I know! And this guy is a Twain scholar, which makes it even more strange to me. I simply can't imagine that Sam Clemens would approve of this bit of editing. He claims he's "updating" the book so that more teachers will be able to use them in classrooms, but several of the commenters in the EW article said they were teachers (some of them in the Deep South, nonetheless) and that they'd never had any problem teaching it. I mean, it's pretty much the entire point of the book -- that the reader comes to see Jim as a human being in his own right, and not the ugly word that people keep calling him.