Race relations: January 2011 Archives

Upon hearing there would be new editions of Mark Twain's "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" and "Tom Sawyer" substituting the N-word with "slave," I quickly became a 15-year-old again. I was back in that cramped classroom, one of three black students, uncomfortably listening to students of other races read "Huck Finn" aloud.

Granted, the teacher took the right precautions: a pre-lecture on inappropriate use of the N-word, a separate conversation with the black students asking how they felt about the rest of the class using the term and a no-questions-asked option for all students to skip over the word during recitation. Still, I remember it being a few incredibly uncomfortable weeks of my secondary school experience.

Though I can remember being offended by the students who used the word more brazenly than I liked or the stares by students wanting to catch my reaction to use of the word, I now laugh off the memory as a growing pain, something me and many friends have commiserated about.

The reality is, Twain aimed to bring the language, attitude and actions of the people of a certain time to life through his literature. If read in the right context, with appropriate teaching methods, "Huck Finn" becomes both a historical and social learning experience. To erase the N-word from the text is to say it didn't exist in history. Doing so would be a disservice to our youth.