Free Nigger: The Strange Career Of A Troublesome Word by Randall Kennedy Page A

they will have.” 40 Morse simultaneously undermined his own point, however, by noting that “offensive words… appear only in hardcover college-level dictionaries, which are edited expressly for adults. Slurs and other offensive words are not included in dictionaries intended for children. Nor are they published in any smaller, abridged dictionaries, such as paperbacks.” With respect to these other dictionaries, the managers of Merriam-Webster had decided, for various reasons, to excise the N-word. Whether or not this decision was a sound one is, for the moment, irrelevant. The important thing to recognize is that dictionary makers do, infact, exercise judgment, notwithstanding Morse's evasive denial.
    Deciding whether to note or how to define a deeply controversial word is an inescapably “political” act, and claims to the contrary are either naive or disingenuous. The issue, then, is not whether editors shape the substance of their dictionaries. Of course they do. The issue is the substance of the choices made. Some of Merriam-Webster's critics have condemned the editors’ decision to include any reference at all to
nigger.
“If the word is not there [in the dictionary], you can't use it,” one protester asserted in favor of deleting the N-word alto-gether. 41 That tack, however, is glaringly wrongheaded. Many terms that are absent from dictionaries are nonetheless pervasive in popular usage. Moreover, so long as racist sentiments exist, they will find linguistic means of expression, even if some avenues are blocked. There are, after all, numerous ways of insulting people.
    In sum, the campaign against
Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary
was misguided. The dictionary defined the term adequately, and the dictionary's editors were correct in including the N-word despite the embarrassment and hurt feelings the term inflicts.
Nigger
should have a place in any serious dictionary. The word is simply too important to ignore.
    A second, and achingly poignant, example of mistaken protest is the widespread repudiation of
Huckleberry Finn
, now one of the most beleaguered texts in American literature. Monthly, it seems, someone attacks Mark Twain's most famous book onthe grounds that it is racist. The novel's most energetic foe, John H. Wallace, calls it “the most grotesque example of racist trash ever written.” 42 For many of
Huckleberry Finn's
enemies, the most upsetting and best proof of the book's racism is the fact that
nigger
appears in the text some 215 times. At one point, for example, Huck's aunt Sally asks him why he is so late arriving at her house:
    “We blowed a cylinder head.” “Good gracious! Anybody hurt?” “No'm. Killed a nigger.”
    “Well, it's lucky; because sometimes people do get hurt.” 43
     
    Wallace asserts that this exchange, within the context of the novel as a whole, strives to make the point that blacks are not human beings. 44 That interpretation, however, is ludicrous, a frightening exhibition of how thought becomes stunted in the absence of any sense of irony. Twain is not willfully buttressing racism here; he is seeking ruthlessly to unveil and ridicule it. By putting
nigger
in white characters’ mouths, the author is not branding blacks, but rather branding the whites.
    There was a time when Twain's own use of
nigger
signaled contempt. As a young man inculcated with white-supremacist beliefs and sentiments, he viewed blacks as inferior and spoke of them as such. 45 As he matured and traveled and became more cosmopolitan, however, Twain underwent a dramatic metamorphosis. He grew to hate slavery and the brutality of Jim Crow and began to express his antiracist perspective satiricallythrough his writings.
Huckleberry Finn
is the best fictive example of Twain's triumph over his upbringing. In it he creates a loving relationship between Huck and Jim, the runaway slave, all the while sardonically impugning the pretensions of white racial superiority. Among Twain's nonfiction,