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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'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?
My work here is dung.
And the cover now has a big shiny sticker that says "Nigger Free!"
"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
Says the guy who can't write nigger.
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.
I think you are misquoting that book.
My NewSouth Books edition of 1984 doesn't have that paragraph in there at all.
We are at war with Eurasia. We have always been at war with Eurasia.
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?
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.
I am officially gone from
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."
Knowledge = Power
P= W/t
t=Money
Money = Work/Knowledge so the less you know the more you make
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!
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.
(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.
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.
Free Martian Whores!
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.