The Neutering Of An American Classic

Full disclosure - though it was semi-required reading in my school, meaning we received lists of classics and had to choose a certain number to read over the course of a school year and write reports on them, I have never actually read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in its entirety. I know what it's about, I've read bits and pieces, but I've never really sat down and read the whole thing. I should. I have it on the book shelf behind me right now because even my British husband was required to read it in school it's that important a book.

Before I continue, I am also going to state that this blog is being written by a 37 year old woman who has a mixed race grandmother. I am not a racist. I do not approve of the word "nigger" and have no use for the word in day to day conversation or writing. However, as an adult, I am not going to sit here and call it "the n word" if I am going to write an essay about it. If you can't handle it in even this context, stop reading now.



This article  has managed to piss me right the hell off. To sum it up, new editions of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn are going to replace the word "nigger" with "slave". Let that sink in. I'm going out for a cigarette so that I can collect my thoughts on the matter and write about everything that is wrong with this without throwing something.

Much better. I shall continue now.

Mark Twain's classic is a classic still read today in part because it was critical of the racist attitudes in his own time. To go in and whitewash his work is to weaken the point being made. For the modern reader, the point is driven home more strongly with the use of the word "nigger" because it is a word that we don't throw around as comfortably as people did while Twain was alive. It is probably more important to keep the offensive word  in our time as it ever was, because it affords a teacher the opportunity to show his or her students how far we've come in racial attitudes with a stark comparison and contrast to the past.

Then we arrive at an even bigger problem, which is censorship and the blatant altering of words written by a man who could write just about everyone in the past 200 years under the table. Changing something written by any published author, for any reason without the author's approval is bad enough. Changing something written by Mark Fucking Twain is two steps away from a Nazi book burning party. Where does it end? Who has that right? Those are the words he wrote, and it is not only arrogant to change them, but disrespectful to anyone that writes.

Political correctness is a concept that I abhor. If I am going to read a novel written in a certain time period, I want to get a feel for that era, not someone else's idea of what that era should have been like. I don't want for some "do-gooder" to come in and change it because they cannot handle reading something in context and taking it for what it is. This book is a part of history, and history should not be viewed through rose coloured glasses. Nothing good can come from that. If we remove the raw realities of our past from works of literature and history books, we are only moving backwards as a society. We cannot learn from history if we go about changing it and sugar coating it. Doing so renders its study useless.

Let's also give children a bit of credit. Reading a word like "nigger" in the context of its time and place is not going to turn them into racists that throw the word around like they would "please" or "thank you". If parents and teachers are doing it right, it will have the opposite, and thus, desired effect. Are we so lazy as a society that we cannot teach children right from wrong in a way other than manically shielding them from the wrongs by wrapping them in layers of bubble wrap? Is this what we have really become?