I noticed that she said "I never USED the N-word in my life." Philosophers of language talk a lot about the distinction between use and mention. The sentence " the rose is a flower" uses the word "rose". But the sentence "'rose' has four letters" only mentions the word "rose". When we mention a word we usually put it in caps, So if this lady had written that sentence, she probably would written it as " I never used 'the N-word' in my life."

This is an important difference in some philosophy papers, but not in this context, and I think this lady thought it was. I use to think this difference was important, but I now see that people exposed to racism are going to be hurt by the sound itself, because of it's history. I've also seen that this kind of quoting can be a way of covertly expressing your own unacceptable opinions by saying them as "people say that". (although I don't think that's what she was doing here.)

I wonder, though, how we are going to be able to teach the great African-American writers if we don't preserve this distinction. Many of them of them use the N-word, and recently one of my colleagues got into trouble by reading aloud one of these passages in a literature class. It's not my place to judge what would be a solution for this problem. But I think it is a problem that needs to be solved if we are going to honor and preserve the work of these great writers.