Yes, everything is about race

Letting a group of peoples skin tone run your entire life, is wild behavior.

A Black school cafeteria worker accepted a $60,000 payment to settle a federal discrimination lawsuit after being stripped of her job duties involving disciplining children because white teachers allegedly didn’t like “the sound, tone or tenor of her ‘Black voice.’”

Vanessa Bowie-Middleton, 60, had worked in school kitchens and cafeterias for 17 years and for Washoe County School District since 2019 when the school principal, Heidi Gavrilles, came into the kitchen in January of 2022 and gave her an upsetting directive.

From now on, the principal did not want Bowie-Middleton, who was the kitchen manager at Bohach Elementary, to reprimand or discipline any of the students in the cafeteria because some white teachers “did not like the way she spoke and/or her accent or dialect and felt a Black woman should not be giving instructions to unruly cafeteria students,” her lawsuit says.

When asked why, the principal later told a local NAACP leader, Lonnie Feemster, it was because “white teachers did not want to hear a Black voice telling children what to do,” according to a statement he provided to the plaintiff.

Misconduct in the lunchroom was frequent, including screaming and yelling, bullying, throwing food and occasional fights, and over the years Bowie-Middleton had learned how to handle and discipline unruly students, a necessary part of the job, and one that she’d been trained to do by multiple WCSD supervisors, she claims.

When she was hired at Bohach, then-kitchen manager Terri Braunworth, who is white, told her that if teachers were not present when students acted out in the cafeteria, she must “act to maintain safety and security” before the issue escalated and students were harmed, the complaint says. It had been “drilled into her by all kitchen managers” in the school district that “she was not to stand idly by” and let misconduct go unaddressed.

"We don’t want no sympathy, we don’t want to debate, at this point we just want to be left alone to build a life we can pass on to our kids without being terrorized and then blamed for the terror we received.

This post is going to make a lot of people uncomfortable and I’m okay with it because we’ve BEEN uncomfortable. Our progress as a people is always met with violent deadly force and systematically suppressed by the very people put in charge to govern us all.

The saddest part about all of this is that history won’t tell the truth. It will be rewritten to demonize the victims and champion the predators. Creating a new generation of trauma and fallacy presented as facts for young people to be indoctrinated with HATE.

I pray things change. I vote in the interest of the people. But I’m also preparing my sons with the hard truth. We are exhausted but very much aware. The choices we have to make on a daily basis should never have to be about race, but for us it’s the only way to survive."