Recently, the album presentation in class was To Pimp a Butterfly by Kendrick Lamar. It is a big record, a substantial record to a lot of young people I meet in the courses I teach. He won a grammy in 2016 or 2017 for it but it’s also filled with wall to wall N word and as the presentation was approaching I found myself worrying about how to be the teacher in the room, the white teacher in the room, the white male teacher on the room, the white old man teacher in the room. But I also knew how to not do it. When I worked in group homes the only staff members that made me less comfortable were the one or two who spent their shifts blending in to the furniture and avoiding the necessary confrontations that came with the job. I made an announcement about the use of the N word in this record, in hip hop, the many dimensions of understanding words used to hate people or hurt people and how people repurpose or reclaim words like this. How that doesn’t mean the problem is solved either. Plus, half the classes are made up of people from other countries for whom English is not their language, and I addressed how it must be very peculiar for them to make sense out of a society that instructs you to feel ok to use a word sometimes deemed vulgar, sometimes not, based on your skin colour. So many heads nodding. I was pleased. Felt like I tested a fire extinguisher before starting the cookout. Then, just before the presentation started, one student, a man whose parents moved to Canada from Nigeria, raised his hand and asked me what I think of the word personally, a smirk not hidden on his face. I reiterated more of the same things and added I do not like it being used personally. It is always very weird to me, I think it creates even more problems or to put it another way even less solutions but I also understand all these different dimensions and histories. I shrugged. The class was ok and the presentation proceeded. Only later on the subway did I realize what I really wanted to say was that the idea of saying N word is also what really bugs me. The premise that we are avoiding saying something offensive but inserting substitution language actually makes one have to think about the thing we are supposedly avoiding. Like being told to not think of a pink elephant makes you think of a pink elephant. It is also super interesting to me, to hear Lenny Bruce talk about these things sixty years earlier and so I sent the class a link to the Bob Fosse film. Show them the history of this type of thinking might be longer than they knew and in some ways comedy has a better angle with which to build wisdom.