Huckleberry Finn And The Word "Nigger"

Much has been written and said about a new edition of Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in which the 219 instances of the use of the word "nigger" are omitted and replaced with the word "slave." In my view the word should not be removed and the classic work not altered or edited, by anyone, including the apparently well-intentioned Twain scholar Alan Gribben of Auburn University.

Consider several reactions to this development: Leonard Pitts argues that "is is never a good idea to sugarcoat the past" and that "any work of art represents a series of conscious choices on the part of the artist--what color to paint, what note to play, what word to use--in that artist's attempt to share what is in his or her soul. The audience is free to accept or reject those choices; it is emphatically not free to substitute its own."

John McWhorter notes that "Twain's use of the n-word was an illustration of injustice. The fact that he used it so often in the text served to make that point more effectively--that this was the warp and woof of how black people were viewed in the context he wrote about (as opposed to Rhett Butler saying 'damn' only once in 'Gone With the Wind')." And: "This genuflective brand of horror at the N-word is insulting to black people more generally. The idea, under this mission creep from civility to neurosis, is that for black people only, there is a particular sequence of sounds whose utterance is to be treated as gravely sociopathic. This, despite its frequent misinterpretation as lending black people some kind of strength, is actually a badge of weakness. We become America's only people who brandish proudly our potential to be shot to pieces at the presentation of a mere word."

And click here to watch Melissa Harris-Perry's reaction and analysis.