The So-Called "N-Word" -- Nigger

It used to be that everytime I used the word "nigger" here on my weblog, the next day I would see a comment chastising me and accusing me of something or another, I forget what.  It would be signed by somebody that I didn't know, though I did know that he, she, or it definitely were not otherwise reading my weblog, or for that matter had read it even in that instance.

That shot at censoring me would happen so invariably and so mechanically that I thought someone had a means of scouring the entire internet looking for every use of "nigger" in weblogs while keeping the steel-edged ruler at the ready.   I haven't used the word lately, so I don't know if that scanner is still active, or whether that guy or guys has gotten tired and gone on to other righteous flipdoodle.   Maybe I will now find out.

It's always interesting to see how the free use of that word can so easily bend so many so-called "white" minds out of shape even quicker than it does some so-called "black" minds, with both sets being entirely ignorant of the fact that in their mutual repugnance, they are caught in exactly the same trap.

I can't tell you how overjoyed I am that my origins, my education, and I guess my nature have kept me completely immune from that nonsense from the very beginning, to what may be the inexplicable point that I find being called "black" by anyone actually  more offensive than I think I would be by being called a "nigger" by a "white" person.    I am tentative about the last part of that statement since through all these years in many settings I have had no experience along those lines, except one time while I was a kid walking down a road, a kid of the lighter persuasion for some sort of strange reason took the opportunity to yell  "nigger" at me while he was standing behind a far off fence.  Other than that, the many references to me as "nigger," always by rainbows ("black" people), were always benign and even said with fondness, as those who have no other opportunity to witness or to experience what looks to them to be an inexplicable phenomenon can readily see in those movies containing rainbow characters where there was no attempt made to scrub all racial references.

The easy use of the supposedly defamatory word "nigger" by its intended targets is easy to understand, and little more about that needs to be said, except that it is a great example of how rainbows have always manipulated the language, by turning words and their meanings upside down, back upon themselves, reversing them, or however you want to put it.. 

The more interesting part of all this involves the European Derives and their attitudes toward the use of "nigger," and quite often their objections make me suspicious, and I begin to think that the attitudes of at least some of them come from the desire to keep the use of that word  as it exists in their minds, as  active and as virulent as possible.   They use their false repugnance of it as a way of tryiing to keep rainbows thinking that it is a truly ugly term, so that rainbows should always be ready to bare their fangs and start snarling at every use of it, in true kneejerk fashion.   In other words, no weapon of use against rainbows should ever  be allowed to go dull and lose its bite.   If "nigger" ever became a respectable or even slightly less lethal word,  the targets of that term would likewise become respectable, and then the world would really begin to come to an end.

I suppose that the responsibility for taking the main step toward this Happy Apocalypse  is more the responsibility of rainbows than it is of the euros.  If fewer of them could avoid breathing fire at hearing the word coming from the "wrong" mouths, they would have taken an important step toward taking this so far intractable weapon out of the enemy's hands.

This subject came to my mind this morning because of a BBC article about how there is a new edition of Mark Twain's "Huckleberry Finn, " and a small furore is at hand because Twain's language has been badly adulterated in this version, mainly by changing every use of the word "Nigger."  This applies notably to the first part of the name of one of the book's two main characters, Nigger Jim, which here becomes "Slave" or something else, while, as long as they're at it, "Injun" also becomes "Indian."  That,  if I remember correctly, is mainly in the case of another character called "Injun Joe."

In college in the 1950's at Howard University in D.C., I was privileged to take a bunch of English and writing courses from Sterling S. Brown, a very well-known figure in rainbow-centered teaching and writing and one of the foremost exponents of rainbow  aspirations, literary and otherwise, in his time.   And if anyone had been able to find Twain's naming one of his characters "Nigger Jim" unacceptable,  it would've been Dr. Brown.   But instead he devoted quite a lot of time to explaining to us exactly what Twain was up to there, and showing us that in fact the truth was quite the reverse of what the book's detractors thought. 

I strongly doubt that any of my classmates in that largely rainbow college  had been put off by Nigger Jim's name anymore than I had, and I remember being a little puzzled at why Brown had felt it necessary to tell us all that regardless.  But after hearing about the unenlightened howling about Twain's masterpiece and other like matters that still goes on,  to the point that in these later and supposedly more informed times, many of the book's detractors are still mistakenly trying to prevent "Huckleberry Finn" from being taught in schools, now more than ever I see why.

The radioactivity of ignorance has a very long half-life, doesn't it?