Oh no, she asked the students to discuss?

Oh for god’s SAKE, people.

Professor who discussed James Baldwin in class allowed to keep her job:

Laurie Sheck, the poet and professor who was investigated by her university for quoting James Baldwin’s use of the N-word in a graduate class, has been cleared of charges of racial discrimination.

After assigning Baldwin’s 1962 essay The Creative Process to her class at the New School in New York, Sheck had asked the students to discuss how the 2016 documentary about the writer and civil rights activist, I Am Not Your Negro, altered Baldwin’s actual quote, in which he had used the racial slur. A graduate student, who, like Sheck, is white, had objected to her language.

TWO WORDS. THAT’S ALL, JUST TWO.

Use. Attribution. Mention.

That’s it. End of story, end of fuss, end of student’s idiotic objection.

Imagine a teacher attempting to discuss The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn with a class.

That too, by the way, is mention as opposed to use. Twain didn’t use the word in his own voice, he put it in Huck Finn’s mouth because it’s what a Huck Finn would have said at that time in that place.

PEN America, stressing that there “is a distinction to be made between a racial slur wielded against someone and a quote used for pedagogical purposes”, warned that Sheck was protected by the principle of academic freedom.

Indeed there is, and it even has a name: it’s the use/mention distinction.

I have discussed the use of the word “cunt” many times, for reasons quite radically different from the reasons of people who call women “cunts” in anger.

That complaint should never have happened. That student needs remedial classes.

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