To the Editor:
Yesterday's article about the racial slurs in The Jack-O-Lantern really shocked me. ["Humor magazine under scrutiny," Nov. 3, The Dartmouth] It made me realize what an uptight, overly politically correct world we now live in. No one seems to care that the magazine was using these words specifically to bash people that use them derogatorily. The magazine clearly did not believe the sentences they wrote. That is the entire purpose of the letter. Somehow, people are so ready to jump the gun and assume that if these words are used, the person saying them must be racist. That is entirely wrong.
The people that should love this article the most, the very people that the Review puts down, are the people that are now in the process of trying to ruin a great magazine. The same thing happened with Huckleberry Finn. Yes, Mark Twain did use the N-word (I won't write it out, because I am sure I will offend someone.) He did this because he was satirizing racist attitudes, not because he was racist in anyway. People need to lighten up and read the sentences and not the context. If every word that was ever offensive to somebody in one context was never allowed to be spoken again, we would have nothing left to say.
