I re-read Huckleberry Finn last week with the idea of seeing for myself how the message would be impacted by dropping the word “nigger”; it seemed to me that the move to drop the word is more indicative of poor teaching than anything else. As others seem to be saying, the force of the book is lost if we censor the book to avoid hurting someone’s feelings. Teaching of this novel should emphasize the historical aspect; failure to do so is simply more poor teaching and catering to the proponents of censoring the book is catering to people who have most like been poorly taught. In this day and age, that is probably the consequence of PC school administrators and/or race-baiting publicity hounds. Censorship sucks and should be fought with all our vigor.
And then there’s all that Muslim-hate in The Song of Roland – and it’s so ignorant! “Their idol Termagant,” indeed! And Moors weren’t even involved in the Battle of Roncevalles! Yes, that one needs cleaning up!
I think a big part of the problem is that Mark Twain is widely (and wrongly) viewed as a kiddie author. And when schools assign it to younger kids, teachers and parents alike are reminded that “Huckleberry Finn” is not a cute little story of innocent boys frolicking on a raft. It’s a tough story, filled with hard characters and hard language.
Bottom line: teachers have to make a judgment call. Are the kids in their classes old enough and intelligent enough to understand the subject matter and the issues Twain was writing about, and why he used the words he did? If so, the kids should read EXACTLY what Twain wrote. If not, then wait a few years, and introduce the book later.
I’m not sure I’d be on board with anything like Alan Smithee’s plan of strategically knuckling-under, but I do think it’s a shame that the rest of Twain’s deeply cynical tale won’t be read because of one word. I’m not sure that one word is the most powerful and revealing thing that happens in the book.
But there’s this to say for it: there probably is some amount of knee-jerk thoughtless censorship involved in the controversy. More than that, though, the word does have a well-documented sting to it, which is a stark testament to the power a single word can have. The very impulse to censor the word teaches something very important about the way language can be used to abuse, degrade, rationalize and divide. The controversy itself makes the inclusion of the word important.
Censoring a word really only works out if you can make people forget what has been overwritten. Lot of luck there, pal. Arguably, the word has even more power when we know it’s lying there sous rature, albeit a subtler power. How about this, for having it both ways – don’t replace the word, just mark it out in black lines as though it was a redacted document, or with the same symbols we use to replace swear words:
I teach Huck Finn in a Junior (16-17 year-old) AP English class. We do read sections of it aloud, and I tend to slur over “nigger” because it does make some kids uncomfortable to hear it. I pair it with a slave narrative (Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl) so that the kids can get a feel for how different “real” slavery was. The two books together make it very clear how derogatory “nigger” was even in the antebellum era, and we talk about it. It’s very noticeable in the pages leading up to the epiphany:
But when Huck begins to reflect, he says:
Here, when he’s thinking of his friend, the word drops away. It’s an important transition: not the most subtle literature in the world, but just about right for high school.
As far as kids feeling embarrassed, I will say that many African American students are uncomfortable about their slave heritage, or at least react with feelings of shame or guilt or embarrassment when it is brought up. This is by no means universal, but it is not uncommon, and I’ve never understood it. It is something that a teacher needs to be aware of when teaching anything about early American history to African American students. One has to be careful, and set things up to avoid that reaction. I am not sure, however, that getting rid of one word will change that issue.
True, but only if they make it clear that’s what they’re doing. Even then, @#$%! is something you usually see in comic books. It destroys the severity of the language. I don’t think the black bar does anything either other than call attention to the fact that the book contains a word (219 times) that someone doesn’t want the class to read.
I have an honest, tangential question - did Hemingway really, literally write expletive over and over in his dialogue in For Whom the Bell Tolls (for instance, “I *expletive *in the milk of thy mother”)? Or did some editor ‘fix’ that for him?
So now instead of banning the book because it’s offensive, you’ll ban it because it’s embarrassing?
Remember, using the original book without at least the possibility of redaction isn’t an option in most school districts. At least not one the publishers and editors can do anything about.
I never read Huckleberry Finn in school. In fact, I haven’t read it at all, but I’m going to add it to my reading list now (as soon as I finish Moby Dick, which I’ve been working on–I’ve been on a bit of a classics jag lately.) When I was in seventh grade, we read Summer of My German Soldier by Bette Greene. This novel also contains the word nigger. Some of the copies we were given had been redacted by a previous English teacher, who had covered each instance of the word with a black Sharpie. It didn’t make any difference. We new exactly what was covered up. It was no more distracting than a typo or a misprint. The idea that we should have read a completely different book rather than use the copies with the black marks is utterly ridiculous. This was the book the teacher wanted us to study and those were the copies available.
Now the teacher who put the marks there, she was a priggish idiot (or the administrators or school board who made her do it were). But that damage was done. Should those copies have been burned and not been read by students?
I actually think black-mark redaction is preferable, since it makes the censorship more transparent, but I can see why people would prefer replacement.
Now, someone who prefers to read a censored version is probably an idiot, but each of us has every right to be an idiot in our own home. They’re probably less of an idiot than someone who prefers to read Danielle Steele or Dan Brown, but they can read those, too, if they like. It’s no one else’s business. Someone who wants to force others to read only the censored version is an evil idiot. Fortunately, ready access to the original makes them so easy to defy as to render them virtually harmless (unlike idiots who want to remove the book from schools altogether).
But people who want to ban the censored version, who object to its very existence, and who want to deny that choice to readers and teachers, well they’re hypocritical idiots. And that’s the worst kind of idiot there is.
Twain wasn’t using “nigger” to be silly, so I don’t think this does what you want it to.
What? I said the suggestion is embarrassing.
Most? Since when? It’s one of the most challenged books in the country, but this is the first time I’ve heard anybody say it’s banned from most school districts. I read it in high school, not that that proves anything.
I didn’t say you should have read a different book.
This is what we’re talking about: changing the word or blacking it out. We’re not talking about what you should have done with a book that was already defaced.
We’re talking about what censors and school districts do, not what people do in their own homes. People can do what they want with their own books. That’s not the same as censoring or rewriting them for other people.