I found this rather upsetting.
I talked to a black co-worker about this at my job today. He thought it was stupid just like I did. He's read the book, (in his younger days) and he said he wasn't bothered by it and he still isn't. He told me he understands that's the way people talked back then, the word was a means to describe a man of color... back then in the deep south along the Mississippi river. Now, it's degrogatory...anywhere, and depending upon it's use and context it should be.
I'd thought we'd grown up since the publication of the novel in 1885. Maybe we have... or I should say... MOST of us have. Some people are still thin skinned enough to let this bother them.
Well, okay, but to judge a book simply of a word? As I remember it both Finn and Sawyer told a great story about growing up in the south after the civil war.
Yet here, author Earl Ofari Hutchinson writes:
Basically almost anything written by Twain is a classic (IMO). Now because of a word people want it removed. Might as well have a book burning and lets throw in a few hundred more books with the same word in it.'Huckleberry Finn' wins a first round in St. Louis Park
Parents' request to have it removed from high school's required reading list was rebuffed, but they plan an appeal.
By Dan Wascoe, By DAN WASCOE
Last update: March 21, 2007 – 11:10 PM
Ken Gilbert read the story of Huckleberry Finn in the late 1960s in a segregated black North Carolina school, but he doesn't remember much about Huck's adventures and the book's status as an American classic.
What he does remember is class discussions of the n-word. Mark Twain used it over and over.
"Why were there so many usages of the same word?" he said. "We never got to the story line. It was the racial issue."
When daughter Nia was assigned to read it in her 10th-grade honors class, his memories of a racially volatile childhood came surging back. Now Gilbert and his wife, Sylvia, are reviving a century-old debate by asking St. Louis Park High School to remove the novel from the required-reading list.
So far their request has been declined, but an appeal is planned.
While controversy over the book dates back to the 1880s, debate over use of the n-word by schools, theaters and even black entertainers continues to make news.
For Gilbert, a 52-year-old small-business owner, there's not much question: While no word should be banned entirely, he said, he believes it should not be tolerated in informal conversation or popular entertainment. For blacks, he said, "There's no word that brings you to a lower level. ... It makes children feel less than equal in the classroom."
He does not seek to ban the book from the school. "I don't care if all of America reads the book," he said, but he doesn't want it to be required classroom reading.
More here: http://www.startribune.com/1592/story/1071200.html
I talked to a black co-worker about this at my job today. He thought it was stupid just like I did. He's read the book, (in his younger days) and he said he wasn't bothered by it and he still isn't. He told me he understands that's the way people talked back then, the word was a means to describe a man of color... back then in the deep south along the Mississippi river. Now, it's degrogatory...anywhere, and depending upon it's use and context it should be.
I'd thought we'd grown up since the publication of the novel in 1885. Maybe we have... or I should say... MOST of us have. Some people are still thin skinned enough to let this bother them.
Well, okay, but to judge a book simply of a word? As I remember it both Finn and Sawyer told a great story about growing up in the south after the civil war.
Yet here, author Earl Ofari Hutchinson writes:
This misses the point. Words are not value-neutral. They express concepts and ideas, and often reflect society's standards. If color-phobia is one of those standards, then a word as emotionally charged as "******" can reinforce and perpetuate stereotypes. It can't be sanitized by overuse. It can only send a signal to non-blacks that it's OK to use the word.
Even some black defenders of the "N" word have recanted. After a trip to Africa in the late 1970s, the comedian Richard Pryor stunned a concert audience by pledging that he would never use the word "******" again. Pryor, who had made a career out of using the word in his routines, softly explained that the word was profane and disrespectful.
In today's volatile climate of racial hostility and polarization a campaign to get Websters to "deracialize" its definition of the word is worthwhile. But the campaign I would like to see is one that prods Webster's to delete "****** completely -- and to get African Americans to delete the word from their vocabulary as well.
http://www.pacificnews.org/jinn/stories/3.20/970926-nword.html
Another author Charles Taylor, writes: January 22, 2002 | "I am addressing the contention that the presence of ****** alone is sufficient to taint ... any ... text. I am addressing those who contend that ****** has no proper place in American culture and those who desire to erase the N-word totally, without qualification, from the cultural landscape. I am addressing parents who, in numerous locales, have demanded the removal of 'Huckleberry Finn' from syllabi solely on the basis of the presence of the N-word -- without having read the novel themselves, without having investigated the way in which it is being explored in class, and without considering the possibilities opened by the close study of a text that confronts so dramatically the ugliness of slavery and racism. I am addressing the eradicationists who, on grounds of racial indecency, would presumably want to bowdlerize or censor poems such as Carl Sandburg's '****** Lover,' stories such as Theodore Dreiser's '****** Jeff,' Claude McKay's '****** Lover,' or Henry Dumas's 'Double ******,' plays such as Ed Bullins' 'The Electronic ******,' and novels such as Gil-Scott Heron's 'The ****** Factory.'"
And why stop there? To the list that Randall Kennedy provides in his new book "******: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word," you could add Joseph Conrad's "The '******' of the Narcissus," Dick Gregory's autobiography "******" (with its touching dedication to his dead mother, "If you ever hear the word '******' again, remember, they're advertising my book"), the stand-up comedy of Richard Pryor or any historically accurate discussion of racism or the civil rights movement.
It didn't matter that the ugliness of "******" was precisely LBJ's point. Such blanket refusals to print "******" simply eradicate context and intent. You can't argue with that kind of nonthought. When it comes to this sort of cleaning up of history, the result is, of course, to erase history itself, and thus our ability to learn anything from it. But there's a problem. How do you defend "******"?
There was a similar protest about a University of Wisconsin at Madison professor who used "niggardly" during a Chaucer class -- this time the complaint came from a student to whom the professor had explained the word's origins. And a professor at Jefferson Community College in Louisville was dismissed because of the lone protest of one black student (out of nine in class of 22) upset by the professor's inclusion of "******" in a class discussion on taboo words.
These are examples of stupidity masquerading as sensitivity. In one sense, though, as even the professor in the Louisville case acknowledged, that sole protesting student had a point. "******" is an enormously loaded word, and there's cause for worry when it's divorced from its potential to hurt (that doesn't, however, mean that hurt feelings should trump intellectual inquiry).
The irony, though, of the word's reemergence is that it's largely due to its use among African-Americans, particularly comics and hip-hoppers. Kennedy writes that the word was taboo for most of the prominent black comics of the '60s -- people like Godfrey Cambridge, Dick Gregory, Nipsey Russell and the great Moms Mabley. Not that those comics didn't address racism or the battering it inflicted on black self-image. But it took Richard Pryor to make public the shared secret of the word's use among blacks.
"He seemed racially unconcerned," Kennedy writes of Pryor, "with deferring to any social conventions, particularly those that accepted black comedians as clowns but rejected them as satirists." That Pryor, as Kennedy notes, performed before mixed-race audiences made his gambit even more daring. It may be hard to remember now, but Pryor's performances were often initially very discomforting if you happened to be white. That's not just because he brought black hostility to whites onstage ("this is my favorite part of the show -- when the white people come back and find out ******s have taken their seats") but because he was offering up black rage and at the same time wasn't afraid to make fun of it.
If you were white, it wasn't uncommon to react with a nervous titter, wondering if it was appropriate to laugh. And yet such was Pryor's artistry that, in the course of his performance, those fears and taboos melted away, if not uniting audiences, then at least making them realize they were united in their preconceptions.
Arguably, Chris Rock has gone even further. Kennedy quotes at length from Rock's incendiary routine that begins "I love black people, but I hate ******s ... You can't do anything without some ignorant-*** ******s ****ing it up." Anticipating charges that he shouldn't air his people's dirty laundry, Rock mocks blacks who say, "The media has distorted our image to make us look bad." To which he answers, "Do you think I've got three guns in my house because the media's outside my door trying to bust in?"
Kennedy describes a sketch on one of Rock's CDs in which a white man who approaches Rock to compliment him on the critical things he says about blacks receives a punch in the mouth. "Rock's message is clear," Kennedy writes; "white people cannot rightly say about blacks some of the things that blacks themselves say about blacks."
That may be a double standard, but it's not one that violates the basic commonsense principle that context is everything. And it's a double standard we all abide by: "Just as a son is privileged to address his mother in ways that outsiders cannot (at least not in the son's presence), so, too, is a member of a race privileged to address his racial kin in ways proscribed to others." Even Pryor, at the end of "Live on the Sunset Strip," tells us he doesn't want to use "******" anymore, and especially doesn't want to hear it from "hip white people" telling "****** jokes" (presumably in the same way that white hipsters made "spade" acceptable parlance in the '60s).
"******" is, above all, an argument for the restoration of context and intent in judging uses of the word. Kennedy isn't just a good, clear writer, he's possessed of the uncommon virtue of common sense. That's particularly evident when he's writing on legal challenges involving the use of "******." Kennedy abhors things like campus speech codes, but he does allow that the word can create a hostile work environment and believes employers should be held liable for such. But in every instance he cites, whether it's a legal case or not, he makes common sense his standard.
By far the most intriguing such case that Kennedy writes about is a 1988 incident in Arkansas where a white high school teacher, fed up with her all-black class misbehaving, said, "I think you're trying to make me think you're a bunch of poor, dumb ******s, and I don't think that " [emphasis added]. Parents demanded her ouster, and the school board demanded her resignation, which she gave. Except that 124 out of 147 of the school's students (all but two of them black) signed a petition asking the school board to give the woman a second chance.
Clearly, the students could see that her remark, ill-chosen as it was, was not an expression of bigotry but of frustration. Had she really thought them "poor, dumb ******s," she wouldn't have added "and I don't think that." Kennedy calls the students' actions "a sensible and humane response," and continues, "The offer of a second chance ought not to be automatic but should instead hinge on such variables as the nature of the offender's position and the purpose behind his or her remark."
But I'm sure Kennedy would forgive me for calling these niggling flaws. Kennedy's argument that "******" has far too complex a history, far too many uses, to ever have just one meaning makes his book an implicit plea not to limit the richness of African-American vernacular. There have been other controversies over that heritage in recent years, most notably in the arguments over Ebonics. The most sensible response came from Stanley Crouch, who argued that of course Ebonics exist and no, they shouldn't be taught.
Crouch said that black vernacular derives its richness in relation to traditional English and that its invention and humor could only be appreciated by someone who knows what it's riffing on to begin with. (That's an appropriate argument coming from someone who's written so well about jazz. It's like saying you have to know "Someday My Prince Will Come" or "My Favorite Things" to appreciate the changes Miles Davis and John Coltrane wrought on them.) And "******" is part of that heritage; the comedy of Richard Pryor, to cite one example, would be unthinkable without it. The power of "******" is that Kennedy writes fully of the word, neither condemning its every use nor fantasizing that it can ever become solely a means of empowerment. The word "******," in all its uses, will always be with us. The book "******," for the pleasures of its clarity of thought and prose, deserves to be, too.
http://dir.salon.com/story/books/feature/2002/01/22/kennedy/index.html
