Macomb Community College English professor John Bonnell isn't the only teacher in Michigan's Macomb County to find himself on the bad end of a harassment complaint because a student was offended by an assigned literary work. According to the Detroit Free Press, the Michigan Department of Civil Rights is investigating a complaint filed by a high school student angered by his teacher's use of a "racial slur" while teaching Huckleberry Finn. The article studiously avoids the term in question, which has the unfortunate effect of heightening the trumped-up horror surrounding what sounds like a non-event. It's not hard to guess what the term was, however: Twain's novel, which is narrated by the boy Huck and which was written in a mid-nineteenth-century rural Missouri dialect, uses the term "nigger" to refer to black people.

The class in question was a special ed class. The teacher in question is white, the complaining student is black. He became agitated when the teacher read aloud from Twain's novel (apparently the offending word appeared in the passage she read aloud). His agitation was increased when the teacher used the word again during class discussion of the novel. The school defends the teacher, saying her use of the term was germane to the material at hand (I agree with this: I know from experience that you cannot teach Huckleberry Finn without talking about its terminology at some point--if the teacher doesn't bring it up, a student always does). But the student and his parents are not satisfied. They feel that the school district did not demonstrate adequate sympathy for their son's plight, and plan to file a lawsuit.

The position of the school district: "The reality is [the slur] is in the book," said a spokesman. "We feel very confident that in this specific case, things were put in context." The position of the parents: the school district is racist. They were appalled to find that upon bringing their complaint before the school's assistant principal, she also used the offending word: "She, too, kept saying the word," said the student's mother. "It was offensive to us. She was just throwing it around like it was no big deal." So the parents wanted to complain to a school administrator about a teacher's discussion of Twain's use of the term "nigger," but became upset when that word became part of the substance of the conversation. It's hard to imagine any other way the term could have been discussed, though I suppose the parties involved could have agreed in advance to protect one another's sensibilities by calling it the "N-word."

Perhaps in the future, Macomb County school administrators will remember to treat offended parents like children. And perhaps in the future, they will warn teachers away from literature that might somehow, someway injure impressionable young students. After all, it's much easier to avoid the issues a writer like Twain raises than to deal with students and parents who don't and won't get it. It's much easier to dismiss Twain and anyone who teaches him as racist than to recognize the moral complexity of the novel. Yes, Huck thinks of his fellow runaway Jim as a "nigger"--it's the only word he knows to describe blacks. But he also learns, during the course of their journey down the Mississippi, that Jim is human, a father-figure and a friend. The story of Huckleberry Finn is in many ways the story of Huck's realization that you can't classify people by their looks, and that that rare and precious thing--genuine friendship--tends to be found where one least expects it to be. (If you want to read a bit more about this, have a look at this black Missouri high school teacher's poignant account of teaching Huckleberry Finn. It speaks eloquently to the value of the novel--as a work of art and as a complex meditation on American race relations--and emphasizes the ethical and historical importance of confronting Twain's language head-on.)

John Bonnell's nightmare began in 1998, when an outraged parent filed a complaint against him for distributing a handout on the first day of class advising students that some of the reading for the course would include "adult content" and that his own discussion of that material would on occasion involve the use of graphic language. The parent pulled her daughter out of Bonnell's class, and the school began to pursue Bonnell as a proven harasser. At no point did the parent, the student, or the school administration approach Bonnell for clarification; instead, he was summoned to a disciplinary hearing with a letter informing him that the school believed he was a harassment lawsuit waiting to happen and advising him that the hearing could result in disciplinary action against him. His life since that time has been a long and painful series of absurd encounters with a school administration bent on casting him as a predator from whom vulnerable women students must be protected.

The recent events at Macomb County's Cousino High School help to put Bonnell's experience in context. Macomb County appears to be home to more than one set of parents who fail to grasp the fact that education is not always comfortable and does not always confirm one's ideas about what the world is and ought to be like. Those parents raise their children in an atmosphere of sheltered entitlement underwritten by a shallow identity politics: the result is children who react emotionally and intemperately to single words, who cannot hear racial or sexual slurs pronounced without automatically assuming that the person pronouncing them is a hostile oppressor who must be punished and that they are themselves abused victims who must be vindicated. There is no room in such a mentality for intelligent discussion of the power of particular words, nor of how certain words have historically gained and lost power. There is no room in such a mentality for intelligent discussion of any kind.

That said, it is noteworthy that it is the high school that is defending a teacher accused of harassing speech, and not the college. One would think that in the general scheme of meliorative school administration, a college would be more tolerant than a high school, and a high school would be more willing to mark students as children who cannot be expected to function as adults in an adult world. But--as Macomb Community College administrators have been eager to prove for several years now--there are different rules for John Bonnell.