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The Continued Censorship of Huckleberry Finn
eldavojohn writes "Over a hundred years after the death of its author, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn will be released in a censored format, removing two derogatory racial slurs: 'injun' and 'nigger.' The latter appears some 219 times in the original novel but both will be replaced by the word 'slave.' An Alabama publisher named NewSouth Books will be editing and censoring the book so that schools and parents might provide their children the ability to study the classic without fear of properly addressing the torturous history of racism and slavery in The United States of America. The Forbes Blog speculates that e-readers could provide us this service automatically. Salon admirably provides point versus counterpoint while the internet at large is in an uproar over this seemingly large acceptance of censorship as necessary even on books a hundred years old. The legendary Samuel Langhorne Clemens himself once wrote, 'the difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter,' and now his own writing shall test the truth in that today."
I want to live in a world where *everything* that makes me uncomfortable or might cause pain or conflict is excised from history. After all, if it never happened, no one can be pissed off about it--and we can all get along fine. No more racial resentment, no more ethnic conflicts, no more religious wars. We get along, we always got along, end of story. Israel and Palestine always co-existed in peace beside each other. Europeans, Africans, and Asians discovered the New world together and have lived here peacefully together ever since. Every religion is the religion of peace and always has been. "Genocide" is just an abstract concept used by fiction writers, not something that has ever happened in the real world.
Laugh if you want, but wouldn't that make for a much better world? Why focus on the pain and resentment when we can reinvent ourselves as something much better?
Sure it all involves a good dose of self-delusion, but a lot of people have improved their lives greatly with a little self-delusion. After all, no one starts down their path to self-improvement by admitting to themselves that they are an unexceptional, not particularly good or worthwhile person. They start by telling themselves "I am a good person, I can do better" even if they know deep-down that they're lying to themselves. And, quite often, the lie actually BECOMES the reality. Convincing yourself that you're a better person can actually MAKE you better. Why not apply the same principle to society as a whole?
I'm not being a troll here, I'm asking a serious question. Wouldn't we be better off for it?
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Does this mean that all rap music must also be purged of those words? Or only rap music presented in school music classes? At what level? Elementary, secondary, college?
I'd rather be called a Nigger than a Slave.
do you know he's currently on the ny times best seller list?
http://www.nytimes.com/best-sellers-books/overview.html
how'd he do that? he wrote a book, said "wait 100 years before publishing", and they did, and here he is, selling a new book, in 2011
quite an impressive man
and did you know about twain and halley's comet?
http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_is_the_connection_between_Mark_twain_and_Halley's_comet
mark twain: space alien who travels via halley's comet
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Don't laugh too hard ... I've actually heard of some organizations in which someone goes on a program to try to make everybody stop referring to "master server/slave server". Trying to make someone understand that this is an industry term and they need to stop being overly sensitive can be an awfully tricky thing. (I once saw someone actually object to the use of the term "black" when it was ... get this ... descriptive of the color of an inanimate object on the grounds that it could be offensive.)
Some people seem to go out of their way to be sure that it's not possible to give offense. I find it especially sad that what is a really good depiction of what life was really like at that time is being "cleansed" so that we can all pretend that there wasn't racial tension in the South at that time.
I don't support people going around using the N word all over the place -- but this is a piece of literature, and should be allowed to stand. What next, altering Merchant of Venice so that Shylock wasn't Jewish? (I'm not supporting the anti-Semitic stereotypes, merely that the play is 400+ years old, and it's a little late for political correctness.)
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
There really is no reason to bother teaching that book at all. IMO many books are simply re-inflicted on succeeding generations of students because they were inflicted on previous generations. I enjoyed it, but my now-ancient generation has nothing in common with its successors. It didn't do me any good in terms of obtaining future employment, nor did reading any fiction. 1800s history itself is becoming more and more distant every year, hence less useful to anyone but specialists.
(Recent) history and science are much better uses of precious educational time and scarce resources. We need to fit workers to compete in the world economy. Literature and the arts should be left to those who are enthusiasts and enjoy them as hobbies. There is no time for hobbies without a JOB.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
That they won the Civil War. We keep messing with History to make it more palatable.
If you go to Georgia and take a "tour" of some of the fancy houses set up as museums now, you'd be astounded by how much "history" they get wrong. I mean it'll floor you, you really want to speak up and tell the curator he doesn't know what the fuck he's talking about, but then you tell yourself "don't make a scene. don't embarrass your GF."
I'm constantly reminding people of even common misconceptions, like "Edison invented the lightbulb" (He did not).
It's actually very worrysome about how little we Americans know about our own history or what actually took place, because people only know about the falsehoods portrayed in movies or on TV. Things that have been altered for dramatic presentation or to make it dumbed-down enough for the general population to understand.
And to those of you who were *FOR* Amazon "censoring" homosexual books or books involving incest or rape by removing those titles from their ebooks, well, do you see where this slippery slope is heading, or are you still happy to bury your head in the sand?
Continue to allow this and doubleplus ungood newspeak is just around the corner.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
Where I work, there are two black people adjacent to my cubicle. Both agree that this is bad. Their take is "this happened and this is how things were, what can be accomplished by denying it?"
I heartily agree. This is just as bad as going back to old movies and editing out the cigarettes or replacing the guns with walkee-talkees in E.T.
I honestly don't see what the uproar is about. There are many, many editions of Huck Finn out there with the author's original choice of words faithfully reproduced. IMO, the new edition is an attempt to convey the author's intent rather than being fixated on verbatim wording.
Mark Twain was white. His intended audience was white. There weren't a whole lot of educated non-whites in America in 1884. Yes, Mr. Twain was hoping to help move the country toward racial equality, but he was aiming his message at white people. For his target audience, the words nigger and injun were commonplace. They weren't personally hurtful. In today's language, he could just as easily have used the phrase "non-white person" and conveyed nearly the same meaning.
IMO, creating an edition of Twain's work with less emotionally-charged wording is helpful, not harmful. The abundance of literal editions isn't going to evaporate, and the new one will be far easier for schools to use for teaching without having to get embroiled in lawsuits or other forms of parental outrage.
Did they even understand huckle berry fin? it's signigance? that fact that it's one of the first work to recognize a 'nigger' as an individual and not property? that fact that it was common parlance that became impolite latter?
History doesn't need a white washing.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
You know, it's funny, I've heard a lot of folk in this country scrambling about and talking about being exposed to more culture. They want to travel to experience culture. They want to go to art studios to experience culture. They want to speak different languages to learn about more culture. That's a grand and noteworthy goal. However, many of those same people seem to make comments about how shallow and vapid American culture is. As a natural born American, I am damn ashamed to hear that about my country and my culture. We may be a young country, relatively speaking, but we have an incredibly rich culture that is more diverse than most places I've been.
Our culture involves everything from the Puritans fleeing England up through electing a black president while seeking hope and change. Our country was the first to try the grand social experiment of a democratic republic, based loosely on ideals from the ancient city-state architecture of Greece. Our people developed an entire branch of music known as Jazz. Our people blended with, reproduced with, lived with, and learned from the Native American population that we found here. From them, we learned to place a vast amount of importance on the individual and independence. We learned an appreciation for nature, and the resources it provides (who, before us, had a national forest preservation system?). Our culture includes the blending of numerous ethnic communities into a veritable melting pot of ideas and values. We have Latin folk. We have Gaelic folk. We have Greco-Roman folk. We have Asian folk. We have African folk. We have Slavic folk. We have Native American folk. We have Arab and Persian folk. We have a land made up of a culture that combined the values and ideals of the greatest enemies and contestants from history. American culture was enriched by French folk living next to English folk, by Japanese folk living next to Chinese folk, by Grecian and Italian folk living next to Persian and Arab folk, by African folk learning to live alongside the descendants of their former slave-masters. And you know what? We were and still are stronger for that!
We have had dark times in our short history, and we will continue to have dark times as time marches on. We had eras dominated by racism. We had eras dominated by sexism. Currently we are trying to end an era dominated by sexual preference intolerance. We have had wars. We have had depressions. We have had Civil Wars where brothers killed brothers and fathers fought their sons. Yeah, we've had some dark times. We ran the Native American population into the ground. But you know what? We learned from those times. We were hardened by those times. We took away great lessons from those times and grew out of them. And we are still growing. Those dark spots in our history are just as important as the American golden ages. Hell, I'd go so far to say that they are even more important, as they forced us to look in the mirror and learn from the ugly visages that gazed back at us. They forced us to change, for the better.
So now we are supposed to destroy our culture in the name of political correctness? We are supposed to whitewash our history so that we don't hurt anyone's feelings? You know what I think about NewSouth Book's attempt to destroy our culture? I say fuck them! And I can say that word proudly as an American because it is part of our culture, part of our ugly, dirt ridden, blood stained, beautiful, evolving, realistic, free, and loving culture. If I recall correctly, Huck Finn was friends with Nigger Jim. That's a damn important lesson, and the full name is damn important. It showed that a straw-chewing little white boy could be friends with someone that was different to a socially unacceptable level back then. That's a lesson in friendship. That's a lesson in love. And having Nigger Jim be that character's name underscores that lesson every time the name is mentioned. That is something we should preserve, not destroy. That is our culture: a culture of brother- and sisterhood derived from ha
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That's because a lot of folks can't stomach the idea that their country was founded on the very intentional and institutionalized genocide of one group of people and the enslavement of another.
What country wasn't founded on institutionalized genocide? Almost every 'civilized' country in history had a dominant culture that killed off or otherwise suppressed a whole bunch of others, and even those that didn't (as much) only didn't due to accident of geography (say, the Japanese, not that it made them any less prone to doing the same thing to others). Heck, the Romans were much better at it than we are. I'd sooner bet on Roman Centurions vs. The Taliban than I would on the USA vs. The Taliban.
I'm not saying that your point about people not wanting to think poorly of themselves or their country is wrong, because it's quite clearly right. But I don't think that the US is any more prone to it than any other country. It's a human condition, not exclusively or even particularly American.
You know what? You spooked me there for about 20 seconds and I was about to go on a rampage until I realized the reference to NewSouth Books...
Then I scared the hell out of myself when I was that ready to accept that this was already happening.
Such a sad state is this world.
This signature is lame.
Outstanding excerpt from Russell Baker!
The problem is, these people aren't REALLY morons... they're just to afraid of the truth to accept the lessons in the book, the message it's sending is lost in the cacophony created by the war drums of political correctness.
Censorship is the poison of culture and of minds because it is the ultimate in controlling what we see and hear and say all in the fruitless quest to not offend ANYBODY. To make all that anyone CAN be exposed to as generic and boring as possible, to strip the color from existence in order to make it "safe".
It's an impossible task and simply drains away the richness of life, history, society and culture every time it's applied.
People demand censorship because something offends them... Well, I decry censorship because it, and those who call for it, offends ME.
This signature is lame.
When a child picks up the text of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and reads the word "nigger" I want them to take offense. Not to take offense at Mark Twain but more so to take offense to and own up to this great country's tortured past and to vow that this will never happen again. This use of a word as a marker of hate and denigration simply because of the color of a person's skin -- and the widespread cultural acceptance of it! If your child never learns the horrible results of that scenario than your child may one day find themselves as a part of that scenario.
But that was not the intent of the author. That word in that book was never meant to incite offence to the degree that it does today. The word is so offensive today that it detracts from the story the book was intended to tell.
If the intent of the word was to offend, or it was an integral part of the story and the meaning of that word was also integral, then I would defend having it stay. But meanings change and *in this case* there is no valid reason to have that word a part of the story. It adds nothing and only detracts from the real message. I see nothing wrong with removing it, and no I don't see that as censorship.
Tesla was a genius. Edison however was a overrated hack who liked to torture puppies.
In this enlightened age, there are few I believe, but what will acknowledge, that slavery as an institution, is a moral & political evil in any Country....Is it not strange that the descendants of those pilgrim fathers who Crossed the Atlantic to preserve their own freedom of opinion, have always proved themselves intolerant of the Spiritual liberty of others?
Of course a large portion of the missing quote is his attempt at a logically consistent defense of slavery, but starting shortly after the war, more and more people framed it in those terms.
Personally I think it is good that people don't focus on the slavery aspect. Can you imagine if every time someone flew a confederate flag, it meant they wanted slavery back? Instead it is often is a sign of anger at the federal government.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
The GP poster is right. It's one thing to not use the word nigger to refer to a person, and quite another when used in a discussion where it's relevant. It's difficult to have a meaningful discussion of race when people are censoring things out. Nobody in those sorts of discussions is genuinely completely without fault, those that censor themselves just hamper the possibility of making progress.
Growing up a white kid in the south, there are a lot of horrible, horrible questions you ended up asking yourself. The adolescent mind wonders why so much evil comes from white people, why did they enjoyed torturing and murdering innocents and why they would segregate and continue to subjugate others. When it is so close to home it is hard to look at (I can't imagine what it is like for German school children) and you immediately want to associate it with yourself, well, because that is how you see the world as a kid.
The history texts in school did a horrible job of it. It was written by someone who took either a cultural conservative or cultural liberal perspective on it and either spun it as white people are bad or it was about states rights, but either way they had to write only a few paragraphs about it and then jumped on the battles and the Proclamation and then Appomattox and a single paragraph for Reconstruction and so on. Such a truly bad way to teach history.
After college I started reading about it (mostly Reconstruction) on the local level and there I got a very different picture of what happened.
No one mentioned that land not farmed by former slaves holder was re-appropriated in my state. No one mentioned that those who fought for the Confederacy in the war were barred from public office via the test oath. No one mentioned that the local paper lamented the poor treatment of freed slaves and that the only re-appropriated land in my county that was turned over to freedmen was the absolute worse soil in the region; the rest was sold for profit to re-establish a cash strapped government. No one brought up the fact that anyone with any idea of moderation and sanity at that time was quickly shut up and cast out of the new power structures. No one brought up the rallies and gathering of both whites and blacks to try to come to some kind of peaceful resolution to their problems or that Democrats and Republicans shot each other in the street for political office. No one mentioned the "midnight parades" where one party would threaten to burn the town to the ground while carrying clubs and guns if they didn't get what they wanted and the next week the opposing party would do the same.
Suddenly the story wasn't 'white people are evil', but that these people were just as alive, conflicted and capable of making huge, horrible mistakes are we are today. It was a story of good people trying and rotten assholes succeeding on any line you could draw up.
Do what you want i guess but, it bothers me that someone would change a story to fit their own sensibilities, and then try to pass it off as something that its not. What its not, is Huckleberry Fin by Mark Twain. Whats even worst, is that someone would give this to a child, and tell them "here is huckelberry fin, by mark twain". Its not true...its your redacted version of Huckleberry Fin BASED ON the writings of Mark Twain.
Its not censorship... its fraud.
You want to update stuff? Fine. Hell update stuff, just don't try to tell me that Shakespear's Juliet said "Romeo, why are you a montegue. Disown your family and change your name, or tell me you love me and I will"
and Romeo certainly didn't say "Juiliet is is as beautiful as the sun"
Call it your updated version fine, but, don't blame Shakespear for shit.
-Steve
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
I think you entirely missed the point of Twain's use of the word. He used it on two levels:
1. To accurately portray the Mississippi antebellum dialect of his childhood.
2. To invoke strong feelings and to contrast the use of the epithet with the actual character of Jim; to demonstrate that this derogatory word did not in fact do the man any justice.
Maybe you could make a case for using modern idiom as per point 1, but this translation, from what I understand, does nothing to modernize any other part of the speech of the characters in the book (as compared to, say, modern versions of the King James Bible, which dispense with the Elizabethan archaisms).
As to point 2, that's where excising the word "nigger" from the book becomes completely unsupportable. The key central theme of the book, the idea that Jim was not an inferior, that Jim could not be simply passed off as a "nigger", that he was a wise, intelligent, feeling human being, that the man was better than the epithet, and pretty much better than anyone else who appeared in the story, is completely compromised. I'm going to quote a big passage from Chapter 31 to show you just how key the use of the word was, and how it is part of Huck's coming to terms with his friendship of Jim. It was one of the greatest passages Twain ever wrote, and hence one of the greatest passages in English literature:
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.