Putting the N Word in Its Proper Place

(Originaly Posted 11/2/2007)

I find everything about the Richland Hills curriculum in which the school board and their teachers decided to put the N word on a blackboard in the name of education obnoxious. Other words like “cancer”, “pregnant”, were other shock based words to be used in the Huckleberry Finn exercise. Excuse me, but cancer and pregnant are not the same loaded gun as n-----. And, if we are going to have a didactic exercise on sensitivity in literature and start the conversation of racial enlightenment, we must establish from the beginning that when there is racism and injustice, as a society, we suffer the injustice together no matter what happens to be our ethnic heritage.

To me the mistake is not in reading Huckleberry Finn or addressing the use of the N word in the text or in the time. Nor is it a mistake to use the word in an educational realm. The mistake this teacher made is identifying the word with the lone black student in the class by saying, “hurts doesn’t it?” Would anyone walk up to a cancer patient or a pregnant student and say, “hurts doesn’t it?”

The only way to truly take power out of that evil word is to stop identifying it with a race of people and to begin placing the identity where it squarely belongs: to all of us as part of our history. We all bare the ugly cross of that word in our history, not just black Americans. It should hurt all of us to remember a time when discrimination and degradation of a people were commonplace and where dignity and respect was not offered to a person because of the color of their skin. Placing the responsibility on black America for the word is unduly burdensome for a race that did not create the word (albeit who uses it most notably in rap lyrics). We must all remember that any derogatory word or phrase spoken says much more about the character whose mouth releases such ugliness more than the person to whom it is directed.

It would be tragic for student not to read books of that era and think critically on these sensitive issues. To take power out of a historically ugly word is not to use it as much as possible so that people warm to the idea that it is an ugly word is an average word like any other, but to identify correctly to whom it belongs. And, that is all of us.