The 17-year-old Michigan girl is speaking out more than two years after her parents filed a federal racial discrimination lawsuit against her school district following months of taunting and harassment.
The Detroit News sat down with Clara Malick and her parents, Rob and April Malick, for an interview published on Jan. 3, and she shared her experience while attending Croswell-Lexington High School in Croswell, Michigan, back in 2021.
Clara — who is adopted — said she was repeatedly called the N-word by her white classmates, who taunted her. Her suit reports Clara was one of three Black students in a district of more than 2,000 students.
The teenager said white students would often “call me the N-word or say the N-word in a sentence. And they’ll look at me for a reaction.” Clara added that she didn’t know how to react at first.
“I didn’t know how to react, because I didn’t really know what the word really meant,” she continued, adding that while she’d heard the word before, she’d never been called it.
The teen added that, eventually, she would laugh along. “What else are you supposed to do? Like, the jokes aren’t funny, but you’re just like, ‘everybody else is laughing,’ so you gotta laugh, too.”
According to the lawsuit, Malick was taunted by white students on a nearly daily basis with racial slurs and threats of pulling out her hair. Students taunted Malick with phrases like, “Go back to the plantation and pick cotton” and “Your hair looks like s—t.”
The then-freshman was also told, “I’m going to snatch your weave and burn it,” and “I bet your hair is dead.” The lawsuit also detailed an incident where Clara told the students to stop and was blatantly ignored.
“Two students were mocking C.M. and using the n-word in Snapchat conversation. C.M. told them ‘STOP, it’s…not funny’ and explained the history behind the word. One student responded, “free speech,…
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