Spanish Teacher Fired For Word ‘Negro’ – Says It Was Lost In Translation

A Spanish teacher in the Bronx at a bilingual school was teaching her students different colors. The color black came up. The word for the color 'black' in Spanish is 'negro'. A student took this as a racial slur, and the 65 year old black woman from the West Indies was fired. Keep reading to get the full story.

From UPI:

 In court papers, [Petrona] Smith said she was teaching students how to say different colors, and even explained that a black person in Spanish is called "moreno," not "negro." She also said she asked students who had failed a test to move to the back of the class, but had never called them failures.

 

Smith detailed the abuse she claims she often suffered at the hands of her students, who, according to her claims filed in court, called her "f***ing monkey," "cockroach" and "n****r." Smith said she had always risen above their insults.

 

The investigation leading to her termination relied on the word of four 7th-grade students, even though one of the student's parents admitted he had lied.

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