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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.