Negro is black in Spanish...Teacher fired

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Petrona Smith says she was simply using the Spanish word for "black" during a lesson about colors when she used the word "negro" in her seventh-grade class at P.S. 211 in the Bronx. But the 65-year-old teacher was fired after a student reported her


Can we get any more absurd?

SMH!

Can we get any more sensitive?

That is the color for black in Spanish, so why was she fired?

I smell a huge lawsuit against the BOE....

I'm sure there was more to it than that. Maybe she used the word in a not so nice explanation. I would like to hear exactly how she put it in context.

There has got to be more to the story, Negro is not a derogatory word...

She also had kids who failed a test move to the back of the class. So much for encouraging kids to learn. She denies calling the kids "failures" but isn't that what her actions were screaming? I wouldn't want her teaching my kids.

Chickenbutt wrote:[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
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Petrona Smith says she was simply using the Spanish word for "black" during a lesson about colors when she used the word "negro" in her seventh-grade class at P.S. 211 in the Bronx. But the 65-year-old teacher was fired after a student reported her


Can we get any more absurd?

I think it depends on the context. If this teacher tends to pull crap like that or not.

Was she teaching Spanish? Did she give the Spanish alternative for ALL the colors... or just for black.

Sounds from that little article you posted there's some mention of her perhaps doing other things just to humiliate students.

So, I guess I'd have to say I'd have to know more about this teacher to know if she really used the word negro innocently or not.

On it's face, it seems absurd. But in my experience, when "outrage over political correctness" stories like this pop up, there's usually more to the story than first appears.

Ladytwee wrote:There has got to be more to the story, Negro is not a derogatory word...

Negro is a derogatory word. Yes it is part of the acronym NAACP and UNCF. But, those names were kept for name recognition.

But the word Negro has been considered derogatory for decades now because it harkens back to a very painful period for African Americans in this country.

Is it has hurtful as the other "N" word. Probably not. But it's definitely considered disrespectful and unkind.

jojoscorpio wrote:She also had kids who failed a test move to the back of the class. So much for encouraging kids to learn. She denies calling the kids "failures" but isn't that what her actions were screaming? I wouldn't want her teaching my kids.

I also didn't like that article's presumption that because she's evidently black from the West Indies that by default that means she couldn't have used the word in a derogatory manner. That in and of itself is a racist presumption.

West Indian black people can have quite different perspectives on "blackness" than do African Americans.

I'm a white person. If I call certain people "crackers", does that mean it's not racially derogatory when I used it, just because I'm white?