This TED Talk features history professor Elizabeth Storder Pryor, recorded live at TEDx East Hampton Women, 2019.

The minute she set it, the temperature in my classroom dropped.

My students are usually laser focused on me, but they shifted in their seats and looked away.

I'm a black woman who teaches the histories of race and U.S. slavery.

I'm aware that my social identity is always on display.

And my students are vulnerable too, so I'm careful.

I try to anticipate what part of my lesson might go wrong. But honestly, I didn't even see this

one coming. None of my years of graduate school prepared me for what to do when the N-word

entered my classroom. I was in my first year of teaching when the students said the N-word entered my classroom. I was in my first year of

teaching when the students said the N-word in my class. She was not calling anyone a name. She was

bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. She came to class with her readings done. She sat in the front row,

and she was always on my team.

When she said it, she was actually making a point about my lecture by quoting a line from a

1970s movie, comedy, that had two racist slurs, one for people of Chinese descent and the

other the N-word. As soon as she said it,

I held up my hand and said, whoa, whoa, whoa. But she assured me, it's a joke from blazing

saddles, and then she repeated it. This all happened 10 years ago, and how I handled it haunted me for a long time.

It wasn't the first time I thought about the word in an academic setting.

I'm a professor of U.S. history.

It's in a lot of the documents that I teach.

So I had to make a choice.

After consulting with someone I trusted, I decided to never say it,

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