D.

Good points. I happened to be driving and heard the first part of that phone call on Dr. Laura’s program. I actually turned it off a couple minutes into it because I thought Dr. Laura was being horribly insensitive and offensive and I couldn’t bear to listen anymore.

My problem was NOT with her using the N-word, but with her refusal to validate and acknowledge the caller’s very real hurt feelings about her white husband tolerating racially offensive talk in their home. She was in an interracial marriage, which was hard enough, but she didn’t want to have to deal with racially offensive comments in her own home – which was happening when certain of their friends would visit.

I’ve listened to Dr. Laura on and off for 15 years, and have bought many of her books. But I’ve watched her become less compassionate, less kind, and more surly and intolerant. She hurts people’s feelings more and more – far more than she used to ten years ago. I think that call was the straw that broke the camel’s back, showing people that her days as a radio advice-giver should probably be over. She was intolerably cruel to that caller, refusing to acknowledge for even one second that the caller might actually be hurting. I was hurting inside for that poor woman, who called for help and instead got stomped on.

It was definitely the breaking point for me. I doubt I’ll ever listen to Dr. Laura again or buy another of her books. That’s just my opinion, but there’s something to be said for grace and kindness, and Dr. Laura seems to have lost hers.

However, I do regret the fact that I had to remove the three instances in which a character used the n-word in my first novel. Life contains highly-offensive, nasty persons who say things like that, especially slave owners in the nineteenth century. If we can’t show life in its real brutality, it’s harder to show real healing and redemption.

I don’t agree with the argument that it’s not necessary to use the word in order to show the behavior. Part of the ugliness of the behavior *is* the word.

But I accept the fact that the marketplace controls some of our decisions, and apparently, customers return books and complain if they contain the n-word, no matter how high the purpose of the book. Just look at the reaction to Huck Finn. If even Twain can’t get away with portraying characters who use it, who am I to think I can?

Byron Hill
Executive Director, LifeWay Conference Centers and Camps