Black in Spanish is negro. Sometimes thirteen-year-old kids snicker when they hear that. But one teacher was supposedly fired for teaching the word and a student misinterpreting the lesson as a racial slur.
According to The Daily Caller, Petrona Smith, a 65 year-old Spanish teacher in the Bronx, was fired in March of 2012 for calling a student "negro". Smith claims that the interaction was misunderstood and that she was simply teaching colors to the children.
But The New York Post reports a longer string of alleged infractions. Smith has been accused of calling students failures. Meanwhile, she claims that her students called her such derogatory terms as "f---ing monkey" and "ni----". Smith is black and the school, PS 211, is bilingual.
The Inquisitr speculates on the possible events. Either Smith was teaching about colors and the student either misunderstood or is lying, or Smith did use a derogatory term and is trying to cover under the guise of a lesson on colors. Smith's claim that the children hurled racial slurs at her may indicated that the accusation is part of a seventh-grade class' plot to remove a disliked teacher.