Joel Mungo has been a fixture at Menchville High School for 21 years, though he’s recently faced something completely new. Around October 2021, Mungo discovered a strategically placed banana outside his classroom.

“Someone left a banana at my door. The banana was perfectly placed in the doorway,” Mungo recalled. “It happened once a month. It was clearly a deliberate act.”

Stemming from the racist notion that Black people are more closely related to primates, the matter continued for the next few months. Finally, Mungo decided to report the issue to the school administration last month.

Once officials investigated and checked out surveillance footage, they discovered that the culprit was a white 10th grader. Notably, the student was a member of Mungo’s class.

“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,'” Mungo said. “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 continued.

Eventually, the student‘s parents were contacted. Mungo said that, while the parents “seemed truly embarrassed,” they grew “irate” when they learned their son had been suspended.

“It’s 2022—just to have some type of hate crime is absolutely ridiculous,” the history teacher noted. “I was sickened. I was highly upset. So upset, I took the next day off. I didn’t go to work that Friday.”

Mungo revealed that he’s considering taking legal action against the high school sophomore.

“I’m just fed up with the racism around, especially at our academic institutions,” he said. “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,” Mungo added.

While Mungo is considering suing the student, attorney Ali Shahrestani isn’t sure whether the matter would get far.

“It might be the case that the teacher needed to take matters to court to make a bigger point here,” he noted. “The school issued a meager two-day suspension for an arguable hate crime and an act of malicious and racist harassment against an African American teacher in a predominantly white public school.”

“The 10th-grade student is arguably old enough to know better,” Shahrestani continued. “A more appropriate punishment should have been immediate expulsion, especially when the school possesses video evidence of the student’s illegal actions.”

If he were involved in the matter, the attorney added that he’d “advise the teacher to consider a lawsuit against the school for supporting a hostile work environment via its negligent failure to dole out a reasonable punishment.”

“It sends a terrible message to other students, teachers, and the community when a student gets a slap on the wrist like this for such a disgusting series of alleged actions against a teacher,” Shahrestani explained.

Presently, it’s unclear whether Mungo will go through with the lawsuit.