Political Language
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Artistic choices in Big River Mark Twain wrote The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in 1885 and set the story some 40 to 45 years prior. The heinous practice of slavery was part of America at that time as was an egregious degree of racial prejudice. The word most often associated with the legacy of slavery and accompanying racism is the highly controversial word "nigger." Twain used the word in his book to accurately reflect the time, place, and people about which he was writing. When the book was adapted for the stage and turned into a musical in the 1980s, the creators and producers chose to remain faithful to Twain's work and used the word in the play's dialogue. When Big River was selected to be our holiday, family presentation this season, Artistic Director Robert Moss elected to change the word to "slave" because of the number of small children and families expected to attend. The use of Twain's original language, however truthful to the time, requires a degree of discussion and context not entirely provided by the production alone. As Syracuse Stage's production of Big River is intended primarily as a family entertainment, Mr. Moss feels the audience will be better served by using less potentially offensive and incendiary language. What do you and your students think? Some have argued that the word "nigger" is offensive no matter the context, even if the writer is African American, as for example playwright August Wilson. For that same reason, some have urged that Huckleberry Finn be banned from schools and libraries. What do you and your students think?
Here’s what two professors at Ferris State University have written about the use of the word. The original essay is seven pages long. Here is an edited version: The etymology of nigger is often traced to the Latin niger, meaning black. The Latin niger became the noun negro (black person) in English, and simply the color black in Spanish and Portuguese. In early modern French niger became negre and, later, negress (black woman) was clearly a part of lexical history. ... It is likely that nigger is a phonetic spelling of the white Southern mispronunciation of Negro. Whatever its origins, by the early 1800s it was firmly established as a denigrative epithet. Almost two centuries later, it remains a chief symbol of white racism. Social scientists refer to words like nigger, kike, spic, and wetback as ethnophaulisms. Such terms are the language of prejudice — verbal pictures of negative stereotypes. Howard J. Ehrlich, a social scientist, argued that ethnophaulisms are of three types: disparaging nickname; explicit group devaluations ("Jew him down," or "niggering the land"); and irrelevant ethnic names used as a mild disparagement ("Irish confetti" for bricks
thrown in a fight). All racial and ethnic groups have been victimized by racial slurs; however, no American group has suffered as many racial epithets as have blacks: coon, tom, savage, picanniny, mammy, buck, sambo, jigaboo, and buckwheat are typical. Many of these slurs became fully developed pseudo-scientific, literary, cinematic, and everyday caricatures of African Americans. These caricatures, whether spoken, written, or reproduced in material objects, reflect the extent, the vast network, of anti-black prejudice. The word nigger carries with it much of the hatred and repulsion directed toward Africans and African Americans. Historically, nigger defined, limited, and mocked African Americans. It was a term of exclusion, a verbal justification for discrimination. ... No other American ethnophaulism carried so much purposeful venom. Americans created a racial hierarchy with whites at the top and blacks at the bottom. ... Every major societal institution offered legitimacy to the racial hierarchy. Ministers preached that God had condemned blacks to continued
Syracuse Stage Big River Study Guide education office: 443-1150 or syracusestage.org/education.html
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