It’s easy to make the usual criticisms against the latest, clueless school district removing the novel To Kill a Mockingbird from its curriculum – but this time, let’s dig deeper.
School officials in Biloxi, Miss., explained that language in the book – presumably the “N-word” used (approximately 50 times) as it would have been in Mockingbird‘s 1930s-era Alabama – “makes people uncomfortable.”
This seems the umpteenth installment of a near-annual kerfuffle in which, somewhere in the United States, Mockingbird is removed or “banned,” after which all the pundits quite rightly opine that there is great value in finding appropriately nuanced ways to make children confront “uncomfortable” realities.
As it so happens, this very week Liberty Island Media releases my first novel, called Mad Jones, Heretic, available at Amazon, in which the N-word appears 11 times (and 28 times total throughout the trilogy). When writing the trilogy, I did not worry about whether the word would “make people uncomfortable,” much less intend to cause discomfort (or not to do so). I did it because, in terms of the plot and fictional characters involved, that was how one particular character would talk if he had the personality and flaws he must have so that the plot makes sense.
A novelist strives for verisimilitude. In one respect, it should be just that simple.
Nonetheless, today’s world doesn’t let it be so simple. Almost every “fault line” emanating from literary use of the N-word also touches, deep down, some broader and perhaps unstable tectonic plates in our culture.
Obviously, any time the N-word is used, the tectonic plate of race can be shaken. These days, though, that’s certainly not the only part of the cultural foundation that’s subject to a subduction zone touched by the N-word dispute.
For example, debate now rages over the extent and even the wisdom of First Amendment speech protections, with a growing minority (at least) of college students showing either ignorance or hostility toward its basic premises – and with people of my generation appalled at what seems to us to be the collegians’ sheer benightedness.
Likewise, even after being scathingly denigrated as “snowflakes” for their hyperactive over-sensitivity to any ideas that conflict with their own worldviews – in other words, to being “bombarded” with perspectives that make them “uncomfortable” – college students and administrators still insist, ludicrously, that “safe spaces” are needed for protection from the big, bad world.
How humankind survived the past several millennia without safe spaces apparently is an unfathomable mystery. Meanwhile, one wonders what would have happened if the ideas of American abolitionists were censored in the 1850s because they made polite society feel upset.
There are those of us who still believe, with Thomas Jefferson, that public discourse can “tolerate any error so long as reason is left free to combat it.”
None of which is to say that vulgarities, especially dehumanizing ones such as the N-word, are morally acceptable in ordinary conversation. It is to say, though, that context matters, as do intent and venue. That which is inappropriate to say even in a pool hall is perfectly appropriate in literature aiming to demonstrate why it is so wildly unseemly in ordinary life.
In my Mad Jones trilogy (considered as a whole, rather than as individual books), the one character that uses the N-word does so in ways essential to a key sub-plot – a sub-plot which in turn serves to give impetus to, and to elucidate some broader themes of, the three-volume story. (The story features a young teacher named Madison Jones who becomes an “accidental prophet,” developing a pop-culture following when he, Martin-Luther-like, posts religious theses on church doors in Mobile, Ala., in 1998.) Designed as a satire on modern media, religion and politics, overlaid on top of serious faith-based themes, Mad Jones ends up exploring the nature of personal redemptions, large and small.
The trilogy’s one racial sub-plot makes clear that even as far back as two decades ago, the worst forms of racism already were merely vestigial, although still troubling, in the Gulf South. I still don’t know how I believably could have set the scenes and themes without having one character actually use the objectionable word.
If I, in my fumbling attempt as a novelist, felt so impelled to use a word I detest, how much more compelling must Harper Lee have found the use of the N-word in her masterpiece set in Jim Crow Alabama?
Sometimes language is used in contexts that are descriptive, not prescriptive. The truths it can carry should not be blocked out just because some people’s sensitivity meters are set at low thresholds. The best way to guard against civilization becoming a mad, Mad world is to listen to what each other are saying, not to retreat to spaces that only appear to be safe.
Quin Hillyer (@QuinHillyer) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a former associate editorial page editor for the Washington Examiner. Hillyer’s novel, Mad Jones, Heretic, is available on Amazon.
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