A day after a European PGA Tour official was forced to apologize for referring African-Americans as “colored” in the ongoing Tiger Woods/Sergio Garcia flap, a Bronx school teacher has now been fired for calling a student “negro” in one of her classes.
Petrona Smith, 65, has now filed suit, claiming at the time she was simply “using the Spanish word for the color black,” according to The New York Post. A seventh-grader from the bilingual school PS 211 later reported the March 2012 incident and Smith, who is black and a native of the West Indies, was dismissed. In her suit, she claims she hasn’t worked since.
The Post reports Smith took a hiatus from teaching in special education in 2005 to study Spanish in South America, later returning to the teach the language “in cultural context’ here in the states, added her attorney Shaun Reid.
Smith is also accused of calling her students “failures,” a development she also refers to as a “misinterpretation, “even though she also reportedly ordered students who failed a test to sit in the back of the room.
Beyond denying that she referred to a student as a “Negro,” Smith insists she has been the one verbally abused, claiming to have been called everything from a f**cking monkey,” to a “cockroach” and a “ni---r,” the newspaper said.
A 2011 investigation authenticated the unnamed student’s claims based on versions voiced from other students and witnesses. A spokeswoman for the city Law Department told The Post, “We have received the papers and will review them.”
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