The decision by New South, an Alabama publisher, to excise “nigger” from its editions of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn — it’s being replaced with “slave” — has been (rightly) knocked as a heavy-handed attempt to sanitize our history. It’s probably fitting that “nigger” is at the center of this brouhaha, since no other word in American English embodies both our country’s racial psychosis or the inane public conversations surrounding it. Folks want to will “nigger” away, as if that might also vanquish both historical and contemporary racism. Just in the past few years, “nigger” made the cover of Ebony and was given a much-publicized funeral. (“Nigger” should be flattered, as these are the kind of honors usually reserved for luminaries like Michael Jackson.)
The implication of all this public hand-wringing is the belief that it’s some kind of quasi-mystical incantation whose mere utterance has the power offend black people and crush our souls, hence the popular and infantile surrogate “the n-word.” But language is volatile, and even words weighed down by ugly histories can remain slippery and nuanced. Listen to the way Chris Rock used it, and then the way Michael Richards used it. In both cases, it’s pejorative, but they’re giving voice to very different ideas. Then listen to Erykah Badu’s usage, which is sorta neutral, and consider Jay-Z’s use, which is mildly affectionate. In each case, the speaker is assuming a shared understanding of social relationships, and so the way they employ “nigger” tells us all sorts of important stuff about race and how it is and has been lived in America. By taking “nigger” out of Huck Finn, New South is actually muddying the world Twain was trying to describe, but this is no less true for calls to scrub it from hip-hop.