America Does Not Need to Censor Her Past I thought racism was a long-dead school of thought when we first began learning about Martin Luther King Jr. in the first grade; I remembering sharing this with my parents, and the dumbfounded look they had in response to my naïveté—or perhaps my stupidity. It took me another year to come around to the idea that racism was still alive and well in this country (after all, no one that I knew was being lynched or denied the right to vote): when I first heard “nigger” used to refer to Barack Obama by my grandmother’s neighbor in South Carolina—a place where prejudice runs deep and some believe the Civil War is still being fought nearly one hundred and fifty-five years later. Since then I must have heard “nigger” used hundreds of times as a term of endearment or as a vile insult; by my black friends or by my white classmates; in song lyrics or in everyday conversation; however, each time one thing remains the same: the immense power and history behind the most loaded word in the English language. “Nigger” is not interchangeable with the word slave; slave is not the invention of American racism and it does not …show more content…
To censor Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn would not only do a complete disservice to the author himself, who chose his words carefully to convey a certain message, but