Wokeist at it again!
"Espinal was one year shy of earning a lifetime DOE pension when she was abruptly fired from her role as head of Community School District 12 in Bronx without explanation, after repeatedly refusing to do the “Wakanda Forever” salute, according to the lawsuit.
Desperate to keep her retirement benefits and health insurance, the single mom — who recently earned a doctorate — eventually accepted a humiliating demotion to school investigator, a role which requires only a high school diploma and which left her with no permanent desk or phone.
Porter, who was later elevated by Carranza to the post of “executive superintendent,” a promotion she celebrated with a lavish gala, has a Twitter timeline packed with group shots of DOE staff doing the “Wakanda Forever” salute. One shot features Carranza — who couldn’t manage to perform the gesture correctly in the pose — and Espinal. The image showed Carranza, Porter, Espinal and others during the chancellor’s tour of the five boroughs, according to a source. But when repeatedly asked to salute “Wakanda” at other professional meetings, Espinal felt the gesture “introduced a racial divide where there should be none,” said her lawyers, Israel Goldberg, Helen Setton and Domenic Recchia.
Porter would often talk about the militant civil rights group the Black Panthers when asking superintendents to do the “Wakanda” salute, noting her father was a member, the attorneys said. But the symbolic gesture associated with the group is the iconic single raised fist, as made famous by American sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos at the 1968 Olympics, not the cross-armed greeting popularized by the record-breaking superhero flick, which grossed more than $1.34 billion at the box office.
Forcing colleagues to do the “Wakanda” salute “corrupted” it, Goldberg said.
“The gesture was hijacked,” he noted. The DOE insists the famous cross-arm gesture doesn’t refer to “Black power,” but is instead “a symbol used to represent the Bronx.”
Fellow DOE administrators also allegedly told Espinal she wasn’t “Black enough” and she should “just learn to be quiet and look pretty,” she claims in the $40 million suit