There is a bad word that recurs in the novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. It recurs 219 times. That is difficult to read. Many people don’t like that. I don’t like that. Some people want the book to be banned as a result. But I know there is a reason. It is a terrible word that represents more than 400 years of racial subjugation. It is deeply offensive to African Americans. It should be equally offensive to white Americans (and Canadians). Amazingly, it is still used sometimes. More often than it. Thank goodness for that.
Many people have wanted to ban the book because of that word. But the words is important. It was the way people talked in those days. And sometimes still do. Twain knew that. He wanted us to squirm when we heard that word. Many of us do exactly that. I know I did.
If the word were excised from the book, as many have suggested, it would emasculate the book. It would not be telling us the truth about America in the 1870s. It would whitewash America much like Tom Sawyer had to whitewash the fence. It must stay in. Nothing else will do. To insist on its removal on pain of banishment of the book, as some people have done, is to refuse to look at the reality of 19 century America, and that is a reality that must be confronted. Not evaded. Twain did exactly that in the noble character of Jim.
Some liberals have wanted to eliminate the word to placate African Americans. Many of them have called for that. I prefer the approach of Toni Morrison who said, Twain’s use of the word, “the narrow notion of how to handle the offense Mark Twain’s use of the term ‘nigger’ would occasion for black students and the corrosive effect it would have on white ones,” was “a purist yet elementary kind of censorship designed to appease adults rather than educate children. Amputate the problem., band-aid the solution.” Children should not be protected from this word they should face it. That may be hard, but it is important. They should think about what the word signifies about white society of the day. And what the effects of that society are still felt today.
Azar Nafisi said it well in her wonderful book Reading Lolita in Tehran ,
“Education’s goal is to impart knowledge, and knowledge is not only heretical but unpredictable and often uncomfortable. One has to pause and imagine what it would mean to censor all that is uncomfortable from our textbooks. How if we cannot face the past as it was, can you ever hope to teach history.”
As the American literary critic Leslie Fiedler showed, we have to be willing to walk into a dark cave and carry a torch to the back and see the truth. Then we must come out and speak the truth we have found. Nothing short of that is good enough. That is the kind of courage we must have. The book challenges our courage.
Twain used this word deliberately. As Nafisi said, “He wanted to shock us, make us uncomfortable, to arouse us from our indolent acquiescence.” That is what modern American conservatives don’t like. They want the bad parts of history to be removed. Such indolence is the begging of oppression.
Twain understood as perhaps few others ever did, the extent to which racial bias was hidden and deeply embedded in American society. That was deeply pernicious, yet it was the basis for justifying slavery. It was the basis later for Jim Crow laws.
Nafisi made a very important point:
“Each time the word (nigger) is used, it is simultaneously questioned, subverted, destabilized and discredited—in the same manner that terms like “respectable” or “white” are transformed and undermined. When Huck tells Aunt Sally that no one but a nigger was killed and she expresses her joy at no one’s being killed, this, as the saying goes, speaks volumes—not about the inhumanity of slaves but about the blindness of a good-hearted, God- fearing woman.”
Twain punctured the self-satisfaction of people who considered themselves respectable and encourage slavery and discrimination. He also wanted to puncture the self-satisfaction of those who used the word “nigger”.
As a result, for the same reason Twain used the word I will use the word. I don’t want to sugar coat the reality by saying something like “the N-word.” I don’t say this to offend or hurt African American people. I say to offend white Americans and Canadians. They should be offended by the truth. Not because they are responsible for what happened. But they are responsible for what they do about it. For what they think about it. And for how that reality changes them now in the here and now.