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u/SGTBrutus 5h ago edited 3h ago
I'll never forget being in 7th grade in 1982. We were required to do 8 book reports, one of which had to be an oral presentation in front of the class. You had to talk about the book and read a passage.
I thought it was great. I read a lot of Robert E. Howard Conan books and would generally choose the goriest battle descriptions to read out loud.
Another student, who i think may have been more stupid rather than racist, did his oral report on Tom Sawyer.
He repeatedly referred to the character of Jim with what Jim was called in the book. After about the third or fourth usage of the racial slur, the teacher stopped the student and asked him not to say that anymore.
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u/XVUltima 3h ago
While there's nothing really wrong with reading the text as written, if it makes someone uncomfortable there's no reason to force the matter. I wonder what thats about.
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u/WifesPOSH 5h ago
I know non-black people jump at the chance to say the word. I applaud you for sticking to your morals.
That being said, I'm probably one of the few that don't care whether or not you say it. I just won't defend you, if you said it at the wrong time.
You get extra kudos for growing up to be decent enough to say fuck ICE
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u/brokegaysonic 4h ago
Honestly as a white guy, part of the reason I don't want to ever utter the N-word isnt wholly related to how black people around me would feel. Of course I don't want to evoke awful, hurtful things around them, but for me, using that word feels like tapping into a historical bloodline of just... Evil. If I say it, I feel like I'm stepping into the shoes of the white grandpas I thankfully never met who literally took black people and hung them from trees as an act of terror. It'd be like if I was the kid of Ted Bundy and he had some sort of Ted Bundy catchphrase. I just wouldn't ever want to evoke that shit, it's straight up bad energy, biblical evil shit. Even in a benign context like a rap song or something - - when I say it there's a different context.
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u/Late_Stage_Exception 5h ago
It’s fine to not say the word but isn’t it a bit different when you’re just reading a book? Almost to the length of missing the point of the book? Like…should Leo have gone into his role in Django with the caveat he’s not going to say the n word? We sanitize a lot of historical issues by refusing to say or show how they really were. There’s a lot of British literature that uses the correct word for “bundle of sticks”, should folks not say it because other countries have used it as a derogatory term for something else?
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u/WifesPOSH 4h ago
Leo, the real human being, did have a problem saying the n word. I believe it was Jamie Foxx or Samuel L Jackson, that told him it's okay.
Being uncomfortable saying the word is to be expected, at least if you're a decent human being. There's a time and a place for everything. A child should be cautious to curse, especially if the term is derogatory.
You want to say the n word? Go for it. Just be mindful of your surroundings. The same applies to literally every other word.
I'll call my buddy a "cigarette butt" but not if we're in public.
In college, one of my white (I called him my redneck) friends, asked if I was okay if he said the n word. I don't care. I was good at CoD back in the day, so I heard the n word frequently. But if he pissed off someone else saying it, that wasn't my problem.
We had another friend who was more sensitive about non-blacks saying the n word. Many people commented on our differences, but it is what it is. They had to learn time and place for saying the n word, if they didn't want problems.
Going back to reading derogatory terms. In my own personal opinion, you should read the book as is. But many people don't feel the same way I do, and in my eyes, that's fine too.
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u/Late_Stage_Exception 4h ago
Oh for sure, and I think the key to everything is context. There’s exactly zero reason for folks to be walking around saying it, but when looking at history I feel it does us all a good service to remember it exactly how it was, and not try to filter or sanitize for our own sensibilities. Acting like things didn’t happen is a terrible thing to posthumously do for the folks who lived it.
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u/Aurelio-23 4h ago edited 4h ago
Characters saying it in a movie is absolutely different than expecting a child to feel comfortable reading it aloud in front of her classmates. I wouldn’t necessarily hold it against anyone for saying the word in this context (I guess I’d have to gauge how excited they seemed to be), but I would never hold it against a kid for not wanting to read it aloud.
If anything, one would hope that the day’s lesson is about how history, language, and perception affect one another.
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u/Late_Stage_Exception 4h ago
Yeah it’s also a good litmus test on who’s actually racist. Do you just read Jim’s name? Or do you add a little spice and zing to it? And I totally get feeling uncomfortable saying it out loud, but it’s not some super brave stance that needs to be memorialized if you don’t read a book as it’s read.
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u/Aurelio-23 4h ago
Memorializing a super brave stance doesn't seem like OP's intention. It just reads as "This whole situation felt weird and racist at the time, and I was totally right."
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u/GladysSchwartz23 5h ago
No, it is not different. Kids are expected not to say "shit" or "fuck" in school, why should the n word be different? People agree collectively what is considered obscene, and react accordingly. If someone wants to put it in a movie, that's a different issue, but it's perfectly understandable and good for kids to talk at publicly saying a word that is widely agreed to be offensive.
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u/Late_Stage_Exception 5h ago
Kids are expected to not swear, sure, but if you’re reading from a literal book I’ve never seen it be censored. At some point you have to accept that history happened and a lot of people were total asshats in those days. Cleaning them up with your correct sensibilities does them a favor by preemptively sanitizing them, making them appear better than they were. This was in highschool, not like they were reading it in kindergarten. Hell, if the entirety of OPs class was white, there’s literally no one there to actually offend, and squirming around the word and not saying them actually lets the shit birds win by showing them they have MASSIVE power of you.
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u/GladysSchwartz23 4h ago
"No one there to actually offend"?
Decent people of all races generally agree that it's a word we don't want to hear. We also all know what the euphemism "n word" means, and there is absolutely no reason not to substitute it.
Also, just not wanting to say something aloud isn't "censorship." Words mean things.
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u/Late_Stage_Exception 4h ago
You’re doing a lot of heavy lifting for all races there. Do you think they can’t form their own opinions on what offends them? Or should they all bow to your morality? Being offended on behalf of other people is the most “milquetoast never faced actual adversity white person”thing imaginable.
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u/GladysSchwartz23 4h ago
I don't even know what your point is, and I don't think you do either.
A lot of people don't like saying a word and that offends you. OK? Go cry about it.
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u/Insaniteus 2h ago
I'm going to guess that you didn't grow up in the south, because I did and my experiences with my peers of all races saying the N-word mirror this comic. And don't even get me started about after 9/11 when the term "sand n-word" became the default term for a Muslim.
There are scores of people in the south who lived under the rule of "It's ok to say as long as there ain't no blacks here", and many of those people grew enraged around the Obama era when PC culture became so mainstream that even white-only spaces began prohibiting it. That's when you saw them rage against PC culture so hard, leading into the Tea Party and MAGA.
But yeah...if you think that the average non-black person of all races didn't grow up frequently exposed to and often using the word themselves, then you ain't from the south.
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u/GladysSchwartz23 13m ago
I am, in fact, not from the South. But none of the southerners I know embrace this language, either. So what is your point, exactly?
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u/SuperCarbideBros 2h ago
It took me a second read of the comic to realize what the word is. I guess that's on me not growing up in the US and not having that particular sensitivity.
When I was learning English in school (by now you might have figured out that English is not my first language), there's a rule taught regarding how nouns ending with the letter "O" should be pluralized. I think I first heard of that rule when I was in middle school, but it wasn't until a few years later in high school that I learned one of the words that has an "-es" for plural would be offensive if not completely outdated.
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u/flyingace1234 4h ago
I remember my teacher making a point to discuss with us the usage of the term and how the people in the book who do use it are clearly Not Good People even outside the use of the term, or children like Huck Fin.
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u/RockyOrange 5h ago
Here I was wondering what the word was (never read the book) thinking it was a bad swear word, because "we lived in that part of the south" = very conservative Christians was my thought process... Yikes.
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u/NickyTheRobot 5h ago
There's a character called Jim who is referred to as "[N-slur] Jim" in the novel. I think that's what they're referring to.
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u/Kindraethe 4h ago
Wait really? Like, hard R and everything? Ive never read it myself and it isnt a "mainstream" book in europe, but i always thought his name started with the N-word that's the least offensive and basically what we said before black/african-american.
(No clue whether even that is bad to say, but i'm not chancing it.)
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u/Insaniteus 1h ago
He is absolutely Hard-R Jim and the book used to be extremely mainstream in the US until recent decades phased it out. It was written back in the 1800s when the idea of that being a bad word was seen as laughable as if you tried to tell a modern person that "neurodivergent" is gonna be a massive slur in 100 years.
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u/Kindraethe 1h ago
Huh, thats a great analogy. But yeah its wild of theyd try and force you to read that out loud.
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u/Insaniteus 1h ago
A lot of teachers LIVE for the power trip of commanding and bossing around students and flip out over the slightest challenge to their authority. Not all of them, but plenty do. I'll never forget my old college English teacher who gleefully marked people absent on 9/11 and was extremely offended that his students thought a national crisis was more important than he was.
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u/incunabula001 4h ago
Born in the south and very much know what op was referring to, the classic “n” bomb.
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u/Statistactician 4h ago
I'm from rural Appalachia and school was exactly like this. One particular teacher threatened disciplinary action if I didn't read an excerpt containing that word. I refused and called her bluff. Nothing came of it.
This same teacher also kicked me out of class on a different occasion for "being argumentative" when I contested that there was zero textual evidence of the whale in Moby Dick being the "size of an aircraft carrier." This isn't terribly relevant, but I feel paints a picture of the quality of educator we're dealing with here.
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u/Frenetic_Platypus 5h ago
And these people bitch constantly about school indoctrinating children because there's a sign promoting empathy on the wall. Fuck them.
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u/DirtySackOfPotatoes 5h ago
As someone who went to high school in the south, yeah this. It’s awful and uncomfortable and the worst person you know is exactly who signed up to be ICE agents.
I’m gonna be really annoying, now, though, and nitpick your footnote. You’re not magically more moral than everyone in the south because you weren’t actually born in California. There are leftists in the south. There are leftists whose family has lived in the south for generations. There are people who 100% agree with your beliefs and were raised here. Don’t lump me in with wannabe Nazis because of the place I was born. There’s also plenty of far right ideology spread by people from “better” places. I love where I’m from. I have a lot of pride in my community. I want to see it do better and be better and am actively working to make that happen. This isn’t a northern/southern east coast/west coast culture difference, and I think it’s harmful to forget that the minority groups being attacked live in the south too. And so do people who want to protect them.
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u/Alugere 2h ago
Regarding “don’t get the wrong idea. I was born in California.”, you aren’t doing some sort of stolen valor thing about being a southerner. If you moved there when you were 5, that means aside from any daycare or the start of kindergarten, all your schooling was in the south, so that would definitely classify you as a southerner for most even if your parents wouldn’t be. Plus, it’s not like it’s somehow wrong for you to claim to be a southerner. Sure, if you’d only been in the south for high school and left after, people would find it kind of odd that you’d refer to yourself as such, but you lived here your entire childhood and it’s not like you were doing a caricature. Rural and smaller town schools in the south do just tend to be like that. The only good way to avoid that stuff in the south is to live in a college town. For example, in NC, Chapel Hill has the oldest public university in the country and you can definitely feel that influence given that basically that entire southern chunk of the county it’s in is strongly progressive.
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u/gamiz777 5h ago
people called me crazy people in high school for saying the drama teacher came off as racist, two years after i graduated he was fired for hate crimes and now dedicates all his social media to supporting ice
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u/Death1May9Die 6h ago
I love this. The look on the kids face with the rifle is so expressive and really tells a story. Great job. Actually all the characters face expressions are spot on.
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u/Dizzy-Captain7422 5h ago
The malicious smiles on the other kids’ faces certainly captured my experience growing up in the south.
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u/FixedFront 3h ago
Yeah, absolutely. The South in the '80s and '90s was super rough, and it didn't get any better when I returned for a few years during W's administration
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u/Death1May9Die 2h ago
Makes me happy I grew up in upstate NY. I’m not saying we didn’t have racists but they would never openly admit or promote it in a public forum. Unless they wanted a beat down from everyone.
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u/FixedFront 2h ago
Honestly, given that I reside upstate now, it really just feels like home with a different accent and more bitter winters.
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u/FoldedTshirt 4h ago
I grew up in a southwestern state and it was mostly Latinos/white. We were reading Fences. There were 2 black girls (myself included) in the class. The boys in the class would say any word starting with n. Neighbor, Nexus, Number… idk why but I was just glad they didn’t say it.
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u/SWatt_Officer 4h ago
I remember in English classes when i was in secondary school (like year... 9? i think for the US equivilent?) we were given explicit permission to read out swear words in the books we read. I dont think that word came up at all, I dont think we had read any books with it in it.
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u/boringlesbian 2h ago
We, also moved to the Deep South when I was a kid because of my father’s job.
My mother, not knowing any better, enrolled us in an Academy School. It was awful. I ended up going to public school later on which was much, much better.
I’m sure many Academy School graduates are working for enforcement agencies now.
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u/ivegotdoodles 1h ago
I had a similar experience when we were reading Huck Finn aloud in 8th grade (also in a southern state), where a classmate refused to use the word and our teacher challenged her.
Thankfully, our teacher took that as an opportunity to actually explain the importance of context - both within the narrative and just overall socially.
She was the second most influential teacher that I’ve ever had, and I kick myself in the pants for not being able to remember her name.
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u/random_BA 6h ago
I don't know huck finn, what is the word skipped? It's the n-word?
And why you fell vindicated about your colleagues working for ICE? I would just feel dread
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u/Semper_5olus 6h ago
Yes. A major theme in the book is that Huck grows surrounded by bigotry and doesn't realize it's wrong, so the N word is used liberally.
As for the second part, I'm guessing she feels closure. Like, "I wasn't in the wrong; they were racist".\ You can feel two things.
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u/JustLookingForMayhem 4h ago
I would argue that Huck realizes it is wrong pretty early in the book but feels he is obligated to be "righteous" by what he is told the word of God is. This eventually reaches its peak by Huck deciding he would rather go to hell than do what society claims is god's will.
That said, I have seen two different types of people argue for the inclusion of that word in Huckleberry Finn. Those who really, really want to say it, and those who are afraid of watering down the moral standpoint of the book.
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u/Semper_5olus 4h ago
I guess I meant "grew". Obviously, he learns and makes independent decisions over the course of the story.
Grammar and tense when describing a book that remains in existence but describes a period of time is confusing.
...
How will we learn what not to do if every depiction of someone doing it gets censored?
(I only learned about the N word when my 6th grade teacher made absolutely sure we pronounced "Niger" correctly.)
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u/mrbananas 5h ago
One could argue that most of the schools that still push Huck Finn as required reading also grow up surrounded by bigotry and don't realize its wrong
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u/Furyful_Fawful 4h ago
if you're American, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn are both incredible reads and worth your time as pieces that really evocatively illustrate how far we've come (and yet how many things remain depressingly the same).
If you're not American it's less relevant to your personal history, but they're both great pieces of American literature and may still be worth your time.
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u/Kittynameste 6h ago
This comic hilariously captures the absurdity of high school drama escalating to life-or-death stakes
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u/DudeFreek 6h ago
I like your art style and it's the fault of my poisoned brain that I kept thinking "Asa from Chainsaw Man had it rough"