"A black security guard who was fired from Madison’s West High School last week for repeating a racial slur a student had hurled at him, in an attempt to correct the student, will get his job back."

"Interim Superintendent Jane Belmore said she rescinded the termination of Marlon Anderson Monday. The decision comes less than a week after Anderson was fired Wednesday for what he said was defending himself from a student who was calling Anderson the N-word. The incident was followed by days of outrage among community members, a student walkout and national attention.... In a statement, School Board President Gloria Reyes said she asked Belmore to rescind the termination, which stemmed from a zero-tolerance approach by the district on the use of racial slurs by employees. The policy, put in place last year, has resulted in at least seven employees losing their jobs."

The Wisconsin State Journal reports.

That shows that applying pressure works, not that any of these authority figures have good character or judgment. And what are they going to do about the other employees who lost their jobs under the zero tolerance policy? Those former employees shouldn't get worse treatment just because there was no display of outrage on their behalf.

If a contextualized judgment is what was required for Anderson, then it's required for all of them. You don't have a zero tolerance policy if you make exceptions.

The zero tolerance policy began as a device that made life easier for those in power, and their interest in their own comfort is underscored by their caving to pressure when that policy made their life difficult. What we're left with is unprincipled power. Have a clear rule and stick to it or consider all the circumstances for everyone. The school authorities do not deserve the ease of leaving those other cases closed.

"So if the class is reading ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ and the teacher is reading the book out loud and it gets to the part where the N-word is, the teacher gets fired?"

"It has nothing to do with context, but it has everything to do with the actual word," said Marlon Anderson, quoted in "School Security Assistant Fired for Repeating Racial Slur Aimed at Him/Marlon Anderson told the student to stop referring to him by a racial epithet, which officials at a Wisconsin high school said violated a zero-tolerance policy on offensive language," a Madison, Wisconsin story reported in The New York Times,

Anderson said "n-word" when posing his question, but elsewhere in the article The New York Times spells it out.

Here's the statement from the school board president, Gloria Reyes: "We’ve taken a tough stance on racial slurs, and we believe that language has no place in schools. We have also heard from the community about the complexity involved — and our duty to examine it. As a board, we plan to review our approach, the underlying policies, and examine them with a racial equity lens understanding that universal policies can often deepen inequities. We will ask the community for help in that process. I have requested that this item be placed on our board agenda as soon as possible."

The NYT doesn't print the whole text of Reyes's statement, so I was surprised when I saw this additional material at the University of Wisconsin student newspaper (The Cardinal):

Although Reyes agrees with the district’s decision to follow protocol and use “best-practices” to remove Anderson, she sees this incident as an opportunity for the board to look more closely at the implications of existing policies, especially regarding cultural context.

“It is different when a white person says this term than an African American,” Reyes said. “This is an opportunity to move forward aggressively on what's the best way to deal with this.”

How can you have a policy that varies according to the race of the speaker?! It may be well understood in American society that black people have a special privilege to use this particular word, but the school is a government workplace. Picture the lawsuit from the white teacher who gets fired for reading that "To Kill a Mockingbird" passage out loud.

Also from The Cardinal:

Students who protested explained they did not necessarily want to abolish the zero-tolerance policy regarding the use of racial slurs on campus, but rather add steps to it, allowing the administration to look at all parts of a situation before making a final decision.

It's not zero tolerance if you add steps to it!

Elsewhere — "Wisconsin students walk out to protest racial slur firing" (WaPo) — I'm seeing that the high school students who protested were chanting "Hey-hey, hey-ho, zero tolerance has got to go!"

Here's an idea: Teach everyone, including the students, about the "use/mention distinction" and have the consequence for violating the zero tolerance policy depend on whether it was a use or a mention. You could still outlaw the word in the workplace, but make the penalty for mentioning it minimal.