INDIANAPOLIS — Written in black marker across a teacher's white board are different variations and meanings of what many would consider a racial slur.
Darrion Brown is a junior at North Central High School. He said the photo circulating on social media was taken during his English class.
"Other things they bring up in the classroom setting that we may call appropriate or inappropriate, so I think, as teacher, he did what was necessary because it was in the writing. We can't just skip over it," Brown said.
Brown, who is 17 years old, said his class was reading "Sweat," a short story by Zora Neale Hurston from the early 1900s. He said his English teacher had students read paragraphs aloud and then discuss certain words that may sound or have different meanings today.
"We saw words like, 'I' that was supposed to sound like 'ah' and words like 'God' be pronounced like, 'gawd,'" Brown said.
Brown went over the day's lesson at the dinner table with his older sister, Jamice Wilson, giving her context to the photo she saw floating around.
"It was a Black student who said it in the class. The teacher, he never said it. He had only written it on the board after it was said, and that's after the student had said they didn't tell him to write it, but it was one of the words they had brought up, so he had written it on the board," Brown said.
13News reached out to the teacher for an interview to learn more about Friday's class discussion, but we never heard back.
As for Wilson, she would rather her brother be able to discuss the word with his teacher and classmates than not at all.
"I'm going to take it back to when I was growing up," Wilson said. "I had white teachers. Like, we watched 'Roots.' We learned, we said those words because if it's in the context and we have to read out loud and that's one of the words, you know, we were able to read about it, we weren't, it wasn't ever like, 'Don't say that word because it's part of history.' You can't change history."
Brown believes his teacher wasn't trying to be hurtful by writing that on the board.
13News also called North Central High School and the school district office, but we haven't heard back.