The N-word at the time of Huck Finn

[Wilson Gray]

Jon writes:

Easton's assumption about "Negro" seems be that it somehow "stands for" the
n-word. I am not at all sure that his objection to "Negro" itself was widely
shared in the 19th C.


You should call that a WAG, Jon, unless you're referencing only 19th
c. whites. And, given that you note that Easton was a "colored man,"
that isn't the case. What the colored do or don't object to is known
only trivially, even in the 21st c., if for no other reason than that
legal desegregation is not the same as social integration.

Consider the fairly-recent to-do over the "shocking discovery" in
California that black Americans are, for all practical purposes, as
phobic against "do-funnies" as white Americans, when there was
absolutely no reason for anyone who actually knew any black people to
have thought otherwise, especially in California, "where they have to
fence in the fruits to keep *them* from eating the *people*!", to
quote a "jone" that I first heard in 1957 and is, no doubt, much older
than that.

-Wilson
–––
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die"---a strange complaint to
come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
-----
-Mark Twain



On Thu, Mar 12, 2009 at 9:56 PM, Jonathan Lighter
<wuxxmupp2000 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Easton's assumption about "Negro" seems be that it somehow "stands for" the
> n-word. I am not at all sure that his objection to "Negro" itself was widely
> shared in the 19th C.
>

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