In the annals of journalistic coyness, the Washington Post is legendary. Because it is a “family newspaper,” it’s long refused to print sensitive words no matter how crucial they are to understanding the story they ought to appear in.

For instance, today’s article by Ian Shapira on legal wunderkind Kiwi Camara refused to describe “racist remarks” that led to his rejection for a teaching post at George Mason University’s law school. There’s little indication of what these remarks were or what their context was. If you read to the end of the article, the president of GMU’s Black Law Students Association finally refers to “the n-word” in the penultimate paragraph but there’s no indication whether Camara had used it as a epithet against a particular person or had quoted from a secondary source or what—-things you’d kind of like to know if you’re going to decide whether it’s fair that Camara is still being punished for something he wrote as a teenager.

So, in order to make clear what exactly this article was about, City Desk excerpts a contemporary account from the Record, Harvard Law’s student newspaper:

One of those outlines as well as a third outline used the abbreviation, “nig.” The issue in the famous Shelly v. Kraemer, for example, was framed, “Nigs buy land w/ no nig covenant; Q: Enforceable?”

So, yeah, that was pretty bad. Post readers, consider yourself fully informed.