Funeral for the "N-Word"

This last weekend, an NAACP-led gathering in Detroit held a funeral for the "n-word," intending to remove it from usage. Most major news sources have an article about the event, and the Chicago Tribune article includes a video. The funeral for the racial slur is comparable to the handling of iconic books, treating the word as a person and conducting it out of common usage with the ceremony customarily used for people, including a horse-drawn cart containing a pine box and black flowers.

What strikes me as most interesting here is the way that something as celebrated as a religious text or name and something as reviled as the n-word can both be handled with the same practices. At the level of language, the racial slur is talked around with the euphemism "the n-word" in much the same way that the divine name and the names of certain religious personages are handled with care, such as writing "G_d" or using titles instead of the proper name (i.e., "The Prophet"). The word is ushered out of usage with a funeral, a ritual more commonly associated with showing respect for the deceased than with erasure. The value of a text or a word can be either positive or negative, but in either case, it can be treated as an icon and handled through caution and ceremony.