The "N" Word Deception

Have ya’ll heard, Auburn University professor, Alan Gribben is due to release his rewritten version of Mark Twain. Mr. Gribben decided in his vast, politically correct, wisdom that the time had come to eradicate the“N” word from the classics Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer. Cyberspace is aflame with the debate over this rewritten censorship of Twain; most agree, me among them,that this whitewashing is a travesty.

Professor Gribben penned his bastardization in effort to make the works once more available in schools and more palatable to general readership. ”We may applaud Twain’s ability as a prominent American literary realist to record the speech of a particular region during a specific historical era, but abusive racial insults that bear distinct connotations of permanent inferiority nonetheless repulse modern-day readers,” the professor recently told the Wall Street Journal.

As a Constitutional Independent, I am more than a little concerned about the grease such censorship smears on the already slippery slope of our 1st Amendment right to freedom of speech. As an African American I am enraged by the deception of it all. Can we please get real up inhere? The word is “*****” n-i-g-g-e-r and why do we give a f*ck whether Mark Twain, Dr. Laura or Joe Blow says it out loud? We ain’t got to do nothing but take a glance around our lives our reality to know spoken or not, they still mean it. They play this politically correct, post-racial bullsh*t just like they played cross country, brand new, community centers in the 70s. Their “N”word and the unending controversy they stir around it is just another distraction move and we’re playing into it. Do we really believe that if they can no longer say it to our face, they will no longer perpetuate it as a systemic reality? Well newsflash, it ain’t fixin to happen.

This is a major step on the map back to slavery ya’ll and we better wake up and pay attention. The last great deception, integration, cost us the shops, markets and services in our communities, in short our economic base. It scattered us uptown and to the suburbs and fragmented our once community unity and it paved the road to the mass fratricide among our youth.It robbed them of teachers who knew and had a vested interest in sharing our history; it robbed them of teachers, neighbors, a community that supported and uplifted them. Now, they want us to buy their whitewashed vocabulary and their feigned outrage at the injustices of the past. Don’t misunderstand I know that there are millions of sincere white folks in this battle and I know they don’t understand that once again they are the tools of deception. I mean think about it, don’t they always put well-meaning, short-sighted white folks on the front lines of whatever lie they are systematically perpetrating? more