No other word in America stirs more anger, emotion or controversy than the N-word. Its impact goes without saying. An entire book, “The N word: Who can say it, who shouldn’t, and why,” was written about who has the right to use the word. Last month, one of the country’s top five radio talk show hosts ended her show after initiating outrage by flippantly repeating the N-word.Back in the late 19th Century, when Mark Twain wrote his classics “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” and “Tom Sawyer,” use of the offensive term was common. More than 120 years later, new versions of the books will be released in February that replace the N-word with “slave.”Twain’s famous tales are among the most-banned books in American classrooms because of the frequent use of the N-word. So a decision was made by NewSouth Books and editor Alan Gribben (a scholar of Twain’s writings) to censor and republish the books. Never mind the fact that these books were written by one of America’s greatest authors and reflected accurately the dialogue of the era in which the characters lived. Forget that these books are a valuable part of American heritage.

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Are we also going to PC-censor great works by William Faulkner, James Baldwin and Alex Haley? The plain truth is this kind vernacular hopefully is a part of our past, and it’s a past we would be wise never to forget.While it would be wonderful if we could simply erase offensive aspects of history with a delete key, that isn’t possible. More importantly, while scholars, editors and the PC police waste their time pondering the past, a lot of the present and the future need our attention. This reminds us of outgoing New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson debating whether to pardon Billy the Kid. What a waste of time.

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