Sambo is an extremely offensive racist word for a Black man or boy. Students should never use it, not as a joke, not as a nickname, not “because it was in a book.” English partly took it from Spanish zambo, an old and already loaded label for a person of mixed African and Indigenous ancestry. In English it stuck hard through a children’s story, Little Black Sambo (1899): a boy called Sambo outwits tigers, and there are a lot of pancakes. That book was once widely printed, including in East Asia; many adults now see the name, the pictures, and the way the child is treated as a joke as racist. The slur and the story-name fed each other. Though actually, two other words sit nearby and cause accidents: samba is the Brazilian dance; sambo written in small letters can also mean a Russian combat sport (that one is an acronym, a different word entirely). This Sambo, the one filed here, is the insult. There is no polite everyday use left.