Quote marks matter

Two things are true at the same time. One: The N-word is abhorrent, correctly considered the most odious slur in our language and culture. Two: The context of its utterance still matters, a point that seems to have been forgotten amidst a recent hubbub at Rutgers Law School. It started last October in a small-group video session after a criminal law class. One student was quoting an opinion by a former state Supreme Court justice. Others took offense; the student would later apologize.

Not satisfied, some at the law school are pressing for a new policy to presumably prohibit the use of the word no matter its application — whether used as a personal slur, an accurate representation of what someone else said or an intellectually dispassionate reference to what vocabulary is and isn’t permissible, when and why.

It was just such a conversation that got New York Times reporter Donald McNeil in trouble earlier this year, leading Times leadership to pronounce that certain words cannot be spoken “regardless of intent,” a patently ridiculous statement that had to be walked back.

Of course a word isn’t the same when used as base invective or in “Huckleberry Finn,” or in “Roots,” or in “Django Unchained,” or when Gov. Cuomo referred to a historical term once aimed at Italian-Americans, or when, on the U.S. Senate floor, lawmakers read Dr. Martin Luther King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail.

Indeed, linguist John McWhorter, who is Black, spelled out the word, in quotes, in a New York Times essay last week about how it became unsayable. A white editor defended him doing so.

Rutgers should apply the same sane standard. As Gary Francione, one law professor swimming against the tide of uproar, put it: “the idea that a faculty member or law student cannot quote a published court decision that itself quotes a racial or other otherwise objectionable word as part of the record of the case is problematic and implicates matters of academic freedom and free speech.”

Does it ever.