… the invocation of nigger by Twain is not a moral failing. But because of our needs, Twain isn’t good enough. Because we can’t handle the story of who we were, and evidently who we are, Twain must be summoned up from the dead and, all against himself, submitted before the edits of amateurs. This is our system of fast-food education laid bare: Children are roaming the halls singing “Sexy Bitch,” while their neo-Confederate parents are plotting to chop the penis off Michelangelo’s David, and clamoring for Gatsby and Daisy to be reunited.
Let us all live in a world of warm snugglies. Let the air-conditioning anesthesia sprawl free. May the flowers of happiness multiply out. May Mark Twain’s ghost haunt us all.
- Ta-Nehisi Coates, a senior editor for The Atlantic, in a 1/6/11 post called “A Nation of Cowards.”
Publishers Weekly has background here, including this:
The idea of a more politically correct Finn came to the 69-year-old English professor over years of teaching and outreach, during which he habitually replaced the word with “slave” when reading aloud. Gribben grew up without ever hearing the “n” word (“My mother said it’s only useful to identify [those who use it as] the wrong kind of people”) and became increasingly aware of its jarring effect as he moved South and started a family. “My daughter went to a magnet school and one of her best friends was an African-American girl. She loathed the book, could barely read it.”
I sympathize with all of this. When I sat down to read Huck Finn to my kids last year, I was stunned to see how often Twain used “nigger.” I’d simply forgotten.
My imperfect solution: I interrupted my reading to call attention to the word and its meaning and its longstanding role in American life. I explained how noxious it is. Then I kept reading.
For a couple of pages.
I started to feel sick, vile. So I interrupted my reading again.
This time I explained that I couldn’t do it anymore, just didn’t want the word on my lips again. I said something like this: “The word is still there in the book. It’s in there a lot of times. We can talk about it more. But I’m going to stop reading it out loud. It just hurts my heart to keep saying it.”
This, again, is an imperfect solution. I’m not pretending otherwise. But I prefer what I did to the wholesale replacement of “nigger” with “slave” or with any other word. I would like to think my kids learned something from my sincere attempt to explain the word and its place in history. I also hope that the word’s toxicity is all the more real to them for having seen me overdose on saying it.
