Wayne, while I haven't seen examples of professors getting reamed for reading Huck Finn out loud, I would agree that is silly. There is a place to identify why certain words have the connotation they do in educational settings, and reading Mark Twain or studying the Civil War or whatever are pretty valid reasons to examine the word.
Outside of the context of teaching history, I can't think of one good reason that a white person can't find another word to yell off their front porch or on the golf course or whatever. It doesn't matter, as a white person, if black artists say it or black kids say it to each other. White people, particularly American white people, don't need to be saying a word with connotations like this one. As an American white person I don't have any standing to say other cultures need to stop using it or not, but I know American history, and frankly so should every other white person in this country. It's just not that complicated. Don't say one gd word. (This also applies to words with the LGBT community or to handicapped folks. Those don't have racial elements, and there's some usage of slur words within those communities as a way to reclaim them. I don't 100% get that, but I'm not part of those communities so it's whatever to me.)
It's not cancel culture for a person to reap the extremely predictable consequences of their actions. Morgan Wallen, or the vast majority of other white dudes who have had to publicly apologize for dropping a bomb on video, weren't using it as an educational term. It was a pejorative or a slur. Period.
