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The Continued Censorship of Huckleberry Finn
eldavojohn writes "Over a hundred years after the death of its author, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn will be released in a censored format, removing two derogatory racial slurs: 'injun' and 'nigger.' The latter appears some 219 times in the original novel but both will be replaced by the word 'slave.' An Alabama publisher named NewSouth Books will be editing and censoring the book so that schools and parents might provide their children the ability to study the classic without fear of properly addressing the torturous history of racism and slavery in The United States of America. The Forbes Blog speculates that e-readers could provide us this service automatically. Salon admirably provides point versus counterpoint while the internet at large is in an uproar over this seemingly large acceptance of censorship as necessary even on books a hundred years old. The legendary Samuel Langhorne Clemens himself once wrote, 'the difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter,' and now his own writing shall test the truth in that today."
I want to live in a world where *everything* that makes me uncomfortable or might cause pain or conflict is excised from history. After all, if it never happened, no one can be pissed off about it--and we can all get along fine. No more racial resentment, no more ethnic conflicts, no more religious wars. We get along, we always got along, end of story. Israel and Palestine always co-existed in peace beside each other. Europeans, Africans, and Asians discovered the New world together and have lived here peacefully together ever since. Every religion is the religion of peace and always has been. "Genocide" is just an abstract concept used by fiction writers, not something that has ever happened in the real world.
Laugh if you want, but wouldn't that make for a much better world? Why focus on the pain and resentment when we can reinvent ourselves as something much better?
Sure it all involves a good dose of self-delusion, but a lot of people have improved their lives greatly with a little self-delusion. After all, no one starts down their path to self-improvement by admitting to themselves that they are an unexceptional, not particularly good or worthwhile person. They start by telling themselves "I am a good person, I can do better" even if they know deep-down that they're lying to themselves. And, quite often, the lie actually BECOMES the reality. Convincing yourself that you're a better person can actually MAKE you better. Why not apply the same principle to society as a whole?
I'm not being a troll here, I'm asking a serious question. Wouldn't we be better off for it?
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
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.
And the cover now has a big shiny sticker that says "Nigger Free!"
If you are too young to maturely handle the n-word, then you are too young to handle the implications of the story anyway.
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
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.
I live in constant fear of the Coming of the Red Spiders.
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?
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.
I'd rather you rationally disagree than irrationally agree.
do you know he's currently on the ny times best seller list?
http://www.nytimes.com/best-sellers-books/overview.html
how'd he do that? he wrote a book, said "wait 100 years before publishing", and they did, and here he is, selling a new book, in 2011
quite an impressive man
and did you know about twain and halley's comet?
http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_is_the_connection_between_Mark_twain_and_Halley's_comet
mark twain: space alien who travels via halley's comet
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
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.
Don't laugh too hard ... I've actually heard of some organizations in which someone goes on a program to try to make everybody stop referring to "master server/slave server". Trying to make someone understand that this is an industry term and they need to stop being overly sensitive can be an awfully tricky thing. (I once saw someone actually object to the use of the term "black" when it was ... get this ... descriptive of the color of an inanimate object on the grounds that it could be offensive.)
Some people seem to go out of their way to be sure that it's not possible to give offense. I find it especially sad that what is a really good depiction of what life was really like at that time is being "cleansed" so that we can all pretend that there wasn't racial tension in the South at that time.
I don't support people going around using the N word all over the place -- but this is a piece of literature, and should be allowed to stand. What next, altering Merchant of Venice so that Shylock wasn't Jewish? (I'm not supporting the anti-Semitic stereotypes, merely that the play is 400+ years old, and it's a little late for political correctness.)
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
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.
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 ."
* Q
P.S. If you don't get this note, let me know and I'll write you another.
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.
My work here is dung.
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
Motorcycles, Robots, Space Gossip and More!
... 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.
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
Now the children will only here the word nigger 219 times in their favorite rap song.
(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.
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.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
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.
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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.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........