Twain Knew What He Was Doing

Nigger.  The most hurtful word anyone could hurl my way?  Yes.  Should the publisher have made the controversial decision to change the more than 200 appearances of that word to the word slave in Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn?  I don’t think so.

On Sunday, June 12, 2011, “60 Minutes” re-broadcast a segment about the controversy surrounding the “sanitization” of the classic, which originally aired on March 20, 2011.  The story is old news, but the question is not.  Imagine how screwed up our kids would be if we went back and cleaned up all the things in literature that have fallen out of favor since its writing.

Nigger is just a word.  I hate the word as much as anyone you can name, but I can look at it sitting here on the page after I have typed it and have absolutely no emotional reaction to it.   If you, the reader, wrote it on your post, it would get my attention for sure, but I wouldn’t have any emotion about it until I have determined the context in which it was used.

Call me a nigger and you’ll have a fight on your hands.  I fight with my tongue, not my fists, but when I am finished, you will be injured.  Teach me about how the word was used in the history of the United States of America and I will be enlightened, not offended, at least not by the teacher.  I might feel a little uncomfortable if I were the only African American sitting in the classroom when the teacher read Twain’s novel aloud, like the young student who was interviewed on 60 Minutes.  

In fact, that is exactly what happened to me when the time came to study Huck and his friend Jim.  Just like the interviewed African American student, I was acutely aware of the entire class furtively glancing at me to see if I was upset.  Big deal.  It wasn’t the first time and it likely won’t be the last time something said in a classroom or a conference room makes me squirm.  My teacher, instead of getting flustered and embarrassed, had prepared himself to have an in-depth discussion of the use of the word.  He used me to help him explain the feelings the word engendered in a black person.  Everybody learned…together.

I don’t buy into the notion that the decision to sanitize and, therefore, rewrite one of the greatest books in American literature is in deference to the feelings of African Americans.  I think it has more to do with the discomfort it causes white Americans who just don’t seem to know how to deal with the confusing rules surrounding the word nigger in 2011, and I sympathize with them.  Look at all the trouble Dr. Laura Schlessinger got into for repeating the word on the radio.  

Substituting the word slave for nigger in Huckleberry Finn did not change the hateful way black slaves were used and abused at the time.  Saying “the n-word” instead of “nigger” changes not one iota the underlying intent of the word when used to denigrate and dehumanize an entire race of people.  THAT is what is important.  We cannot go back and change history because that history causes us embarrassment today. 

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." –

 George Santayana, in his Reason in Common Sense, The Life of Reason, Vol.1,