Who knew Kitty Pryde had such a potty mouth?

Fun fact: Kitty Pryde is, to my knowledge, the only comics character to use the N-word in three separate stories in the ‘80s. Granted, she was trying to make a point about prejudice and not just calling someone a racist term, but who knew the precocious teen mutant had such a potty mouth?

The first incident was in X-Men Graphic Novel #5, “God Loves, Man Kills.” Someone called Kitty a “mutie-lover,” invoking a mutant slur. Her African-American dance teacher Stevie Hunter told her not to get too upset about it. “What if he’d called me an N-lover?” Kitty asked. “Would you be so damn tolerant then?” Poor Stevie. She was just trying to comfort Kitty and got a racial slur in her face.

The second story was X-Men #196. Kitty encountered some fellow students at Columbia University who were not fans of mutants (and were in fact trying to kill Professor Xavier). A black student asked her if she was a mutie and she said, “I don’t know. Are you an N-word?” Following this ham-handed discussion of prejudice, the guy and his friends chloroformed Kitty and she had to be rescued by Rachel Summers and Magneto. Despite the tone deafness of that part of the script, this was actually a great story about revenge and redemption.

For the third and final time, Shadowcat was speaking at a memorial for a bullied mutant who had killed himself in New Mutants #45. Kitty invoked a list of slurs and insults, including the N-word, concluding that all the words we use to describe people are just labels.

Chris Claremont wrote all these stories. The inclusion of the N-word is so jarring today that I’m wondering if it was more acceptable in the ‘80s. Why was I reading something so harsh at age 11 or 12? “God Loves, Man Kills” appeared only in specialty comic shops, so kids couldn’t just find it on a spinner rack as it had mature content. But the other two stories had the approval of the Comics Code Authority and I probably bought them at 7-Eleven. It just seems a little too mature.

In another light, it seems immature. In these stories, Kitty was probably 15 or 16 and was probably making a point that a teenager would make. The problem is that using such a charged epithet overwhelms any point she’s trying to make about prejudice.