Black Spanish teacher claims she was fired for using the word ‘negro’ in class

yahoo.com | May 24, 2013

[grundle]

In the annals of political correctness run amok in American schools, this story — if true — is easily an all-timer.

A junior-high school Spanish teacher has filed a lawsuit alleging that she was fired from P.S. 211 in the Bronx in March 2012 because of a misunderstanding over the word “negro.”

The non-tenured teacher, 65-year-old Petrona Smith, maintains that she was instructing her class about how to say the various basic colors in Spanish, reports the New York Post. The word “negro” naturally came up because “negro” is the Spanish word for “black.”

A seventh-grade student in the class took offense at the term, however, believing the word to be a racial slur. It’s not clear if Smith directed the term at the student. Whatever the case, he reported the incident to school officials.

But, wait. It gets better. Smith, a native of the West Indies, is black. And to top it all off, P.S. 211 is bilingual.

[aft_lizard]

It’s slang and I have heard it said many times around my spanish speaking friends. It literally means dung beetle, its also an insult to homosexuals.

[hosepipe]

Correction: most American blacks are various shades of brown. But in parts of Africa blacks are actually black, even blue-black.

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True I’m talking mainly in the United States..
but in africa mostly they dont wear black as a badge.. of some nebulous thing..
To most of them it is merely a race.. culture is what counts.
Even most races are inbred to some extent.. even the Japanese..

Only in the US is black a nebulous handle, a politically correct symbol.. but the american(disease) is spreading..

Barack Obama is no more blacker than he is white..
Same with millions of so called blacks..

[kabumpo]

But it’s not a Spanish word. It’s a local Indian word.
And it’s a word that means something else, that is applied to Blacks.
Again, there is no word in Spanish that is a perjorative for Blacks like our N word.