Petrona Smith, a New York educator, has filed a lawsuit claiming that she was fired from a Bronx school in March 2012 after she used the word "negro" in class, reports Yahoo. Officials at P.S. 211 have not responded to the charges.
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.
Read more at Yahoo.