Make It Plain with Mark Thompson

What is the connection between the Virginia governor’s race, Toni Morrison, and Mark Twain? Those are the ties made in today’s conversation with James Henry Harris, Distinguished Professor of Homiletics and Pastoral Theology and a research scholar in religion and humanities at the Samuel DeWitt Proctor School of Theology at Virginia Union University. He’s also author of the book “N: My Encounter with Racism and the Forbidden Word in An American Classic,” a memoir recounting a semester spent in a graduate course studying Mark Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn,” where the n-word is used more than 200 times, which granted a sort of permission to the white professor and students (Harris was the only Black student) to freely use the unabbreviated version of the word themselves. This experience acts as the foundation for today’s conversation, which examines the intersection of Toni Morrison’s own studies (and support) of Mark Twain and his work, and how the effort to ban her work is being used by the Republican gubernatori