Jordan Mayer Op Ed - "A Necessary Discomfort"

“Nigger”. It’s an awful word. It invokes feelings ranging from quiet discomfort to utter rage. It’s a word that makes many people feel severely offended. It is for this reason that many parents and teachers have been fighting to have the word removed from Huck Finn, if not to have the book banned outright. These people argue that the inclusion of the n-word in a book that is read by high school students nationwide is dangerous – that it risks promoting the use of the word, as well as greatly offending students of color. They say that Huck Finn makes people uncomfortable – indeed, when our teacher read some passages from the book aloud in my class, there were noticeable squirms and cringes when that infamous word was uttered.

But this is exactly what Mark Twain wanted. When he set out to write Huck Finn, Twain was not trying to make people comfortable – he was trying to make people think. Twain wanted people to shift a bit in their seats when they saw the horrible, racist word being used so often. He wanted the word to get stuck in their heads. He wanted them to roll that word over and think about it and its meaning. And when we take the word away, we are destroying a vital part of the novel. When Huck (disguised as Tom) tells Aunt Sally that the accident on the boat he rode on “Killed a nigger (Twain 197)” and she is relieved because “sometimes people do get hurt (197)”, readers should feel uneasy. By trying to make students “comfortable”, we are going directly against what the author was intending.

Students should be uncomfortable when they read Huck Finn. They should be uncomfortable when they read the n-word over and over again. Because that word tells the tale of a dark chapter of American history. That word tells the story of the starving, bruised slave and the mulatto denied the most basic of rights simply because of his skin color. That word tells the story of the black man, viewed not as a human being, but as an animal, a low-down, blubbering dog that was only good for plowing fields and picking cotton. Contained within that word are years of racism, and to censor Twain’s novel – to remove the word that forms the very core of the story – is like saying that those racial prejudices never existed, that the white man was never evil and cruel, that the black man was never treated like an animal.

Students need to know that racism was, and still is, very real. As Thomas Glave says in his article “Obscuring the Past”, “it is precisely this abominable history...which must be made clear to schoolchildren, high school students, and university students – to everyone (Glave)”. If we wish to effectively battle racism, we must first accept the harsh reality of its existence. The inclusion of the n-word in Huck Finn does not say that it should be used; it says that it has been used, that it is used, and that this should concern us deeply.

Bibliography

Twain, Mark. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Charles L. Webster and Co., 1884.

Glave, Thomas. "Obscuring the Past". nytimes.com, New York Times, 5 Jan. 2011. Web.

10 Jan. 2014.