"Nigger," and other word etymologies

Reading this Hitchens article reminded me of another personal experience. So you can either skip to the article (which I thought Hitchens could have made much longer), or suffer my little story. Here's the interview with Chris Matthews that Hitchens referenced in this slate.com article.:

Back in 1998, while sitting in a Community College English Composition class (just after highschool, but prior to university), the English Professor assigned us with finding what we thought the most important passage of a particular reading assignment was. Like Hitchens outlines with his Mark Twain story, the story we were assigned dealt with an author writing about the South. The word "nigger" was used by one of the characters in the story, a white American (most-likely of French descent) who used it in every way racist.

Anyhow, I recited the sentence long passage in class, and the English Professor stopped me. She stopped the entire class. In a tone that you'd hear your mother use when you were 6, she said, "What did you say?" I repeated the passage. She then said, "We don't use that word in class, ever." I tried to be as respectful as I could, so I didn't respond with what was ready — "Well you fuckin' assigned this!" Instead, I said, "This word is powerful, and it evokes, and it was used a lot back in the South of then and today. In choosing this passage, I thought it brought out the racist flavor of the historical South..." She somewhat backed down, but again told the class to never say the word again.