Steamd

Did that headline get your attention? Good! Yes, it’s true, the book “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” has the word nigger in it! Now, before you go nuts and yell “RACISM” on me, finish reading my post…

A couple of weeks or so ago, I opened up the weekend edition of USA Today and read an article entitled School apologizes after ‘Finn’ lesson backfires. After reading it, I was pissed. Go read the article and maybe you’ll see what I mean.

In a nutshell, a teacher was preparing the class to read “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” by going over various racial slurs in the book. One particular student, a black student, was offended by one of the words that the teacher had written on the blackboard. The word was (you guessed it!) nigger. [And, no, I am not going to substitute this word for "the N-word" or the like! A word is just a word and doesn't have any meaning unless it's put into context. More on this in a second.]

The teacher “badgered” Mohamed after denying his request to remove the slur from the chalkboard or change it to the “N-word,” and she continued to say the word during class, said his mother, Tunya Mohamed. The teen said that he felt singled out when the teacher asked whether the word offended him and that she told him, “‘It hurts, doesn’t it?”‘

Now, I’m going to give the kid the benefit of the doubt cause I can understand how a young kid can feel singled out when they are the only black kid in the class, especially given the subject matter. However, I don’t think the teacher was being maliced and pointing a finger at him. I think she was merely making him and everyone else in the class understand that these slurs can hurt people if taken out of the wrong context.

But wait! There’s more:

Birdville Superintendent Stephen Waddell agreed to issue a written apology to the teen and his family and arrange sensitivity training for faculty, said Thomas Muhammad, spokesman of a group called Coalition to Stop the N-Word.

Coalition to Stop the N-Word? Wha??? Sensitivity training? Are they serious?

So the school officials, the student, his parents and members of the coalition have a meeting, the book is removed from the class, the kid enrolls in a different English class, and all is well. Right? Wrong!

“We are here today to say we will not tolerate the N-word being used by any educators anywhere in any school district throughout our region or the state of Texas,” said Ron Price, a Dallas school board member who attended the meeting. “It’s critical that we examine all of our textbooks to ensure that the language is proper and that the language is not being used to abuse any child in any public school.”

This is taking the issue way overboard. What next? Are we going to remove the word bitch too from every textbook and novel? Cause my wife doesn’t like being called that and she certainly won’t want her children to be exposed to that word! Hell, why stop there! Might as well bring back book burning while we’re at it!

Look, you can’t remove every stinky word from every textbook or novel a student might read; that just isn’t any common sense. Teachers don’t need any sensitivity training and students don’t need baby sitting when it comes to the words they could potentially read or hear. There just isn’t any sensitive way of exposing a student to slur words.

“The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” is a part of American history. Like it or not, white people used to refer to black people as niggers. As far as I’m concerned the teacher did the right thing. She wrote all the slur words, including nigger, on the black board and said, “Here are the words you’re going to see in this book and here’s what they meant during the 1800’s”. There are plenty of teacher’s guides and comments about this very thing. As Minnie Phillips on Time.com says:

Thirty years after first teaching the novel in my American literature class at Webster Groves High School in suburban St. Louis, Mo., I’ve decided the novel is not about race but about freedom.

Does this book really call for any special attention? A word in and of itself isn’t bad. It’s the racist son-of-a-bitch who uses the word that you should really be worried about. But this book isn’t about race…it’s about freedom and it’s a part of our history. I think our students can handle it. History is history. Get over it!