N? WORD!

I am currently sitting in my classroom with headphones on as a 30 year veteran teacher teachers her English class in my room. The book the class is working on is "Roll of Thunder Hear My Cry."

Maybe I am some sort of crazy bleeding-heart liberal, but one thing that bothers me more than almost anything else within the realm of speech, is when a white person uses the N word. Even in reading this book aloud, everything just seems all wrong. I try to hold that idea that this teacher truly cares and that she really is excited about teaching this novel... but nothing seems to excite her more than using this word. I am being completely honest when I say that I don't even feel comfortable TYPING that word, never mind saying it aloud in front of students. The discomfort and awkwardness in the classroom set over the classroom like a dense fog, and from my perspective, this reality is clear as day, yet this teacher continues to belt out the N word like it was the punchline to a 5 minute joke. If I were teaching this unit, I would have used a substitute word when that word came up, after having a conversation about the word with me class. I vaguely remember this happening when I was in (my all white) middle school a bit over a decade ago.

Is it unnatural? Is it completely out of line for me to feel this way? I have a knot in my stomach right now, but I guess I'll never really understand what goes on in the head of anyone other than myself, never mind someone who more than twice my age and grew up in a different world from me.

How do the students feel hearing a white teacher use this word? Maybe they are less affected than me by it - and if that is the case maybe my feelings are not justified - or perhaps my students are just too young to understand. I remember a time two years ago when I interviewed a mixed-race (Black & Puerto Rican) student about race. One of the interview questions was about the N word. The student's response was a bit different from what I expected. He said that the word depended all on the context and the relationship. If a white person used it in the right tone and they were a friend, than that was okay to him. I remember I had two white students who used the word frequently in that same year and it always was so shocking to me but it never really had any impact on his Black classmates.

Sometimes I feel like I live on a different planet from my colleagues.