Nefarious

As someone who has never been on the receiving end of racism I can only imagine how hurtful it must be. Judging someone by the colour of their skin or their country of origins is the basest form of ignorance and pointless stupidity.

Being Irish, of course I’m sure not all my compatriots can say they’ve never experienced some from of xenophobia, either in relation to the potato eating leprechaun or the car bomb planting terrorist. We have a tendency to laugh it off now, sure we’re great crack, everyone loves us, that’s all in the past. And if you can’t laugh at yourself, who can you laugh at?

Maybe this is the best way to deal with bigotry although I’m sure Irish people who have suffered abuse and segregation would (understandably) disagree. It’s not so easy to be flippant when you or your family have been degraded or had to endure indignities because of where you are from.

So I can completely understand why there is such an abhorrence of a very certain ‘N-Word’ by the people who it has affected. It is a word that has been used with cruelty to degrade, belittle and alienate entire races.



What needs to be remembered however, that a word can only be as hurtful and offensive as the hate behind it. The problem isn’t the combination of letters that form the word, but the memory of murder, rape, oppression and slavery that it has been based on, sadly even to this day.

It’s this point that highlights the ludicrousness of the decision for future editions of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to be published without the ‘N-Word.’ It’s not the fact that the character Jim is referred to as ‘nigger’ that is offensive. It the abuse and intolerance he copes with on a daily basis.

Despite this Jim is possibly the noblest adult character in what is one of the first books to address the subject of an unequal and unjust America. Mark Twain was intelligent and articulate, one of the greatest writers of his generation. A declared liberal and civil rights supporter in a time when such things were not popular in his home state of Missouri, the only group he was attacking in his opus was the ignorant.

One of the main points of this classic work of literature is that the main character, Huck, learns to question the accepted norm, that is racist and exclusionist, and begins to treat people for who they are rather than pigmentation or class.

Censoring a word will not change the fact that racism exists or, that even today, African Americans can probably still consider themselves second class citizens. Nor will its eradication make it easier to forget the past.

Apparently some of the thinking behind it is that people won’t read it because the tome is already assumed to be racist partially due to the 219 times that the offending word is used. But with the word being used in such a way to highlight ignorance of the user, surely explanation and education is better than suppression or restriction.

The only thing that is affected by this is the work of one of the Great American Writers. When the world already suspects that as a nation, America is some what anti intellectual, why perpetuate this by messing with one of their own masterpieces?



Even I can see that it is pointless move with no benefit to anyone. And I’m just a thick Paddy.