The N-Word: Offensive, But Indispensable

Sun Media's Michael Harris makes a powerful argument against efforts to remove the word "nigger" from a new version of Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn.

The National Post editorial board comes out in tentative support of a U.S. publisher’s decision to print a new edition of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn with its 219 mentions of the word “nigger” expunged. “Our preferred solution would be for teachers to explain the context of Twain’s use of the word,” says the Post, but “instead of schools and school boards avoiding the book altogether, we would rather see the N-word replaced with ‘slave.’” The Post’s contention, that “even a half-appreciation is better than none at all,” is one that strikes us in The Mark Newsroom as giving students very little credit. How can we expect them to understand the horrors of slavery (which we clearly do, because we teach them about it in schools) while simultaneously declaring that a single word is too much for them to handle? If “nigger” is too powerful for young schoolchildren, surely a delayed appreciation is better than the Post’s “half-appreciation.” Teach the book, in full, to kids old enough to understand it.

This column by the Ottawa Sun’s Michael Harris is probably the best thing we’ve ever read in a Sun Media paper, and demolishes the Finn revisionism with impressive clarity. The Newsroom couldn’t hope to improve on Harris’s razor-sharp logic: “By taking the term ‘nigger’ out of Huckleberry Finn, New South Books is not just altering literature, but changing history,” he writes. “It is the dubious assertion that what one person finds objectionable will be found objectionable by all — the hubris of the censor … It is knowing the history of awful things, not covering them with sheets, that frees us from their tyranny.”

Harris's point is that this aversion to the word “nigger,” albeit well-intentioned, has only enhanced its lasting hateful power. For an illustration of the kind of knots that well-meaning people twist themselves into over these six letters, see this column in the Calgary Herald, in which the editors steadfastly defend Twain’s use of the word, while just as steadfastly refusing to print it in their own pages.