coming from the HBCUs and other colleges, the bomb threats, the nooses, the bananas and now it’s streaming into public education.
“It’s time to take a stand and just let people know it will not be tolerated. I know I’m not tolerating it. You have to speak up. You can’t allow it to go on because then it will just continue to go on.”
