A junior-high schoolteacher has filed a lawsuit against New York City siting unlawful termination after a report asserting she called a student a "Negro" had been filed.
Spanish teacher Petrona Smith, 65, was terminated after a student claimed she had used the word "negro" in a derogatory and racist manner. Smith claims the student misunderstood her and did not direct the word at the seventh-grader.
The teacher, who is not tenured, defended herself by saying the word was used in the context of a lesson on teaching the students colors in the Spanish language.
"Negro" is the Spanish word for "black."
Smith, a native of the West Indies, travelled to South America in 2005 to learn the native language in order to gain a greater bearing on the foreign discourse, and be able to use it properly in her curriculum stateside.
She's hired attorney Shaun Reid to defend her, contending that his client's discharge is ridiculous.
"They haven't even accounted for how absurd it is for someone who's black to be using a racial slur to a student," he told the New York Post. "Talk about context! There's a lot of things wrong here."
Making her case, Smith denies ever calling any of her students a "Negro." In fact, she claims that she was the one being verbally abused when students called her "f***ing monkey" and a "n****r."
She maintains that she never retaliated.
Court papers also claim that Smith called her students "failures," and forced those that could not pass her exams to relocate to the back of the classroom. But she said that was also "a misinterpretation."
In 2011, the city's Law Department corroborated the student's complaints based on reports from eyewitnesses, "even though the student's own parents claimed he lied about the event."
