You've probably heard about a publisher's decision to censor Mark Twain's novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. In short, the word 'nigger' will be replaced with 'slave,' and the word 'Injun' will be replaced with 'Indian.' I actually revised myself there...I originally wrote 'edit' rather than 'censor,' and I think my revision is appropriate. This isn't a matter of editing something for offensive content; this is censoring a classic American novel because of a word that is now highly offensive.
I read an interesting piece on Politics Daily by Delia Lloyd concerning the Huck Finn controversy, and it served to gel my own thoughts concerning this. I already had an opinion, and it seems that most of my literary-minded friends share it: this is unwarranted and unwelcome censorship of a novel written only a couple of decades after slavery ended in our country. This is not just a classic American novel. It is a historic American novel because of its context. I did understand several of Ms. Lloyd's points, and left a comment there, but I want to address some of those issues here.
She mentioned that she and her husband bought an edited version of an Eminem CD for their 10-year-old son because of language.
There is, to be sure, a big difference between contemporary rap music and a classic of American literature. Or at least so my son thought when I posed this question to him. His view is that rap is an inherently angry genre and, as such, swearing is central to its aesthetic (word choice mine, idea entirely his). But he says that he can still enjoy a rap CD even when it's "sanitized"--it is, after all, still entertaining.
In contrast, he thinks that "Huckleberry Finn" is a book about social relationships. And so to remove the language in which those relationships are couched is both historically inaccurate and distorts the meaning of the text.
That is one smart kid, who seems to get what his parents don't. There is a big difference between a music CD and a classic American novel. If you take out the bad words in music, you're still left with some great music. (I'm never a fan of censoring music, but there is stuff that is probably age-inappropriate--that is up to the parents to control. Good luck with that. haha) If you censor Twain's writings, you are censoring and attempting to sanitize a piece of our history. A shameful history, but one that cannot and should not be forgotten. Lloyd wrote:
I remember a few years back, when one of the teachers at my daughter's school tried to get a group of 8-year-olds to understand racism by having all the white kids in the class yell all the racial slurs they could possibly come up with at all the children of color. Her objective was to get the students to see the idiocy and toxicity of racism. But the experiment backfired. The children were frightened, confused and horrified. And even here, in the less-than-PC U.K., the teacher nearly lost her job. It's not clear that you can do Twain--or racism--justice in the hour you get as a teacher to talk about this book.
Good grief, how is that acceptable? How is hurling epithets a teaching exercise in any way, shape, or form? And why was it the white kids throwing the epithets at the kids of color? If that was an experiment to teach the students about the idiocy of racism, I think it failed miserably and only highlighted the idiocy of the teacher. Why would this book be a matter of an hour of discussion? When we read books in my school, we spent at least a few weeks going through them and discussing them. Lord of the Flies, A Separate Peace, Of Mice and Men, Hamlet, Macbeth, and so many others. These were not works that could be discussed in an hour. Why is Huck Finn confined to an hour? It has many more implications and much more significance than warranting only an hour of discussion on it.
Last year, my colleague Mary C. Curtis wrote about talk show host Dr. Laura Schlessinger's use of the N-word, which she uttered so liberally during one particular on-air rant that the subsequent outcry prompted her to say she would retire. As Mary points out, "This is the word that people with ropes used as they lynched men and women for an afternoon's entertainment. This is the word craven politicians shouted to stoke racial fear. This word has been used as background music to terror."
Most certainly...but equating Twain's book, a contemporary account of the treatment of slaves and Huck's dangerous friendship with Jim, to Schlessinger's radio rant and inflammatory use of the word 'nigger' in order to boost her ratings is a ridiculous comparison.
In short, the N-word isn't just a piece of regional jargon that marks a particular moment in our nation's history. It's a hateful word. It's poisonous. And it's pervasive. Does all this mean that in the future, children should only consume the kindler, gentler Huck Finn 2.0 that Gribben [the person who is revising the novel] and Co. are peddling? I'm not sure. But this issue certainly isn't as black and white, so to speak, as some critics are making it out to be.
If our students can't comprehend the full meaning of the book and its place in our history after a reasonable and rational discussion (one that lasts more than an hour), what does that say about us as an intelligent society?
Am I raising the bar too high?
