The “N-Word” and White Anti-Racist Pedagogy (Part One)
The internets have been abuzz this week over a small publishing house’s plans to print a version of the Twain classic Huckleberry Finn in which all instances of the word “nigger” have been replaced with the word “slave.” A representative of the company in question defends the decision as one intended to get the novel into more classrooms — too often, he says, schools and colleges are unwilling to assign Huckleberry Finn because of that word, and that word alone.
I’ve posted on Twitter about this controversy a few times, mostly to mock the idea of bowdlerizing the book, but a response I got from Parker Ross, who tweets as @PRossibly, brought me up short:
@studentactivism In high school my teacher read Huckleberry Finn out loud in class and said the slurs really loud. Super uncomfortable.
Ross doesn’t say, but I strongly suspect that the teacher in question was white.
As a person who teaches American history on the college level, I address the country’s traumatic racial past in
