An Old Emergence

Today we honor the life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. It was a life lived in peace, and a life spent working toward equality. Dr. King remains to this day an inspiration for all who still struggle for equal rights. Growing up in Alabama endows a white Anglo-Saxon protestant with a unique perspective on race relations. Even though I never experienced segregation or the atrocities that were perpetrated in my home city of Birmingham in the sixties and seventies, I still experienced a form of “us-them” mentality as a child. I remember thinking and “understanding” that there was something different about the black, Asian, and Latino students in my classes.

I’ll be honest. My original intent with this blog post was to rant about the efforts of an Auburn University professor to publish a new edition of the Mark Twain classic Huckleberry Finn . This new edition would replace the word “nigger” with “slave.” To be sure, I find the “n-word” incredibly offensive. However, by censoring the use of this word in a classic work of literature takes away much of the meaning and cultural context of the original work.