I agree with that, but conclude from this premise that we shouldn't ban Romeo and Juliet. I think you'll find that almost anyone who objects to the banning of Huckleberry Finn will be equally outraged by the banning of Romeo and Juliet.

Nevertheless, I think the two cases are different, and much to my surprise I now sympathize with the arguments against Huckleberry Finn, now that I realize that banning it from schools doesn't deny that it is both great literature and Anti-Racist. Articles like yours have made me realize the impact such books can have on young black students, and I appreciate that this is an important factor regardless of the book's literary merit.

Nevertheless, I'm still concerned that banning the N-word will cut students off from great African-American writers like Langston Hughes, Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin. When I was a kid, and industrial strength racism was still somewhat respectable among white people, I had racist acquaintances who argued for Black Inferiority by saying that Black people had never written any great books. I couldn't answer this argument at the time, because our literature classes were reading Longfellow instead of the Harlem Rennaisance. There aren't any easy answers here, but I think the right direction is to teach that words used in literature are frequently not acceptable for use in conversation.