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."

Comments

I have a much more ambitious vision

[elrous0]

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?

Re:I have a much more ambitious vision

[bchickens]

LOL. This censorship thing is getting way out of hand.

Re:I have a much more ambitious vision

[eldavojohn]

I'm not being a troll here, I'm asking a serious question. Wouldn't we be better off for it?

And also doomed to repeat it all?

Re:I have a much more ambitious vision

[nospam007]

"Laugh if you want, but wouldn't that make for a much better world?"

Yes, it only needs an old man in the sky to make the delusion perfect.

Re:I have a much more ambitious vision

[TheL0ser]

Your lack of discomfort makes me uncomfortable.

Re:I have a much more ambitious vision

[Jaysyn]

Sounds a bit like Huxley's Brave New World minus the genetic tampering.

Re:I have a much more ambitious vision

[magsol]

I wholeheartedly disagree. I think such mistakes are opportunities for self-improvement, without which we might never make spontaneous advancements, be they anthropological, scientific, philosophical, or otherwise. Pain and suffering are intrinsic to our existence here, so while eliminating them entirely might seem on one hand like a nice pie-in-the-sky goal, I believe it completely misses the point. To try and ignore something that is perpetually interwoven into the fabric of our existence is to discount a huge opportunity for growth, and I think that would be doing a great disservice to the human race.

It's this discomfort and pain that strips away all the bureaucratic bullshit, all the superficial nonsense, and forces people to be who they really are. Whether they sink or swim is entirely up to them, and I think it's necessary for everyone to experience, if only from a perspective of self-discovery (but also for everyone else's benefit). I realize this is all sort of hand-wavy philosophical, but I think it's born out in concrete fashion every day.

Re:I have a much more ambitious vision

[elrous0]

And also doomed to repeat it all?

Well, that's the classic argument. But I would contend the opposite. Our knowledge of our nasty history hasn't stopped us from repeating ourselves again and again, after all. Perhaps we would be better served by making the very *concept* of genocide or war simply inconceivable. I think we would be a lot better off with "But we've never done this, we've always been better than that!" than with "We'll, here we go yet again."

Re:I have a much more ambitious vision

[somersault]

No, self delusion is what brings us religion.

Self improvement for me came when I accepted that I needed to improve. Before, I always thought that I was a good person and didn't need to try harder. Coincidentally my realisation of a need for self improvement also coincided with me losing my religion.

I chose to accept truth and pain over just pretending that I was being watched over by some all powerful being. There is something to be said for being happy, but I can't bring myself to sacrifice truth for happiness, otherwise I'd probably still be religious.

You also appear to have not noticed the basic element of human nature that causes us to split into groups and have an "us vs them" mentality, which means that there will be vehement disagreements and wars between groups of people in the future anyway, no matter what people believe happened in the past. The best way to reduce this kind of thing is from learning and communication, not ignorance. Even things like having sports teams to love and hate instead of making a big deal of nationality are good things I suppose. They keep the dumb people distracted with shiny things so they have less time to hate other kinds of "different".

Re:I have a much more ambitious vision

[Imagix]

We are at war with Eurasia. We have always been at war with Eurasia.

Re:I have a much more ambitious vision

[Monkeedude1212]

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?

The problem is that there are also a lot of people who start by telling themselves "I am a good person. I am doing the best I can" - all the while slugging back some McD's and tossing that non-biodegradable cup out the window into a grassy field. Or "I am such a good person. I'm better than those filthy n*gger thieves". Not trolling - there are people who believe that stuff. Believing in self-delusion often leads to arrogance.

In order to be a better person you need to have some reference to be better of. Forgetting genocide, racism, sexism, rapings, killings, wars, etc - tossing all that aside just leaves it open to happen again. Without knowing it happened, and the consequences associated with it, there is no reason it won't just continue. This is like history 101, those who fail to study history are doomed to repeat it.

Honestly they need to put it back in there. Who is being offended by this word? African Americans? Let me put it this way: By leaving it in there you help propogate the story of how your people were treated during those times. How will our children know the N word offends you if we don't give the N word it's proper context?

Re:I have a much more ambitious vision

[Old97]

"Knowing" history as a set of facts and "understanding" it as insights into humankind and cause and effect are two very different things. Most people "know" some history and "understand" very little if any of it. That's partly a symptom of the problem of how history is taught in primary, secondary schools and the under-class levels in Universities.

As to Twain and Huckleberry Finn - Twain took great pains to accurately capture the dialect and idioms of the characters he wrote about. He took such pains because he thought it was essential to the story he was telling. What's next? Are they going to correct all the grammar and have Huck speak the Queen's English?

Re:I have a much more ambitious vision

[SirGarlon]

I'm not being a troll here, I'm asking a serious question. Wouldn't we be better off for it?

All right, here's a serious answer. No, we wouldn't be better off. Excising history would not excise social injustice from the present, it would only rob us of the perspective necessary to recognize and redress it.

Re:I have a much more ambitious vision

[Monkeedude1212]

Perhaps we would be better served by making the very *concept* of genocide or war simply inconceivable.

You can't make a concept inconceivable. That's like the definition of it. By taking off the word Genocide from the idea of purging a race from existance doesn't change the fact that there are some people, in power today, who are still exercising the idea that they can just purge people they don't like.

Saying "We've been better than that" is just being naive and will only lead to being abused by something you couldn't see coming because you didn't know the warning signs.

Re:I have a much more ambitious vision

[cptdondo]

No. Read the outright racist newspaper accounts of WWII. What you're suggesting would require expunging the vast majority of human history.

We can start by removing "offensive" words, but where do we stop? "nigger" is offensive to some, "jap" to others, "squaw" to still others.

But it's not just words that are hurtful. We need to expunge all history of violence and pain. How about accounts of the thousands of dead bodies in Pearl Harbor, floating so thick the survivors could walk on them? How about Mogadishu? Hutu-Tutsi genocide?

The human race is the most successful predator to walk the face of the earth in 4 billion years. You can't expunge violence and pain; it is our nature. We need to deal with the fact that we are a vicious, violent species, and we need to evolve beyond that level to survive.

The fact that it makes some of us uncomfortable is proof that at least a few of us are rising above our violent nature, and that maybe there is hope for us yet.

Re:I have a much more ambitious vision

[Attila Dimedici]

Self improvement for me came when I accepted that I needed to improve. Before, I always thought that I was a good person and didn't need to try harder. Coincidentally my realisation of a need for self improvement also coincided with me losing my religion.

It is a shame that the religion that you lost wasn't Christianity, since one of the fundamental teachings of Christianity is that no one is a good person.

Re:I have a much more ambitious vision

[hrimhari]

That's not even the problem. Check the percentage of people that actually know anything of what we're supposed to learn about History in school. Go ask questions like how did the I and II World War started, who was Benjamin Franklin, Stalin, Cristopher Columbus...

It's not that "knowing" didn't help. Most people didn't even got that far.

Here's what comes out from erasing or modifying the "bad" part of History:

- Instead of just a small percentage of people knowing it (voluntarily or not), nobody would.
- Who decides what to erase? Hitler, Stalin or the Pope? Or everybody?
- How will we know how one thing led to another?

This kind of History elrous0 proposes sounds like a new kind of Bible to me.

Re:I have a much more ambitious vision

[Monkeedude1212]

Even things like having sports teams to love and hate instead of making a big deal of nationality are good things I suppose. They keep the dumb people distracted with shiny things so they have less time to hate other kinds of "different".

That reminded me of something I saw on Television the other day. At the bar, watching the Canada vs Russia World Juniors Hockey Game (being a somewhat nationalistic Canadian its pretty much manditory to watch the big hockey games).

Some Canadian Fan held up a sign they made that said something along the lines of "Canada vs Russia Ice Hockey: The original Cold War!" which got a small chuckle out of me.

And then I thought about it for a little while. I think it's great that the international community has these kinds of sporting events, because as you said, it allows us to vent our frustrations on a meaningless game (from a political perspective) - instead of taking it out on our foreign relations. It's gotten to such a point, where Canada and Russia might have been rivals during the actual Cold War, but now we all can kind of poke fun at the whole thing.

I think Elrous might have been trying to insight the idea that perhaps Canada and Russia or Canada and the US would have better relations if they just forgot the Cold War had happened, or something along those lines. While it might sound novel at first I think he's missing the underlying foundation of the history lessons learned. Think about that little red phone in the Oval Office, that goes straight to Moscow. Would that be around if it weren't for the Cold War, and would it have any relevance if we just forgot it happened? Isn't that phone a sign that learning from history helps improve relations around the world moreso than forgetting they happened?

Re:I have a much more ambitious vision

[JackieBrown]

I'll bet you're one of those people who would love to have a Thought Police, if or when the technology ever arrives that can read thoughts. Then all non-politically correct thoughts can be purged from everyone's minds!

And you are one of those people that hate having a conversation, right? Or are you one of those people who felt that if people should fly, they would all have wings and there was no point in discussing anything different.

elrous0 was starting a discussion and opened it playing the devils advocate (or he really feels this may possibly be a good idea.) It is useful and interesting to discuss and reason things out.

Re:I have a much more ambitious vision

[mangu]

Perhaps we would be better served by making the very *concept* of genocide or war simply inconceivable.

You keep using that word but I don't think it means what you think.

Re:I have a much more ambitious vision

[arth1]

Were the characters in the book slaves, or is that just the new politically correct term for African American and Native American?

It's also misplaced. Not all slaves were Negroes.
Will kids a generation from now believe that slave is a synonym of Negroid, or alternatively wonder whether Jim was an Irish slave?

Re:I have a much more ambitious vision

[Shadow Wrought]

Perhaps we would be better served by making the very *concept* of genocide or war simply inconceivable.

And yet they do exist. And came into existence years ago, and came about without little prompting of history. As long as there are schoolyard bullies, people shouting at each other in traffic over a dozen feet of road, and domestic violence, there will be war. Even without the tanks, planes, artillery, and machine guns. As long as Thag can convince a group that Og sucks and needs the tar beat out of him with stickas and/or stones; there will be war.

Ignorance does not eliminate problems, it exacerbates them. Understanding the problem and having the fortitude to fix it, is the only way to truly solve a problem.

Re:I have a much more ambitious vision

[HungryHobo]

Yes, too many things have *aspects* which are appealing at first but which history has shown to tend towards situations which we don't really want.

Eugenics can start with the simple and reasonable goal of not wanting children to suffer horribly painful genetic diseases but history in the form of the nazi party showed that if you go too far down that road then being a member of an unpopular ethnic group is eventually cause enough for sterilisation or extermination so better to steer well clear entirely, it isn't worth it.

Hell the nazi party provides no shortage of warnings it's good to remember like

"never believe any government which is herding some segment of the population into cattle cars and tells everyone that they're really just going to live somewhere nice"

And perhaps most relevent lesson from history to elrous0:

"Das war ein Vorspiel nur, dort wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man am Ende auch Menschen."

Re:I have a much more ambitious vision

[D Ninja]

Yes, it only needs an old man in the sky to make the delusion perfect.

It saddens me to see that you were modded Insightful. The GP's question is very far off and would never work for a wide variety of reasons. However, your flamebait response against religion shows your lack of knowledge of what religions embrace. The fact of the matter is, any major religion, and anybody practicing such religion, realizes that humans, as a whole, are a pretty messed up bunch. Nobody is immune from the tragedy that is human nature, and I have seen this acknowledged by many people who practice their faith. More often than not, it is those who don't understand the concepts of a sinful or selfish nature that think an idea expressed in the GP's post will work.

And, as an aside, removing religion would not end the wars, genocides, judgement, etc that pervades our cultures. Religion provides a focal point more often than not because of the topics it attempts to address. However, if you removed religion from this world, I can guarantee you that something else would quickly take its place. The problem isn't religion...it's people.

Re:I have a much more ambitious vision

[QuantumPion]

Broken Window Fallacy. If we didn't have to pay a groundskeeper to clean up your litter, we could spend the money on something that produces wealth (e.g. teachers, new roads, etc).

Re:I have a much more ambitious vision

[Jason Levine]

Knowledge of nasty history can be very valuable. Take the controversy over vaccines, for example. Some of the folks who lobby against vaccine use try claiming that the diseases they prevent aren't really that bad. If you have a sanitized version of history, you wouldn't know that people died, were permanently disfigured or were permanently disabled by diseases such as measles, mumps, whooping cough, polio, etc. Modern parents (including myself) don't have first-hand knowledge of these horrors so they might look at Sanitized History and wonder why they should use vaccines if things weren't ever so bad. Then, when vaccination rates drop and the diseases make a comeback (which is happening in some areas), children will get sick and die.

I'll admit that no historical account is ever 100% objective, but I'd rather have an honest-as-possible recording of history than a Scrubbed-Clean-With-Bad-Stuff-Replaced-By-Rainbows-And-Unicorns version.

Re:I have a much more ambitious vision

[Lumpy]

"Check the percentage of people that actually know anything of what we're supposed to learn about History in school. Go ask questions like how did the I and II World War started, who was Benjamin Franklin, Stalin, Cristopher Columbus..."

DO the same with members of Congress and the news!

Cripes I heard crap out of the mouths of Some senators and Fox news pundits during the past 3 weeks about the congress working during Christmas that Claim they are christian say things about Christ that are blatantly wrong.

And these are from people who CLAIM they worship and follow the teachings of Christ. I guarantee they know even less about American History.

The overall education of Americans, from inner city kids to rich, well to do college educated leaders is atrocious. We're a nation of morons.

Re:I have a much more ambitious vision

[Lumpy]

First it's because US history in high-school is not history but a fairytale. They don't teach how we did horrible evil things to steal land from the Indians. How we did worse things to the indian population than Hitler did and in fact he learned them from us.

Or the nasty crap we did to the poor, how the slave trade is what built this country. etc...... Or any truths about the founding fathers.

College level US history and real research digs up all kinds of things that make you literally shit yourself as to how violent the United states has been. And it explains the preconception that other countries have of us. Some of the crap we have pulled with other countries is insane. There is a reason the Canadians came down and burned the whitehouse to the ground.

Re:I have a much more ambitious vision

[Shakrai]

There is a reason the Canadians came down and burned the whitehouse to the ground.

I hope you can appreciate the irony of complaining about the quality of our history classes while making a mistake like that ;)

Re:I have a much more ambitious vision

[mcgrew]

As to Twain and Huckleberry Finn - Twain took great pains to accurately capture the dialect and idioms of the characters he wrote about.

It isn't censorship, it's a rewrite. With Mark Twain there's no censorship, because the original unmolested text is public domain and there for anyone to read. You can buy unraped versions at almost any bookstore.

However, in the case of a more recent author like Vachel Lindsay, there is a very bad problem -- his heirs hold the still standing copyrights to his works, and his son has set about "correcting" the work to be more contemporary. Much if it will therefore be lost forever, since most of his books were hand made (he was known as the "Hobo Poet", riding the rails).

Odd that this controversy isn't covered in the wikipedia article, it's well known to acedemics here in Springfield.

Re:I have a much more ambitious vision

[couchslug]

"How we did worse things to the indian population than Hitler did."

Citation sorely needed for the "worse" part. Looks like ordinary conquest and the methods used were the only effective way to win by conquest. None of that was "wrong" at the time, and it bears reminding that conquest was normal and acceptable worldwide.

Re:I have a much more ambitious vision

[dgatwood]

That's not even the problem. Check the percentage of people that actually know anything of what we're supposed to learn about History in school. Go ask questions like how did the I and II World War started, who was Benjamin Franklin, Stalin, Cristopher Columbus...

I think you're being a little unfair. The human brain only has so much space. Sure, one could understand every detail of our history, but that person probably won't also know every detail of mathematics or physics. Folks complain about people not understanding science all the time. No human being is going to be good at everything. Particularly in political leaders, far more important than knowledge is awareness of one's own limitations. It's not important what you know. What's important is knowing that you don't know and knowing how to research it to find out.

The problem is that most folks in Congress don't know and don't want to know. Instead of bringing in experts to explain complex subjects, they let lobbyists tell them what to do because it is easier. The crap they spew sounds ignorant not because they don't understand things, but because they willfully delegate understanding to other people. In short, they're mostly irresponsible across both sides of the aisle, and it is only getting worse.

The right thing to do would be to have Congress consist of proportional representation not just geographically but also in terms of their backgrounds (contrasted with our current Congress, almost half of whom are lawyers). The people in there should be smart enough to know when to defer to the opinions of other Congresspeople who have a better understanding of a specific issue. Unfortunately, instead of such reasonable people, we tend to get people who stubbornly refuse to cooperate, refuse to work with the other political party, and generally drag the country down with them.

Re:I have a much more ambitious vision

[ginbot462]

No form of the Bible (even if you were referring to the Tanakh/Torah) was all inclusive. Books were lost or intentionally not added. There are whole groups that were marginalized (for reasons unprovable by our time). Famous among these groups are a varied bunch labeled as Gnostic,
some calling themselves Christians, others not.

I've desperately tried to summarize what Gnostics could have brought to the table, and how it wasn't included in the Bible (for whatever reason ... even as simple as, the Church needed uniformity); but, I could not without being a windbag. A good starter link is:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnosticism_and_the_New_Testament

Also check out the:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gospel_according_to_the_Hebrews

And, for the diversity the old testament portion:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblical_Canon#Canons_of_various_Christian_traditions

Re:I have a much more ambitious vision

[TheCarp]

How do you know what our enemies prefer? You must be in league with Goldstein! Traitor!

Re:I have a much more ambitious vision

[mcgrew]

Cripes I heard crap out of the mouths of Some senators and Fox news pundits during the past 3 weeks about the congress working during Christmas that Claim they are christian say things about Christ that are blatantly wrong.

Well, the problem there is that Fox and the "conservatives" they promote have an agenda and beliefs that are diametrically opposed to Christ's teachings. They may claim to be Christians, but they really worship money. But there are so many true Christians out there that if Fox and the politicians they promote let it be known that they think Christ was fiction, or his teachings were bunk, etc., they would lose votes and eyeballs.

The same holds true for half the congregation in any church; they're only there to be seen.

The necktie is a symbol of wealth and power. Never trust a man who wears one, and never take a man with a tie at his word when he claims to be Christian.

Pat Robertson has converted more Christians to athiesm than all the athiests at slashdot combined could ever hope to.

Re:I have a much more ambitious vision

[tnk1]

No. Just no.

I'm sorry, but say what you like about the treatment of the Native Americans, but what happened to them is not worse than what Hitler did to the Jews or the other groups that they committed systematic genocide on in the twelve years of National Socialist control of Germany and most of Europe. Just because there were massacres and because reservations were sort of like concentration camps (but not really), does not mean that Indians were herded on cattle cars, stripped of their possessions, and then either shot into prepared mass graves or marched into gas chambers.

There was no component of warfare against the Jews. The Jews were long time, and prosperous citizens of Germany and the other conquered countries who had even fought for Germany in some cases in WWI. They were all executed in less than twelve years. Six million Jews, and millions of other groups in about a decade. Less than a generation.

Native tribes, although eventually outmatched by the technological strength of the US, prosecuted successful military action on the frontiers, many times trading massacre for massacre and in no few instances, winning battles against US forces. They fought over hundreds of years and at no time was it the policy of the United States to exterminate Indian tribes, even if the government participated or looked the other way while the Indians were cheated and starved.

More to the point, the Holocaust was effected in the "modern" world. A world of (at the time) unprecedented scientific achievement, Reason and interaction between cultures. The plight of the Native Americans was different, cruel and sad by many measures, but Hitler did not learn how to kill humans with industrial efficiency from America.

When I went to school, while there was not a full exploration of the atrocities against Indians in detail, they were certainly covered. The Trail of Tears, the land grabs, the reservations, the blankets with smallpox, the sham treaties, that was all there in high school, and even to a degree in middle school. I don't know where people get the idea that this is missing in US education, at least since the 1970s. Its there. In fact, I think sometimes it ignores certain details to ensure the slant remains firmly on the side of depicting the Native Americans as powerless victims, which they proved time and time again that they were not.

Let's be clear, as someone who trained with an eye towards getting a Ph.D. in History and teaching, I can tell you that almost *any* college level course on just about any culture will bring out details that will cause you to shit yourself, as you put it. And there was definitely a period where the US thought pretty highly of itself and ignored, forgot or otherwise glossed over the downright evil actions that were sometimes committed in the name of progress and Manifest Destiny.

The term that is descriptive of what people mean when they think of ignorant, history-blind Americans is American Exceptionalism, and it is certainly a real phenomenon, but there are limits to the level of ignorance that it actually engenders. The fact that there are rustics out in the countryside who are ignorant of the greater world or rabid nationalists is pretty much a fact of life in any country.

Finally, the Canadians did not burn down the White House, the British did. In fact, it was a British brigade that had fought against Napoleon in Europe under the Duke of Wellington and was then dropped off by the Royal Navy via the Chesapeake. The American attempts to attack Canada never really got anywhere, but they did not go so badly that the Canadians could march through 500 miles of the interior of the US to get to Washington to burn it.

Re:I have a much more ambitious vision

[frank_adrian314159]

... humans, as a whole, are a pretty messed up bunch.

[Citation Needed].

I've found it much more fruitful to view my fellow travelers on this tiny ball of mud to actually be pretty benign, for the most wanting simply to live their lives as best they can. Other than the few aberrations (sociopaths, psychopaths,and other variations of "path"), the only messed-up thing about us is that we have somehow allowed to exist (or have actively created) societies that mis-allocate resources, allow the most venal among us to rise to positions of power, and do not tend to promote policies that could help keep us from procreating to the extent that we must rape the planet (and each other) to survive. As such, I believe that the main treatment should be on the creation of societies that do not have these flaws.

Re:I have a much more ambitious vision

[markass530]

There is a reason the Canadians came down and burned the whitehouse to the ground.

don't let history get in the way of your rant. A Canadian did call for retaliation for the sacking of york, because it was against "the civilized laws of war". We however wouldn't be a country if we accepted the civilized ways of waging war back then "Lets stand in a line and mow each other down!". It was the advance guard of British troops under General Robert Ross who burned the White House.

Re:I have a much more ambitious vision

[Raenex]

War wouldn't disappear, but come on. When Israel/Iran - India/Pakistan start tossing nukes it will be religion.

Both World Wars weren't fought over religion. Hitler wasn't religious. Stalin wasn't religious. South Korea and North Korea don't fight over religion. The Cold War and threat of nuclear annihilation was not over religion. The United States invading Iraq was not over religion.

Sorry, mankind doesn't need religion to fight. I'm an atheist and despise all the evil done in the name of religion, but religion is not the fundamental problem.

Re:I have a much more ambitious vision

[MrSenile]

I'm simply pointing out that there are degrees of evil, and Hitler was quite a bit further up the scale than those darned expansionists.

I still have, from my great-great-grandfather's collection, his private diary stating of tobacco bags made from the testicles of American Indians.

So let's see...

Hitler gassed Jews.... Americans wiped out indian tribes through diseased blankets/clothing.

Hitler mutulated Jews for scientific expansion (and I'm sure pleasure).... Americans mutulated indians -just- for pleasure.

Hitler tried to exterminate Jews.... Americans DID exterminate tribes of indians.

Hitler was out to take over the world and failed.... Americans were out to take over the richest nation of the world and succeeded.

Thus, I must disagree with your point above. Good ol' America, in how they treated the Americian Indians, were right up there with Hitler in the evil department, not degrees away as you said. The reason we aren't looked down upon in the same manner is frankly because unlike Hitler, we won.

Besides, I'm sure that Hitler didn't light up his pipe with his Jew testicle bag....

Re:I have a much more ambitious vision

[Monkeedude1212]

Finally, the Canadians did not burn down the White House, the British did. In fact, it was a British brigade that had fought against Napoleon in Europe under the Duke of Wellington and was then dropped off by the Royal Navy via the Chesapeake. The American attempts to attack Canada never really got anywhere, but they did not go so badly that the Canadians could march through 500 miles of the interior of the US to get to Washington to burn it.

I hate to burst your bubble, but most of it is generally considered a "Canadian Attack" as Canada was still a British Colony at that point. Any Canadian troops were considered British and any British troops operating directly for Canada's interests would also be considered Canadian troops. You wouldn't deny that Canada fought in the World Wars, would you? Even though we were still intermingled with Great Britain?

Canada's laws still had to go through British checks and balances all the way till 1949 - and we didn't gain full access to our own constituion till 1982. We're an incredibly young Country, if you are going to claim that Canada didn't burn down the White House than you can say the 1976 Olympics held in Montreal weren't Canadian at all, but British.

Re:I have a much more ambitious vision

[Anonymous Coward]

You make some good points, but I disagree at least in part with your assertion that the Native American genocide and the Jewish Holocaust are not comparable.

Well into the '50s the Indians were depicted as the "primitive savages", or as racially inferior to the whites by even the mainstream media - similar to the caricaturization of the Jews by the Nazi regime. I would argue the reason why there was no centralized campaign to eradicate the Native Americans as a racial group was that they were not concentrated well enough, and did not stand in the way of, American industrial progress. But when they did, measures to eliminate them were taken swiftly - Andrew Jackson in Florida will provide illustrative examples.

That Native Americans were able to prosecute military action against the United States is largely a factor of their geographic distribution and the fact that they were trained to fight as a part of their way of life - unlike the Jewish citizens of Germany. This ability does not alter the attitude of the United States toward them.

It is, I freely admit, something of a stretch to suggest that the U.S. and Nazi Germany are identical in their treatment of their respective "racial questions". Nevertheless, a genocide was committed in both instances. This fact certainly permits the appropriate parallels to be drawn - I feel it is disingenuous to suggest that the two events are "entirely" unlike each other. Finally, the Native American wars were still taking place even into the late 1800s - certainly an industrial-enough era, and the final American-Indian wars are regarded as ending in 1918. Is that really that far from 1933?

Ministry of Truth?

[iONiUM]

Nothing like ret-conning the evil out of our past. I mean, it's not like we should remember history so we don't repeat it, or anything. Protect the children at all costs, their innocent eyes shouldn't ever know the word "nigger."

There was some sarcasm in there, in case you didn't notice.

Re:Ministry of Truth?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date. In this way every prediction made by the Party could be shown by documentary evidence to have been correct; nor was any item of news, or any expression of opinion, which conflicted with the needs of the moment, ever allowed to remain on record. All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary."
- George Orwell, 1984, Book 1, Chapter 3

Re:Ministry of Truth?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you are misquoting that book.

My NewSouth Books edition of 1984 doesn't have that paragraph in there at all.

Re:Ministry of Truth?

[MozeeToby]

I'm just going to play the Devil's advocate here, largely because the knee jerk reaction (and a reaction that I share) is that this is censorship and censorship should be prevented at all costs.

But, what if you look at it, not as censorship, but as translation. Language changes a lot in 100 years, and the meaning of the this particular word has changed even more than the average. I suspect that many of the instances of the word 'nigger' in the original text are not in line with the racist, hateful connotations that are associated with the word today. It is possible that changing the word to something less emotionally charged would more accurately reflect, from a purely narrative, non-historical point of view, the intentions of the author.

Of course, there are doubtless instances in the book where the use is meant to be racist and emotionally charged, I can't find any logical reason why those instances should be changed. And of course the targeting of this single word for changes without changing other words and phrasing in the story to make it more easily understood for the students is clearly censorship or at least pandering.

Re:Ministry of Truth?

[dkleinsc]

US history is particularly subject to ret-conning, at least in the US. 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. Particularly those who's ancestors fought and in some cases died for those causes of genocide and slavery have a hard time dealing with it. And yet it happened, and not acknowledging it happens leads to all sorts of trouble today, over a century after the actual evil is over.

For instance, when the press interviewed attendees of the Secession Ball in South Carolina, not one of them acknowledged that the rights that South Carolina was fighting for was the right to own slaves.

Re:Ministry of Truth?

[jimbolauski]

Here is a great quote that the morons failed to realize when they read the book because they were too offended to learn the lesson Twain was trying to teach.
Russell Baker wrote:

"The people whom Huck and Jim encounter on the Mississippi are drunkards, murderers, bullies, swindlers, lynchers, thieves, liars, mows, frauds, child abusers, numbskulls, hypocrites, windbags and traders in human flesh. All are white. The one man of honor in this phantasmagoria is 'Nigger Jim,' as Twain called him to emphasize the irony of a society in which the only true gentleman was held beneath contempt."

Re:Ministry of Truth?

[anyGould]

But, what if you look at it, not as censorship, but as translation.

Obvious answer: if we're revamping Finn for "modern audiences", then why aren't we doing the same for Shakespeare (where kids are told that you have to study it in the original text or it loses meaning). You can't have it both ways.

Re:Ministry of Truth?

[Aquitaine]

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.

Re:Ministry of Truth?

[MrMacman2u]

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.

Re:Ministry of Truth?

[MrMacman2u]

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.

Re:Ministry of Truth?

[Magada]

Going a bit OT here but I like your premise. So, What Would the Romans Have Done in Afghanistan?

Going by the historical record, I believe they would have built roads and bridges throughout the valleys in that godforsaken country, massacred one tenth of the population in "war", enslaved another tenth and demoralized the rest through torture, public mass executions and destruction of the local religious and/or political elite, followed by replacement with a friendly local satrapy that would take its orders from a Roman (pro-)consul. Then they would have split the country roughly in half, with them holding tight the reins of only the resource-rich bits and everything else left to rot in carefully nurtured anarchy, economic despondency and in-fighting. Then, the life of the new colony would begin in earnest, with rich Roman patricians in control of colonist-run resource operations such as export of valuable minerals and agricultural products.

Oh, wait...

Re:Ministry of Truth?

[dkleinsc]

Read the official secession documents, and then tell me that this was about the right to choose more than the right to own slaves.

Re:Ministry of Truth?

[phantomfive]

As far as I can tell, this was an idea started by the North. Lincoln and others didn't want to upset the anti-black northerners, so they framed the war as a fight to keep the union together. In the build-up to the war there was a lot of talk in the south about the right to have slaves, but after the war the southerners stopped talking about it so much and accepted the Northern narrative. Even before the war some Southerners framed it that way, look at what Robert E Lee said half a decade before the civil war:

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.

Re:Ministry of Truth?

[hedwards]

To some extent in depends on the particular person. Mark Twain was noted for considering the Southerners for being less civilized than Africans. And his use of the word nigger in its place in the books was necessary for the purposes of portraying the story accurately. It would be a bit like writing a story with a Klan member as a character without the use of any racial epithets or nasty things to say about Jewish people.

It's not so much that it really depends on the author so much as how and why the author is using the language. Some cases of censorship are more egregious than others are.

Re:Ministry of Truth?

[anyGould]

And all of those are fine in my mind - because none of them are trying to pass themselves off as "the original". And when you sit down in English to study Shakespeare, you don't get to watch West Side Story and call that your paper on Romeo & Juliet.

If they want to make a "Huck Finn" where Sarah Palin and her friend Tea Party encounter treacherous Democrats along the campaign trail, have at it. I only expect them to have enough integrity to name it something different.

Re:Ministry of Truth?

[swordgeek]

Actually, the text never said n----r. It said nigger. And injun. Those are the words I read when I was eight years old, and I never misunderstood them. Of course, my parents actually talked to me about history and context. (And that began earlier, when my dad read Tom Sawyer to me for the first time.)

It amazes me that even newspapers no longer dash-out words such as "fuck, cunt, slut, bastard" in court transcripts, but spreading from the US, you can NOT commit the word "nigger" to print in any context - even in the discussion of the word. Unless, of course, you're a black rapper. Then you have "reclaimed" the word and everything is all happiness and light.

Damn.

Re:Ministry of Truth?

[Steauengeglase]

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.

Re:Ministry of Truth?

[Shotgun]

But, what if you look at it, not as censorship, but as translation.

Because, Samuel Clemmons was a unapologetic satirist. The only people using the derogatory words were the idiots of the book, the so-called "fine and upstanding citizens of society" were fools, criminals and murderers. The fact that the words are more hideous now makes the fools of the book look even more foolish.

Mark Twain is turning in his grave...with laughter...and the fools still don't get the joke.

Re:Ministry of Truth?

[10101001 10101001]

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).

But don't you see: the USA is different. We're the bastion of freedom, founded by God to spread democracy just as the Bible and Jesus intended.

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.

Perhaps. And no doubt various countries are quite guilty of covering up, glossing over, or outright ignoring the atrocities their country/government has done (Rape of Nanking by Japan comes to mind). But the answer to that isn't to simply nod one's head and say "it's the human condition". The answer is to call those people out who try to cover up history.

The desire to censor something is more often than not precisely because it makes someone uncomfortable with the truth of a situation. Such should always be dealt with, by pointing out the why and how of that discomfort so they may not simply ignore it. Anything less, and as pointed out there's the serious risk of repeating such mistakes. That means not only knowing the mistakes of the US, but also those of Russia, Afghanistan, France, etc. By bringing attention to the racism of the past in the US, not only can the US but people from other countries can learn to not repeat those mistakes. I believe that is one major reasons why Mark Twain chose the language he did. To truly deal with a problem, one has to confront it, and sometimes storytellers are best capable of presenting those problems to you.

Most importantly of all, one should be taught when one is young. Why else do you think we teach children fairy tales or stories from the Bible? It certainly isn't because they're all feel-good, political correct crap.

New cover

[brian0918]

And the cover now has a big shiny sticker that says "Nigger Free!"

Re:New cover

[jbeaupre]

Don't joke. Some folks would probably be more than happy to remove Jim entirely from the book and slap that sticker on.

And why start NWO censorship with this kind of...

[Fibe-Piper]

....punk assed half measure. Why aren't we calling for outright book burnings, in the town square!

If you can't handle the n-word...

[chispito]

If you are too young to maturely handle the n-word, then you are too young to handle the implications of the story anyway.

Re:If you can't handle the n-word...

[Anonymous Coward]

Says the guy who can't write nigger.

Re:If you can't handle the n-word...

[chispito]

Says the guy who can't write nigger.

Perhaps I should log out and type it?

I was trying to put attention on the book. A child who can't contextualize Huck's upbringing and the society he travels through will have no hope of appreciating how Huck and Jim relate. And if a child can't process that, then you really shouldn't be throwing words or ugliness at him until he can.

Re:If you can't handle the n-word...

[clone53421]

Huck Finn is taught around 8th grade, not preschool. A thirteen or fourteen year old ought to be able to pretty well understand the topics of slavery, racism, and their history in America.

Re:If you can't handle the n-word...

[jemenake]

If you are too young to maturely handle the n-word, then you are too young to handle the implications of the story anyway.

Well, sort of.

I'll be honest. When I first read the post, my knee-jerk reaction was that this is political-correctness run amok. However, half-way into one of the Slate commentaries on it, I had a thought: What you get out of the book depends upon the age at which you read it. If you're really young, it's just an adventure book, like Treasure Island or something. The historical overtones, the clues about how racism was so innate that it was codified in the national vernacular, will be lost on you unless you're of sufficient age to understand how language changes over time to reflect changing political opinions.

Now, if you're not at that age yet, then it's just an adventure story. Also, you're closer to that age where you're still "absorbing" your vocabulary and vernacular from observing the conversations of others. In other words, if I had some kid who was, say, 5-6 reading it, I'd worry a bit that they'd think that "nigger" was, like countless other ones, just another word that they hadn't come across, yet, and start whipping it out in conversations at school.

This is kinda what the Slate article was hinting at. We abridge countless other books to make them more pertinent or digestible to different audiences (especially younger ones). In science books, we leave out the bit about Newton's law of gravitation and elliptical orbits just say that the planets orbit the sun until the kid's brain is capable of grokking the more-esoteric concepts. The Slate article questions how this is all that different.

So, even though my overall feeling about this is yucky... and that I think this is a scary path to be going down, I must admit that I can envision situations where I would choose the watered-down version for my own kid if they were of a certain age.

Re:If you can't handle the n-word...

[hedwards]

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.

"Internet is in uproar" .....

[unity100]

I dont see any uproar on internet in europe, middle east or asia over this. not to mention africa and south america. not even canada.

maybe is it that the supposed 'uproar' is in united states of america ? even that i havent seen any uproar in the communities with predominantly american population ?

or maybe the article poster is making up shit ?

Re:"Internet is in uproar" .....

[d6]

>>or maybe the article poster is making up shit ?

nah, this has been fairly well reported on/discussed for the last day or so. I'd drop a link to his version of the book, but I'd hate like hell for someone to mistakenly buy it.

context is everything. the use of the word throughout the novel punches home the bone deep, offhanded racism present in the protagonist and the people of his time.
A shame the publisher doesn't think we're smart enough to understand the book as written.

Re:"Internet is in uproar" .....

[anyGould]

I dont see any uproar on internet in europe, middle east or asia over this. not to mention africa and south america. not even canada.

At least in Canada, it'll be because Huck Finn isn't in the school curriculum. I suspect the same will be true elsewhere - we'll never see the "clean" version, because we don't freak out about the original.

Damned if you do, damned if you don't

[headhot]

There is no way a school is going to make children read a book with the word nigger in it. Its too much trouble for the teachers, principles, and school board. They wouldn't touch that with a 10 foot pole. The public school system is not equipped to handle controversy.

Then again, censoring such eminent work from Twain is going to catch you some major heat too.

The lesser of the 2 evils I think is to run the book with the word n***r censored that way, so every on is placated, and the students can have a discussion about it.

Re:Damned if you do, damned if you don't

[Brannoncyll]

Then said children go home and listen to rap music on MTV or watch any TV show involving people from "the 'hood" and they'll easily find 219 uses of the word 'nigger', along with 'bitches', 'hoes', and a wide variety of other unsavoury phrases.

Re:Damned if you do, damned if you don't

[demonbug]

There is no way a school is going to make children read a book with the word nigger in it. Its too much trouble for the teachers, principles, and school board. They wouldn't touch that with a 10 foot pole. The public school system is not equipped to handle controversy.

Then again, censoring such eminent work from Twain is going to catch you some major heat too.

The lesser of the 2 evils I think is to run the book with the word n***r censored that way, so every on is placated, and the students can have a discussion about it.

Yeah, but how do you do you pronounce n***r when you are having the discussion? "Now class, let's discuss how Twain contrasts Huckleberry's newfound perspective with that of his boyhood friend Tom, the disparity between the two illustrated when Tom is recounting the boiler explosion on his recent trip by steamboat; 'Thankfully no one was hurt. A n-star-star-star-er was killed.'"

Also, don't know where you're from, but we sure read Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn in school, n-word and all. Somehow we even managed to have discussions about the book and the use of offensive language in class, and no one even got fired! The only ones who complained were the kids who couldn't read more than two pages without a picture to look at.

Re:Damned if you do, damned if you don't

[gstoddart]

The lesser of the 2 evils I think is to run the book with the word n***r censored that way, so every on is placated, and the students can have a discussion about it.

I think censoring is far more evil than running the risk of offending people.

That's an awfully slippery slope, and before long you're assassinating people who disagree with a law against blasphemy.

Yes, that's an intentionally over-the-top example, but changing reality to fit someone's beliefs/hopes/sensitivities is just plain bad for a free society.

No better

[Amorymeltzer]

The NYTimes has, of course, a lot of coverage on the topic, but many, including the editorial board, make the very strong point - how is this any better? Yes, as countless first posters try to show everyday, nigger is offensive, but nothing is such a blight on American history as the institution of slavery. This censorship wrongly conflates the word to be the problem, when really the problem is the hundreds of years of oppression, hatred, and violence that has and is aimed at blacks that the word represents. Some choice editing won't change the realities of the South in the mid-1800s, to think this fools anyone is a presumption of ignorance amongst teachers, parents, and children.

Re:No better

[flaming error]

> This censorship wrongly conflates the word to be the problem

That's the best argument I've heard yet. These people are targeting a word. Not the institution of slavery, not racism.

Twain used the word on purpose to sharpen his anti-racist message. Removing the word serves only to dull his attack.

This censorship is completely counter-productive.

Re:No better

[vux984]

Some choice editing won't change the realities of the South in the mid-1800s, to think this fools anyone is a presumption of ignorance amongst teachers, parents, and children.

Playing devil's advocate here...

Maybe they aren't actually trying to hide the realities of the South in the mid-1800s. Maybe they aren't trying to fool anyone.

Maybe switching out nigger for slave actually restores the reality of the South in the mid-1800s. I mean, in the mid-1800s "nigger" didn't have the shock value it does today. It was a pretty unremarkable word, really, at the time.

If 100 years from now, "thee, thy, thine" are the most shocking slanderous word one can utter, then perhaps shakespeare SHOULD be performed with "you/your/yours" substituted in its place to preserve the spirit of the play. Shakespeare didn't intend to completely shock the audience when he wrote "thy". Just as Twain wanted to show that "nigger Jim" was of no consequence and "beneath contempt", but there was no "shock value" in calling him "nigger Jim" at the time.

Pulling the word 'nigger' out, and switching in slave, allows you to spend time on the actual story, without the distraction of the -word- 'nigger'. They aren't trying to exorcise the rascism and slavery. The word itself really is the problem.

Personally, I object to censorship... but I really do see their point. When Mark Twain wrote it 'nigger' was not 'the most vile word all of the english language', and I do find it distracting which in context, it shouldn't be. And it gets in the way when discussing the book later... should a 9 year old use the word when writing a book review, or doing some chapter questions?

The word itself is a constant distraction.

Re:No better

[Speare]

If you read even a small amount of "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court," another Mark Twain classic, you will see that the author had an uncanny and immense sense of the turn of phrase, of subtle implication, of purposeful choice of words from a massive vocabulary. It's not his best work, in my opinion, but it's obvious he plays with the slang and vernacular of 1910 as easily as the vernacular of the late 1400s. He blends in a few paragraphs (admitting a direct and literal "sampling") from Le Morte d'Arthur, the seminal Arthur legends of that period. Otherwise, you can't tell what text is Twain, and what text is ancient Malory's. And separately, the story is such a satire against the ridiculous nature of caste society and organized religion... so it's not like he accidentally was stepping on those toes when he chose the word 'nigger' in Huckleberry Finn. He wrote it because it *did* shock and offend some audiences, making his point ever more forcefully that the caste system was alive in America, and America was the worse for it.

Re:No better

[vux984]

This is the problem though. The word should not be a distraction.

But it is.

In fact keeping it used, keeping it in the book, is the best thing that can be done because it reduces the shock value. The word is only shocking and a distraction because it is taboo.

Why exactly do we want to reduce the shock value? There is nothing wrong with having offensive words in the language. That way when we when we pull them out, they carry all that offensive baggage. You want to deprive language of the ability to shock and offend. That's just as bad as censorship.

The only issue here, is that some of today's most reviled words weren't always 'most reviled'.

The word itself is not the problem though..

The word itself is precisely the problem, which is why no one is objecting to "black slave" which means the same thing.

Rap?

[digsbo]

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?

Miss the point more?

[Manip]

This is frankly fairly shocking - shocking that people would want to remove an offensive word from a book who's intent was to diminish that word's power. Just goes to show how scared and cowardly the Western world has become, when a single word can scare us so much that we must hide it from ourselves. I honestly wonder what future generations will look like after parents have worked so hard to make their kids softer and naiver than the generation that proceeded it. How long until the witch hunts begin, and we start removing undesirable thoughts/people/etc?

What?

[cheekyjohnson]

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.

I thought that was part of the point. Oh, well, we need to protect the children from words that they are not even obligated to get offended by (it could turn them into racists, after all)! Why don't we just lock all children in some sort of bubble forever and get it over with?

Roger Ebert's response to this:

[Iphtashu Fitz]

I'd rather be called a Nigger than a Slave.

Re:Roger Ebert's response to this:

[careysub]

I'd rather be called a Nigger than a Slave.

Possibly the only profound tweet ever twittered.

Re:Roger Ebert's response to this:

[GodfatherofSoul]

Seeing as a 60ish white guy has no ancestral relationship to either (besides marriage), I don't see how his opinion matters.

Re:Roger Ebert's response to this:

[tsm_sf]

Seeing as a 60ish white guy has no ancestral relationship to either (besides marriage), I don't see how his opinion matters.

Not to be argumentative, and I'm going to leave aside your science blunder since it might be a religious thing, but what does his race have to do with his opinion?

Marketing campaign

[RobVB]

Let all those kids know the book is in the public domain and they can legally download the original version with the bad words and sex scenes in it.

In case you're wondering, mentioning the sex scenes is to make sure they'll actually read the book.

Biggest problem

[Aladrin]

My biggest problem with this is that removal of the word from the English language will not stop people from thinking the exact same thoughts. The word is a -symptom-, not a cause. As such, this is a pointless exercise that only costs money and provides no benefit for anyone.

Re:And why start NWO censorship with this kind of.

[grub]

I guess the GNAA will have to rename their fine organization.

i'm just impressed we're still talking about twain

[circletimessquare]

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

It is believed that Mark Twain (aka Samuel Clemens) was born the same month as the passing of Halley's comet in November 1835. Halley's Comet passed on November 10th 1835 and Twain was born November 30th 1835. Twain vowed he would "go out"with the passing of the comet, as it passes in 75 year cycles. Halley's comet passed again April 20th 1910, Twain passed April 21st 1910.

mark twain: space alien who travels via halley's comet

Re:Two Words

[jimbolauski]

Fuck censorship. Also, fuck you, lazy parents who probably teach your children far more offensive beliefs, much less language, than they could possibly derive from reading the Great American Novel without butchering it. Replacing "injun" with "slave" doesn't even make sense.

Nigger Jim will now be Slave Jim which will be changed to Black Jim and then to African American Jim
Injun Joe will be Indian Joe which will then get changed to Native American Joe

This should be done to all clbuttic literature

[Anonymous Coward]

With the rise of eBooks, we should be able to do this automatically to all clbuttic literature.

Anyone who butterts that this is a violation of our consbreastutional rights is overreacting.

Re:This should be done to all clbuttic literature

[HTH NE1]

That's a rather medireview implementation.

I can't believe I'm writing this...:)

[rickb928]

But this is the only good argument for perpetual copyright I've seen in a while.

If you can change 'objectionable' words at your whim and re-publish the work of an author as if it were the 'original', well, you can't know what the hell anyone ever wrote unless you kept a copy.

I'm not at all interested in reading Mark Twain censored. Next thing you know, they start in some really offensive authors, and we have nothing to rely on.

Sounds like something the high-school textbook publishers would do. Stupid. So much for literary integrity. Another publisher I can regard with a jaundiced eye.

Re:New difinitions...?

[gstoddart]

Does this mean when I say "slave" I'm actually saying "nigger?"

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.)

Poignant

[SethThresher]

I think that this is a very [REDACTED] article. It is so telling of our [CENSORED] that {individuals of nonspecified cultural, racial, religous origin} would [CLASSIFIED] our literature. Really, before you know it, we'll all be facing [CENSORED] and then [REDACTED] [REDACTED] with [REMOVED] a duck.

Re:And why start NWO censorship with this kind of.

[Quiet_Desperation]

Town square is all booked up with witch burnings.

Re:Indian, not slave, for "injun".

[Haedrian]

Indian is racist! The correct word is "Native American". And "Nigger" should be replaced with "Person of African American decent".

Slave is bad too. The correct word is "Voluntary worker".

There, all safe for kiddies.

because pretending bad stuff does not happen

[Dan667]

is what you want to teach your children? No wonder so many kids freakout after they leave their parents house and binge drink, get into drugs.

Re:I'll make you a deal

[Quietust]

This sort of thing has already been done with other works, such as some of the DVD releases of certain Looney Tunes cartoons bearing a disclaimer along the lines of "The cartoons you are about to see are products of their time. They may depict some of the ethnic and racial prejudices that were commonplace in the U.S society. These depictions were wrong then and they are wrong today. While the following does not represent the Warner Bros. view of today's society, these cartoons are being presented as they were originally created, because to do otherwise would be the same as claiming that these prejudices never existed ."

We'll Have to Agree to Disagree

[eldavojohn]

I think we would be a lot better off with "But we've never done this, we've always been better than that!" than with "We'll, here we go yet again."

I respectfully disagree.

If I may liken it to a more concrete example of the history of mathematics, I don't think we ever would have made it to integration without remembering mistakes or basic concepts like addition.

We have stood on the shoulders of the works of very brilliant philosophers and thinkers to get where we are today. Fascism has slowly been phased out in favor of more liberal and democratic governments. And we all know that democracy is the worst form of government except for all the ones we already tried (thank you, Churchill).

Our knowledge of our nasty history hasn't stopped us from repeating ourselves again and again

It's not a perfect process, no. But you don't see a Pol Pot rise to power so easily today and you don't see a new Stalin sending millions to the gulags. Because we remember those things and we remember how they were accepted at the time but are clearly wrong now. On top of that, we remember what Imperialism did to the poor nations and how it made some nations poor and more powerful nations richer. We're not going to get away with colonizing a weaker nation and taking all their resources anymore. Because we remember what that results in. Of all the bad things you listed in your post, I implore you to look back to the situations and causes that set up those problems -- like the redrawing of boundaries of countries following World War II. And remember that so we can catch it next time. The list of these things are endless but you can find example after example in any history book worth its salt (I was most impressed with Hobsbawm's "Age of ..." series).

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.

Re:We'll Have to Agree to Disagree

[yurtinus]

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.

Not sure how that could be better written!

Re:We'll Have to Agree to Disagree

[pnewhook]

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.

Re:We'll Have to Agree to Disagree

[digsbo]

I completely disagree. All art has context, but great art transcends context. Art which we come to appreciate despite offensive content in its intent or context is still art we appreciate.

Do I love John Coltrane's "Alabama" because of the story behind it? No, I loved it before I understood that, because the pain it depicts transcends the senseless murder of children it was actually about. I enjoy it differently now that I know.

With Huckleberry Finn, the context is offensive, but that's what I'm bringing to the art, and understanding that things change is something I get to appreciate on a deeper level because not only do I get the benefit of seeing Huck's attitude change, but also the historical social changes between the setting and my lifetime which Twain couldn't have provided.

Art is appreciated in an interaction between the art and the beholder. If you can demonstrate art that has value without ever being observed, maybe there's something to what you say, but I don't think that's possible.

Re:We'll Have to Agree to Disagree

[cheekyjohnson]

The word should stay there to show how language was used at the time.

The word is so offensive today that it detracts from the story the book was intended to tell.

It frightens me when I think about how many people are afraid of mere words. Every word has a use and a meaning and is merely a string of letters.

But meanings change

So we should go back and rewrite/censor every book that contains words that we no longer accept?

I see nothing wrong with removing it, and no I don't see that as censorship.

You don't see it as censorship when people want to remove the word simply because some people find it offensive?

Re:We'll Have to Agree to Disagree

[omnichad]

You think that removing something you feel is offensive is not censorship. If not, then what is?
 
The point is, instead of flat, dry history classes, books like these teach people. You learn the thoughts, words, and customs of the day. You can't wipe that out without consequences.

Re:We'll Have to Agree to Disagree

[turbidostato]

"But meanings change and *in this case* there is no valid reason to have that word a part of the story."

Except the "little fact" that that was the way Mark Twain wrote it down.

Remember that a book, or any work of art for that matter is much more than what was conceived by its author and its enrichened by those that get to access it. Maybe Mark Twain didn't mean "nigger" as an offensive word, maybe it could be the case that if Mark Twain wrote it today he would avoid it even, but the fact that now the book can be seen with new eyes and that new lessons can be extracted from its read does nothing but increment its value.

USA is a country that a day not so long ago treated some of its fellow countrymen like beasts and fortunately does it no more. This book gives the chance to learn it and learn out of it: don't disallow your new generations of this treasure.

Re:We'll Have to Agree to Disagree

[DCFusor]

Amen, brother.
My take is that the "bad N word" is now more of a slur on the people who used it, than the people targeted by it. And that makes removing it suspect in some ways -- could it be we don't want to admit where we came from? Diversity is GOOD -- coming at things from different directions in an honest way is a great way to find truth quicker.

To the extent there are differences, and my work in a mixed race jazz band pointed some up, they are good and compliment one another. A lot of the differences turned into one race helping the other get it right in life. It was good all around -- it went both ways.

Re:We'll Have to Agree to Disagree

[Monkeedude1212]

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.

Okay - If it was used to properly reflect the language of the times, then removing it from the story will inaccurately depict history, thereby skewing our view of it.

Either way you look at it, removing the word, for any reason, isn't justified. If the real message is to tell the story, let the word help tell the story. If the real message is to offend people, let it offend people.

Re:We'll Have to Agree to Disagree

[BJ_Covert_Action]

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.

You're wrong, so much so that it betrays an incapability on your part to perform an effective literary analysis. I don't think the intent of the word was to offend, but it most certainly was central to the story. While calling Nigger Jim exactly that was not a plot device in and of itself, it was an ironic device used to develop the characters, something very central to the story. At the time, African-Americans were considered to be primitive, brutish, lower class members of society in the South. Throughout their travels, Huck Finn and Nigger Jim stumble across all manner of illicit, terrible people that are dressed up to be high class citizens. They run across other characters, white characters, that are supposed to be more civilized, but display anything but moral accountability. Thus, naming one of the primary characters Nigger Jim, helped to underscore the irony of the story, showing that an African-American, when called by a very degrading name at the time, could still be more friendly, loving, and civilized than most of the white folk in the story.

Furthermore, by continually painting Jim's character as part of the social underclass, and showing how easy it is for Huck to befriend him, Mark Twain is championing the cause of the less wealthy, simpler lifestyles of some white people at the time. This is another common theme in his writing, that simple hicks, as we might call them today, can be more civilized and, for that matter, better people, than the high-to-do aristocrats and southern dandies.

By continually portraying Jim's character to be part of an underclass, by instantly and continually labeling him with a title that is not respectable, Twain explicitly carries these themes every time the character is mentioned. So it is very central to the story. The fact that label is even more offensive today, if anything, rams that theme home even further by showing that character is part of a culture that has had to carry and make peace with it's social stigma. Thus, that character, still displaying virtue in his actions, stands now as a symbol that, even if you are an African-American that has to deal with racism on a daily basis (by having it embedded in your very identity), you can still be a good person, and you can still stand prouder and taller than those who would seek to put you down with that slur.

Taking away that label for that character completely dumbs down and deemphasizes these themes, and it is a fucking literary tragedy.

Re:We'll Have to Agree to Disagree

[Cederic]

The word is so offensive today

It's just a word.

People find the word 'cunt' offensive too, but I've heard it used intentionally on the BBC. (I've heard it used accidentally too).

Just because people find a word offensive shouldn't stop it being used. Particularly when it's not being used to offend against them.

If I want to use the word 'nigger' in a historical context, why is that a bad thing? I hear plenty of 'nigga' in music, why is that acceptable but its use in what was contemporary literature not acceptable?

The demonisation of certain words merely constricts language and places barriers in the way of education and open discussion. Stop it.

Re:We'll Have to Agree to Disagree

[TheCarp]

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

Re:We'll Have to Agree to Disagree

[MightyMartian]

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:

Once I said to myself it would be a thousand times better for Jim to be a slave at home where his family was, as long as he's got to be a slave, and so I'd better write a letter to Tom Sawyer and tell him to tell Miss Watson where he was. But I soon give up that notion, for two things: she'd be mad and disgusted at his rascality and ungratefulness for leaving her, and so she'd sell him straight down the river again; and if she didn't, everybody naturally despises an ungrateful nigger, and they'd make Jim feel it all the time, and so he'd feel ornery and disgraced. And then think of me! It would get all around, that Huck Finn helped a nigger to get his freedom; and if I was to ever see anybody from that town again, I'd be ready to get down and lick his boots for shame. That's just the way: a person does a low-down thing, and then he don't want to take no consequences of it. Thinks as long as he can hide it, it ain't no disgrace. That was my fix exactly. The more I studied about this, the more my conscience went to grinding me, and the more wicked and low-down and ornery I got to feeling. And at last, when it hit me all of a sudden that here was the plain hand of Providence slapping me in the face and letting me know my wickedness was being watched all the time from up there in heaven, whilst I was stealing a poor old woman's nigger that hadn't ever done me no harm, and now was showing me there's One that's always on the lookout, and ain't agoing to allow no such miserable doings to go only just so fur and no further, I most dropped in my tracks I was so scared. Well, I tried the best I could to kinder soften it up somehow for myself, by saying I was brung up wicked, and so I warn't so much to blame; but something inside of me kept saying, "There was the Sunday school, you could a gone to it; and if you'd a done it they'd a learnt you, there, that people that acts as I'd been acting about that nigger goes to everlasting fire."

It made me shiver. And I about made up my mind to pray; and see if I couldn't try to quit being the kind of a boy I was, and be better. So I kneeled down. But the words wouldn't come. Why wouldn't they? It warn't no use to try and hide it from Him. Nor from me, neither. I knowed very well why they wouldn't come. It was because my heart warn't right; it was because I warn't square; it was because I was playing double. I was letting on to give up sin, but away inside of me I was holding on to the biggest one of all. I was trying to make my mouth say I would do the right thing and the clean thing, and go and write to that nigger's owner and tell where he was; but deep down in me I knowed it was a lie-a

Re:We'll Have to Agree to Disagree

[Em Adespoton]

I have no problems with derivative interpretations/translations of past works -- after all, anyone with only a solid knowledge of modern English reading the King James Bible would completely misinterpret it, and would have no clue what to do with the Canterbury Tales, Beowulf, or Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. These need to be updated (while preserving the originals) in order to make them accessible to those who don't understand the older dialects of the language.

However, performing a s/nigger/slave/ on the text is not my idea of re-interpreting/translating the text. In Clemens' time, the word "Nigger" had many more connotations than the world "slave" does today, and to assume that the one always implies the other seems to me to be much more controversial and racist than leaving the original text alone. They would have done better to replace the word with "blackamoor" -- at least it would have been a currently neutral term that most people wouldn't take offense at which had pretty much the same meaning at one time. Then again, "barbarian" would also fit. "Slave" implies that all references referred to slaves, which obviously isn't the case, at least by the end of the novel. Why not do a search and replace on "Man", "Woman" and various other words in the text as well? They are also offensive to many people in some of the contexts used in that book.

Re:We'll Have to Agree to Disagree

[pnuema]

It adds nothing and only detracts from the real message.

Wait a minute. Huckleberry Finn is a story about an escaped slave, and a boy who risked his life and freedom to help him. He was a slave because people thought he was less than human. Huck was at risk because he treated Jim like he was human. "Slave" is not dehumanizing. "Nigger" is. Just like "raghead", "paki", or any of the other words we use to rob people of their humanity so that we can do inhuman things to them. Without dehumanizing Jim, we do not see the real story - how Huck is struggling to make his world view match what his eyes see. This is the only reason he helps Jim in the first place.

Re:We'll Have to Agree to Disagree

[sjames]

Part of Twain's intent was to alter society through a commentary so that would one day the word and ideas behind it would be offensive. Why should we deny him his prize?

The word was meant to be denigrating even at the time in order to heighten the contrasts. 'Slave' just doesn't cut it. It's much too dry and factual. It carries no sense of the way a black man of the time was seen as fundamentally less. It loses the strength of the story where he was seen as less by so many who were in no way even equal to him.

Perhaps another word would better carry the exact shade of meaning Twain intended, but it's clear that the people doing the editing are in no way up to the task of finding that new perfect word. If they think 'slave' covers it, then I would have to say they either didn't understand the work themselves or they're not actually trying.

Re:We'll Have to Agree to Disagree

[digsbo]

In some cases, I can see where you're coming from. If it weren't an emotionally charged context, maybe it would make sense to edit a piece of literature for modernity's sake, so it makes more sense to the reader. Yet I've read some translations of books which really fell flat with me because the language updates did not flow with the contents (I'm thinking specifically of a translation of Lao Tse which I intensely disliked for it being modernized).

But then on the other hand, the whole collection of Uncle Remus stories are remarkably valuable exactly because they record in writing a specific, archaic, and almost unreadable (to today's average reader) dialect of English. Change the language, and you change the whole nature of the beast.

Finally, I think that even if I agreed in part with you that edits for clarity would help the reader, in this case we've got a remarkable example of literature bringing historical and cultural tensions forward and backward over a hundred years, which gives even more impetus to Huck's internal struggle to come to terms with Jim as a person as opposed to an object. The book would not be as meaningful without the offensive language. Twain may or may not have forseen this, but would have enjoyed the uproar.

White-washing American History

[xednieht]

How Huck Fin to try and white-wash America's racist history.

Re:White-washing American History

[Jason Levine]

No, it would be like Huck to trick someone else into white-washing America's racist history for him.

And this is why the South thinks

[tekrat]

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.

Black people protest

[erroneus]

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.

Re:Black people protest

[geekoid]

yeah, this reeks of white busy body trying to help those poor black people who can't face history.

This very act is far more insulting and racist then anything in huckleberry finn

gah.

Author's intent vs. choice of words

[scgops]

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.

Re:Author's intent vs. choice of words

[Magada]

He could not have done that. The use in context is intentionally injurious to blacks and it's this injurious attitude that Twain was portraying and criticizing.
Idiot.

MOre ignorant fools

[geekoid]

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.

people prefer placid lies over ugly truths

[circletimessquare]

this dynamic is pretty much the driving force in all of politics

in a totally free market place, everyone behaves themselves (placid libertarian lie)

vs

you need a strong government heavily regulating a market to keep it fair (ugly truth)

or

everyone guaranteed the same reward leads to a happy productive society (placid communist lie)

vs

if i am going to get the same as that guy busting his ass off over there, why work at all? (ugly truth)

the truth is often ugly in this world. in fact, at times, it is very, very ugly. enough of it, and people will get depressed. this is why we tell ourselves pleasant lies, and believe them: to make our lives livable, to smile when we get up in the morning. take any central tenet of your belief system, and at it's core is a nice pleasant lie. but without that lie, you pretty much lose all motivation to wake up in the morning

us human beings are weak. we need pleasant lies, pleasant whitewashing and wallpapering over of the ugliness of reality with little pleasant ideas that simply aren't true. look at all of religion. for those of you who mock religion, i simply say that if you removed it in many people's lives, they'd just kill themselves. so let them continue on in their lie, if their belief is innocuous. yes, there are dangerous religious fundamentalists. go ahead and fight them. but leave the vast majority of believers alone: they are harmless, and destroying their beliefs only destroys their desire to live, so that makes you the greater evil than the lies they tell themselves about the afterlife and invisible sky people. we're not all made to be great logicians and philosophers. leave the simple folk alone, you are only molesting their peace and causing them pain if you think bringing home to them the truth about their simple lies is doing any good in this world. that's a pleasant lie you tell yourself, in fact, that a strident atheism is helping anyone in this world. no, its just another form of intolerant religious fundamentalism, in fact

so that's why i say this: if more people read mark twain because we cut out a word considered nasty in today's world, guess what? i'm all for it. they read great literature

of course some of you consider this horribly wrong. well guess what: your belief that not white washing ugly truths leads to a better world is a pacid lie you tell yourself, and i challenge you to understand that whitewashing the past is actually psychologically normal, and will never stop, and you should just get used to it. not because it is good, not because it is bad. because it just is, and its never going away. its a simple facet of human pscyhology and how we cope with the past: we censor it, as individuals, and as a society

American Culture

[BJ_Covert_Action]

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

Re:American Culture

[NeutronCowboy]

Uh, I agree with your conclusion, but I think you display symptoms of the exact problem you're decrying. Here, let me help you....

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.

That would actually be the Romans. You know, the place where the word "Senate" comes from.

Our people developed an entire branch of music known as Jazz.

Only if you define "our people" as also consisting of the black people in the 1920s and 1930s - which no one in polite society would admit to at that time. Not to mention that Jazz music was pretty much frowned upon in the US when it got started.

Our people blended with, reproduced with, lived with, and learned from the Native American population that we found here.

The primary interaction that Americans had with the locals was killing them. The blending, reproducing and learning from was a small subset thereof.

From them, we learned to place a vast amount of importance on the individual and independence.

Nice story, but individualism, self-reliance and independence is already found in the religion of the original settlers: hard-core protestants who believed that success in life was a sign of closeness to god, and hard work a god-approved way of getting there.

We learned an appreciation for nature, and the resources it provides (who, before us, had a national forest preservation system?)

That would be the Germans in the 19th century. You can go back even earlier if you look into more exotic places.

Our culture includes the blending of numerous ethnic communities into a veritable melting pot of ideas and values.

It's understood that a better analogy is that of a salad bowl. Blending of ethnic communities is rare, and takes a very long time. Just look at the various "-towns" in major cities.

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.

You sure about that? Because all I see is that we're just making the same stupid mistakes again. Racial profiling a la Japanese Internment act is one large scale gun assault away from happening. A lot of people are clamoring to redo the same mistakes that lead to the Great Depression. I could go on for a while.

I'd argue that the Golden Ages where never really that golden - maybe gilded for some, but it's been a pretty brutal slog for a lot of people. Again, I agree with your conclusion. I just think you might want to update your data points a bit.

Re:American Culture

[lennier]

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.

That would actually be the Romans. You know, the place where the word "Senate" comes from.

No, it was the Greeks who invented the word "democracy", and the Romans who then conquered them and took their stuff, including politics, maths and religion.

Except the grand old classical Graeco-Roman democracy was perfectly fine with basing the entire economy on slaves, conquest and crucifixion of political dissidents, so... probably not the best example of a shining city on the hill, really.

And now a word from the author...

[PinchDuck]

PERSONS attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.

The Most Important Book in American Literature

[crunchygranola]

... by American's greatest writer ... and we can't let the kids read what he actually wrote.

If the can't handle "nigger" then they aren't ready to read the story.

NPR interview from yesterday

[GodfatherofSoul]

I listened to the "author's" interview yesterday on NPR. Besides the fact that he came off as a jerk, I couldn't argue with his logic. Lots of parents get in a huff about the language and he simply wanted to introduce a cleaned up version that would make the book more accessible. The same way R-rated movies are edited down for TV broadcasts.

And, I also see how this can ruin context. One of my favorites from the 80s was a movie called "Once Bitten." The main character's friends try to forcibly check his inner thigh for a vampire bite in a high school shower. This causes a stampede of jocks running out screaming "fags in the shower!" Of course, this scene is massacred by editing on TV (and who would ever rent the unedited version?), so this scene has probably lost context for 99% of viewers forever.

awesome

[Is0m0rph]

Now the children will only here the word nigger 219 times in their favorite rap song.

Context

[Anonymous Coward]

(The following is a true anecdote that has happened to me when I was younger)

I was once asked in high school to write a short story about a man murdering an Arab in France in 1960 when there were strong racist sentiments against Arabs among the French population. The story had to be narrated from the perspective of an eye witness.
For the purpose of authenticity, I made the eye witness telling the story a French racist. I made the narrator use racist speech and express racist opinions such as referring to the Arab victim as "that dog" and expressing approval about the murder. I tried not to over-do it though, otherwise it would not have sounded natural.
The teacher asked us all to read to the entire class what we had written. When my turn came and after I was done reading I realized my classmates were just staring at me as if I had just punched someone in the face in the middle of the classroom. I expected most of them would not understand the point of the racism in my story, but I did not think they would be so stunned. I think some of them must even have thought I was actually racist.
Anyway, they were shocked... and the teacher gave me the maximum mark.

When I tell this anecdote to people, many don't understand why the narrator had to be racist. People usually tell me I had no need to make a racist narrator and what I did was wrong. I try to explain that racism was not only important in 1960 France but also a central element to the story and the murder. If I had not placed racism in my story, I would have missed an important part of the setting. But no matter how I explain it, a lot of people just don't get it. My teacher did, obviously (as the mark suggests).

Context is everything. You can't write a story set in a period of strong racism and pretend racism doesn't exist. I you want to be authentic, you need to face the facts. And if you're not authentic, your work is bad. Art in particular needs full immunity against political correctness.
But ignoring racism when authenticity requires it is one thing. It only makes your art bad.
It's a whole other thing to retroactively censor literature, particularly if it's so old it's not just considered popular culture but also historical. Now THAT is offensive.

Re:Context

[pclminion]

Huck Finn wasn't just a story set in a period of strong racism, it was WRITTEN in a period of strong racism. I really doubt that Mark Twain intended to convey any deep meaning by using the word "nigger" -- it was just one of the words one could choose from when describing certain people. The fact that the word is charged with intense meaning in modern times is not something Twain would have anticipated. So you can make an argument that the word actually distracts from what Twain intended to communicate.

In a way the same thing is happening with the Bible -- there have been numerous attempts to reword the Bible in modern language to remove anachronisms and make the meaning easier to grasp without wading through obsolete language. Is that censorship or is it more like porting software to a different architecture?

Re:Context

[audubon]

Albert Camus? Is that you?

Re:Indian, not slave, for "injun".

[thijsh]

Oh crap, you forgot to post AC... Now you're going to "Voluntary Re-Education Camp"!

Because when you're ashamed of your past...

[eepok]

Because when you're ashamed of your past, it's probably best to just change it. Why bother with educating people who read about your past (telling them about ways you and your people have changed) when you can just deceive them from the start?

Re:Indian, not slave, for "injun".

[fahrbot-bot]

Slave is bad too. The correct word is "Voluntary worker".

According to Stephen Colbert, the proper modern term is "intern".

Star Trek V

[tekrat]

I'll bet you're wondering what the heck one of the worst Star Trek movies ever has to do with the censoring of Huck Finn.

Well, I'll tell you.

In Star Trek V, there's a guy wandering about trying to remove everyone's "pain", and in doing so, he converts them to his particular cult because they feel so "healed" by the removal of the pain. But it's a sham.

Kirk correctly points out that "I need my pain. It makes me who I am."

And here we are as a society trying to do the same thing: remove something we consider painful. In the hope that we'll somehow be "healed". But it's a sham. We need our pain, it's what makes us what we are. It's what keeps our society in check. And as usual, the big-brother committee, in true "Brazil" fashion, has targeted a word, and not the real problem. Changing a word doesn't change race relations in the USA, nor does it excise xenophobia.

If anything it points out the ridiculousness of nanny-state-ism, just as much as Frank Gorshin's portrayal of a man who is black on the right side, who despises a man who is black on the left side. It's too bad our society learned nothing from Star Trek. Poor Gene. He tried so hard to explain. But nobody listened.

 

We censor stuff all the time.

[shadowrat]

We censor profanity on tv and in songs all the time. Sure, some people think it's some kind of totalitarian measure of control, but really it doesn't hurt much.

However, does the radio edit of Gold Digger (with "nigger" removed) work as well as the explicit version? I actually don't think it does. It's kind of absurd to compare Kanye to Mark Twain, but if a message is diluted or lost from something as insignificant as that song, the loss is even greater in a classic like Huck Finn.

Further one of the main points of the book is that Jim is a good man. He's the best person Huck and Tom meet and Twain wants you to know that society treats him like crap.

Slave clearly doesn't carry the same weight as Nigger otherwise it wouldn't be considered more sanitary. The concept of inserting that word only dulls the edge of what is a scathing social commentary that's right in line with the views of the people who want to remove the word. It's pretty much irony that they would do this.

Re:Orwell was an optimist

[MrMacman2u]

Actually, e-books have nothing to do with this problem. The evil comes from those who do the censoring AS WELL AS those who call for it.

If I am FORCED to accept that censorship MUST exist, I want censored versions to be just like cigarettes; a big fat warning on the package that says "Censored Version".

Not knowing if you have the censored version or not is something that will send me into a rage like no other. I ended up buying a censored version of a CD one time that had NO indication of ANY kind that it was the mauled version. That was the last CD I ever bought. I am actively offended by censorship and I want to KNOW if what I have is censored. Of course I'd greatly prefer that censored versions did not exist in the first place, but you will always have people calling for them because they can't parent and it must be "safe for the childrens".

Again, It's not the information, or the format in which it's offered that's bad, it's those that demand censorship exist that must be stopped.

Gay Slave Association of America

[TrisexualPuppy]

Our PR group has been hard at work!

Monday, March 22, 2010

GSAA Confirms Link Between Wal-Mart and The Bilderberg Group

The GSAA research division has proved a direct link between the Bilderberg Group and Wal-Mart. This link was confirmed last Saturday night when an attempt to save black shoppers from a terrorist threat was lambasted by Wal-Mart, an attack which was planned by Wal-Mart themselves.

In an attempt to revive the United States economy an attack was planned by the same strategists that successfully executed 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina. To minimize collateral damage against voting citizens, which keep Haliburton, the United States controlling body of the Bilderberg Group, in power; black American citizens were targeted. Again.

InfoWars, in conjunction with the GSAA Black Ops Division have been working on project Shield-A-Slave for the past 2 years. The project has deployed over 2500 operatives that have been recruited from the GSAA Youth League. These operatives have been placed in nearly every Wal-Mart store across America in defense of our black brothers.

On the night of 20th March 2010, a brave operative sacrificed himself in defense of our black citizens. When he was informed of a plot to harm black shoppers at the Wal-Mart he was stationed at, he calmly asked the black shoppers to leave that Wal-Mart.

According to the police, the boy picked up a public-address telephone in the Wal-Mart in Washington Township, one of two dozen accessible to the store’s customers, and said, "All black people, leave the store now." This heroic act saved 73 black people that were shopping in store at the time.

Swift retribution was brought upon the brave soul and he was arrested. Media hype was then focused on the boy as to deflect focus from the failed terrorist attempt. This was done by the same media spin group that has minimized the impact of the Full Body Scanner Project, which is funded by Wal-Mart.

About Wal-Mart:

Money Laundering arm of the Bilderberg Group.

About InfoWars:

Righteous.

About GSAA:
GSAA (GAY SLAVE ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA) is the first organization which gathers GAY SLAVES from all over America and abroad for one common goal - being GAY SLAVES.

Are you GAY ?
Are you a SLAVE ?
Are you a GAY SLAVE ?

If you answered "Yes" to all of the above questions, then GSAA (GAY SLAVE ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA) might be exactly what you've been looking for!
Join GSAA (GAY SLAVE ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA) today, and enjoy all the benefits of being a full-time GSAA member.
GSAA (GAY SLAVE ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA) is the fastest-growing GAY SLAVE community with THOUSANDS of members all over United States of America and the World! You, too, can be a part of GSAA if you join today!

Why not? It's quick and easy - only 3 simple steps!

• First, you have to obtain a copy of GAYSLAVES FROM OUTER SPACE THE MOVIE and watch it. You can download the movie (~130mb) using BitTorrent.
• Second, you need to succeed in posting a GSAA First Post on slashdot.org, a popular "news for trolls" website.
• Third, you need to join the official GSAA irc channel #GSAA on irc.gnaa.eu, and apply for membership.

Talk to one of the ops or any of the other members in the channel to sign up today! Upon submitting your application, you will be required to submit links to your successful First Post, and you will be tested on your knowl

Re:Gay Slave Association of America

[lgw]

OK, this is hilarious in context. I wonder how many /.ers these days have ever seen a GNAA troll, and can get the joke?

Re:Gay Slave Association of America

[Shakrai]

Oh c'mon mods, this isn't flamebait. At least toss him a few funny mods.

Re:Is it THAT offensive?

[cayenne8]

"When a child picks up the text of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and reads the word "nigger" I want them to take offense."

Ok, I have to ask...do that many people out there find the word nigger to be so horribly offensive?

I mean, I know a great number of black people find the word offensive (although strangely enough usually only if a non-black person uses it, they often call themselves niggers in everyday conversation), but do people of other colors find the term to be THAT offensive?

Granted, I'm a bit older, and the word was not as bad a four letter words to use. Sure, you didn't shout the word nigger when in company of black people, but in every day conversation, the word was used as a general term for black people...not as a term for putting them down, but that was just the word you used. Growing up, I pretty much thought it was just the usual regional difference in terminology. You hear negro up north, and nigger or nigra as my grandmother used to say it in the south.

I live in the south, and in general, when not in a the presence of black people, the term is still used freely as a synonym for a black person. And no...this is not a bunch of mouth breathing, uneducated rednecks. On the contrary, they are from all walks of life, and most that I am speaking off first knowledge of, are wealthy, well educated and often in places of power (yes, even governmental).

Maybe I'm answering my own question...maybe the degree of "offense" is regional too.

For the record...I'm just not offended by much of ANY language. It is, after all, just a bunch of words.

I don't feel any more offense from words like: idiot, cunt, skin flute, fuckwad, wankel rotary engine, trapazoid, mongolian cluster fuck any more than I do the word nigger.

Words are words.

Revising history, however...is a bad concept.

re Citation Provided

[jelizondo]

Watch this TED Talk and ask the your question again, but of yourself.

This is happening now, TODAY, not one or two hundred years ago...

Are the Americans ready to honor the treaties their government signed or are they continue to ask: "What? It was only the effective way to win by conquest."

Re:re Citation Provided

[lennier]

Treaties and law don't empower the winners. Life is an endless struggle for power and wealth. If they can be got the methods do not matter, and our current fetish for law is but window dressing.

One day, we will lose and a fit replacement will conquer. The idea that the few decades since WWII invalidate the lessons of thousands of years of human history is silly and vain in the extreme.

Hi there Nietzsche! How's the afterlife treating you?

Yes, well, don't keep staring into it then. Okay? Got to run, but good seeing you again old chap.

In defense of religeon.

[mosb1000]

Were you a christian? I always have to ask myself "What Bible are these people reading?". There are a lot of disturbing things in the modern christian moment. It is seemingly divorced from the Bible, but claims the Bible is of central importance. It says you shouldn't question God, but almost all the protagonists in the Bible question God at some point (even Jesus!). It claims every word of the Bible is absolutely literally true, but the Bible never makes that claim. Most of the Bible is prophecy or poetry that can not possibly be taken literally and was clearly never meant to be taken that way. The books of the new Testament contradict themselves about the details of Jesus' life on earth, and how the Church should conduct itself. When they compiled it they knew these contradictions existed and they did not see fit to edit them out. Clearly the point is that the specifics are not known and are not essential to the religion.

It doesn't even makes sense to say that a book on spiritual matters is literally true, because literal means physical and spiritual refers to things that are not physical.

Christianity (true Christianity) is about lifestyle, not what you claim to believe, Jesus says as much in the Bible (as do most of the prophets).

I can't blame you if you rejected modern christianity. Any sane person should.

Re:In defense of religeon.

[somersault]

Around the time I was doubting I realised I wouldn't worship the god of the bible even if he was real (and up until then I'd always tried to believe it, read the whole thing a couple of times, and I'd say it was mostly history, with a bit of poetry and philosophy thrown in there).

I can't take seriously the idea of someone punishing people for something he has pretty much directly caused them to do. God could set exactly how likely people are to believe in him or sin or anything like that, if the bible is correct and he is all knowing and all powerful, etc, then he would be directly responsible for the exact ratio of people who go to heaven/hell.

Thinking about things like that, and all the people who would never even learn about Christianity, made me realise that any religion which claims to punish all non believers is either man made, or has a fairly sadistic god that I wouldn't want to worship anyway.

My lifestyle is still pretty similar to how it was when I was a Christian, and I generally like Christian people (though I tried going out with one since and the difference in beliefs did end up grating). I can see the positive side of even modern religion, but I think overall the negatives outweigh the positives.

Re:I'll make you a deal

[Anonymous Coward]

And that's why Warner Brothers is far more courageous than Disney. When Disney excises the black centaur from Fantasia, removes cigarettes from Goofy's mouth, and hopes that we'll all forget about The Song of the South as long as they don't release it on a modern format.... I think I know where I'd rather spend my money.

Re:Is it THAT offensive?

[cayenne8]

"How nice that you don't take offense to words you use to describe others. Too bad you don't understand why these words are offensive or even try to elevate yourself beyond what you were taught."

I don't take offense to words used to describe me either. Say the word cracker, honkey, idiot...neanderthal around me or to me.

Doesn't get a rise out of me. I tend to thing everyone is getting WAY too PC, and wears their feelings on their sleeves. Geez, get over it, when did life become about preserving someone else's self esteem? Toughen up a little. People that call you things, aren't your friends. I don't have time for people like that. I've too busy trying to make lots of money, party with friends and get laid.

I don't have time to bother with what other people think or say if they are not my friends.

And yes...they are JUST words.

Re:Mark Twain

[jbeaupre]

I read Rand because I was curious what the hubbub was about. Make up my own mind. My conclusion was Atlas Shrugged could have been a good book, if it was 90% shorter. It would make a better short story with a cautionary point than a full novel becoming a way of life.