The internets have been abuzz this week over a small publishing house’s plans to print a version of the Twain classic Huckleberry Finn in which all instances of the word “nigger” have been replaced with the word “slave.” A representative of the company in question defends the decision as one intended to get the novel into more classrooms — too often, he says, schools and colleges are unwilling to assign Huckleberry Finn because of that word, and that word alone.
I’ve posted on Twitter about this controversy a few times, mostly to mock the idea of bowdlerizing the book, but a response I got from Parker Ross, who tweets as @PRossibly, brought me up short:
@studentactivism In high school my teacher read Huckleberry Finn out loud in class and said the slurs really loud. Super uncomfortable.
Ross doesn’t say, but I strongly suspect that the teacher in question was white.
As a person who teaches American history on the college level, I address the country’s traumatic racial past in my classrooms on a regular basis. And as a white person who teaches American history in classes made up primarily of students of color, I come to such moments with a particular perspective and a particular set of challenges.
You can’t teach American history in any serious way without talking bluntly about lynching, about slavery, about anti-immigrant sentiment, about malign policies toward Native Americans, about the deployment of racism as a tactic of terrorism and a instrument of social control. But for a white professor in a mostly-not-white class, such blunt talk can be not just awkward but perilous.
I had a student a few semesters ago who was training to become a teacher, and student-teaching in a middle school classroom. The class she was assigned to was made up entirely of black boys, and the teacher was an older white man. When he got to the point in the semester when he was to discuss slavery, he stuck his nose in his notes, read them verbatim — and as quickly as possible — and then moved directly into a quiz. No discussion, no engagement, no opportunity for his students to address their intellectual and emotional reactions to what they had just heard. My student — a black woman — was appalled. She said that for the rest of the class session, the anger and the confusion the students were feeling was overwhelming. They were, she said, traumatized.
I was of two minds, hearing this story. On the one hand, I shared my student’s anger. If you can’t handle that kind of a discussion, you have no business teaching history in such an environment. Period. On the other hand, I could identify with the teacher’s fear.
Most white people are anything but comfortable talking about race in mixed-race settings, particularly in circumstances in which they are occupying a position of authority. As a white person, to get up in front of a classroom of students of color and tell them about how race works? It’s weird. It’s frightening. It’s uncomfortable.
Even weirder, even more frightening, even less comfortable is to then open up the floor to discussion. Will you be contradicted? Will you be attacked? Will you be revealed as ignorant? Called a racist? Lose control?
It’s scary.
And it can be particularly scary for a white progressive. We’re encouraged to listen to the perspectives of people of color. We’re reminded to allow people to speak for themselves about their own experiences. We’re taught to take our privilege seriously, to acknowledge the gaps in our knowledge and our experiences, to take in, to absorb, to defer.
In my experience, we receive far less guidance — in either academic or organizing milieus — in how and when to construct our own autonomous identities as white people engaged with issues of race in multiracial environments, white people who are working not just as mentors to other whites or as allies to people of color, but as independent anti-racists with the experience and confidence to broach hard questions in potentially difficult settings.
As I say, I’ve had quite a bit of experience with this. I’ve taught dozens of classes that dealt with the history of race, including several in which I was the only white person in the room. In the second part of this post, I’ll be talking in more detail about my own experiences as a professor, giving specific attention to the problem that prompted the new edition of Huckleberry Finn — the use of racial slurs in academic discussions.
Update | Part Two of this series has been posted here.
7 comments
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January 6, 2011 at 11:34 am
Maxwell Love
Thank you for writing this Angus (Professor Johnston). This is an excellent post.
January 6, 2011 at 12:21 pm
Brian
Excellent commentary on an unfortunately complex issue.
Society needs to move towards deeper understanding of history and racism, beyond the unfortunate legacy of slavery, and how it has hindered society as a whole.
While there are still many people around who can personally remember events prior to de-segregation, including blacks and white alike with their respective positions, there are younger generations for whom there has been no impact other than witnessing the effect on others around them.
Ironically, recalling the history of slavery both enlightens us as well as re-opening old wounds that long desperately to heal. At the same time that we must remember history, we have to also distance ourselves in modern times from the negative parts of its impact, and recognize the progress we have made.
Myself, as a 40-something Canadian man, did not know anything about racism at all, having been essentially raised in its absence. While my community has a majority of whites, this was never considered an issue any more than an unbalanced proportion of eye or hair color in a given geographic group.
[snip –AJ]
January 6, 2011 at 12:28 pm
Angus Johnston
Brian, I apologize for editing your comment, but this thread isn’t the place for the discussion that the snipped portion of it would surely provoke. The question of the use of racial epithets in popular culture — and of the re-adoption of such epithets by the original targets of the slurs — is a big and important one, but it’s a question for another day.
January 6, 2011 at 2:16 pm
Brian
Fair enough I suppose, but the title of your article does invoke the “N-Word,” which could be interpreted as an invitation to discuss its contemporary use. Perhaps I should wait for “Part 2”
January 6, 2011 at 8:56 pm
How Censoring Huckleberry Finn Encourages the Myth of a “Post-racism” Society « PRossibly
[…] think it is easy for those of us who actively identify as anti-racist to forget, as Angus Johnston of studentactivism.net writes: “As a white person, to get up in front of a classroom of students of color and tell them […]
January 6, 2011 at 11:30 pm
Leslie
Angus, thanks for opening up this topic and from such an informed perspective.
I have one comment for Brian: I don’t think the complexity is “unfortunate”–it comes with the territory of dealing with difficult issues that can’t be resolved with clever repartee. It’s messy and uncomfortable.
And I have one comment for Angus: When I first scanned this sentence, “But for a white professor in a mostly-not-white class, such blunt talk can be not just awkward but perilous,” I read “perilous” as “tedious” (which, no doubt, says more about my experiences than yours! ;-)
I have found on occasion, though, mixed race classes very reluctant to broach the issue of racism–they feel they are beyond that (else why would they be in college?) and that any discussion of racism seems like an attempt to drag them down.
Above all, I think this generational difference, along with the racial difference (privilege of white teachers) impacts the conversation. So much to consider. . . .
January 7, 2011 at 2:17 pm
Lorne Marr
If parents explained to their children that the usage of this word today is inappropriate for many reasons the editors wouldn’t have to interfere in the novel. Moreover, censoring a particular word can only increase its popularity.