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"This week, Publishers Weekly reported that a coming edition of Mark Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn” will omit racially-sensitive language, like the n-word, which it will replace with the word slave."
I'll be the first to admit that the new additions will be much easier to read. Even as a child I remember feeling uneasy when we read the book aloud in class because of the N-word. Back then I new it was a bad thing to call some one and had a slight idea why. As an adult and knowing the true implications that word outrages me. Do I believe them censoring Mark Twain is a step in the right direction? Not at all.
Erasing the word from the book doesn't change history. It doesn't change how and why it was used. All i think it does Is make people fell better. But the last thing we need to do is "fell better" about that embarrassing part of our history. I have no problem with Jonathan studying the book with the N-word in it when he gets to that age if it teaches him why it's wrong. Isn't that the lesson it's supposed to teach anyway? If he feels uneasy and cringes, good, it means I did something right. Right?
What do you guys think?
2012? Seriously? I survived Y2K, 9/11, 6/6/6, 9/9/9, H1N1, & Swine Flu. BRING IT ON!!!
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That's a tough one. I hate words like the "n" word; however, in the context of the time of the piece, they make sense. That's how people talked during the time of Tom Sawyer/Hukelberry Finn. Sadly, it's how many talk now. We can't erase our hateful past and or present by changing some words in a book. I'd be curious to know who is driving the censorship. It's not the words themselves – it is the feelings and intent that back up the words. I would think that as a high school teacher who was teaching one of those books, having words in there would spark discussions of racism and hate. It happened – and I don't think we can make it go away by sanitizing the past. It continues to happen, and instead of pretending it doesn't exist by hiding examples of it, perhaps we should meet it head on.
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That's a tough one. I hate words like the "n" word; however, in the context of the time of the piece, they make sense. That's how people talked during the time of Tom Sawyer/Hukelberry Finn. We can't erase our hateful past by changing some words in a book. I'd be curious to know who is driving the censorship.
It was me, I'm sorry!
Just kidding, I promise you whoever is the driving force behind this is someone who's never written ONE novel, let alone made the many contributions Mark Twain (aka Samuel Langhorne Clemens) has to the literary world.
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The catholic schools I went to avoided the situation by not putting it on the reading list…I can remember the only Mark Twain ever on the reading lists were Tom Sawyer and A Conneticuit Yankee in King Arthur's Court. I think I read Huck Finn on my own and thought to myself there was NO WAY this was going to be read in school. Same thing w/the American Civil War, for some reason the American History syllabus never quite covered American history leading up to the Civil War…Same thing in high school, they studied either world history or european history.
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I agree with Pynki, I think they should leave well enough alone. Perhaps a few words in the forward would suffice to explain that this book was banned in some schools and why. I believe that changing it and replacing that word with something safer is not accomplishing anything. Like Whammies said, depending on who or what is the driving force behind this could change my mind about editing this book. This is just such a slippery slope, I don't think we should just CHANGE author's words because of political correctness. The word in question evokes some very deep emotions but it is relavent to the time period and context of Huck Finn and I think that MT is rolling over in his grave right now.
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I'm not sure when I read Huckleberry Finn – I believe it was in high school.
I often wonder how far we've come vis a vis racism, discrimination, and our other xenophobic reactions. It still remains an issue. People fear and hate that which is different. So we may erase the "n" word from Mark Twain, but I wonder – will we also go sanitize all of the works that denigrate women, gay people, people of different cultures, and even fat people? Here's the problem as I see it. People become remarkably smug and self-congratulatory when they think that they've shown something outside of the cultural norm. Brokeback Mountain comes to mind. Yeah – it was a good movie, but if you took out the elements of homosexuality what do you have? A Nicholas Sparks movie, that's what. Was it worthy of all of the awards it won, or were people caught up in the self-congratulatory schlock of "look what we've done – it's SO IMPORTANT?" That whole attitude continues to set things apart. Look! We've made a movie about homosexual cowboys and treated it sensitively. That makes us sensitive because we took something different and pretended it wasn't! Look! We make a television show about two obese people who fall in love! Aren't we open minded? Congratulate us! Look! We're removing the "n" word from Huckleberry Finn! See how liberal and sensitive we are? How sensitive is it, really, when by congratulating ourselves for our open-minded tolerance, we continue to marginalize that which is "different" by our very attitudes about it?
This kind of crap doesn't fix problems, as far as I see it. It contributes to them. Instead, why not make our media and commercials more accurately reflect our society's population without making a big deal about it. Instead of isolating it and making it an entire plot line or the entire story, why wouldn't what we see on television, in movies, and even in advertisements just reflect the population. A few gay couples. A few straight couples. Interracial couples. People of all sizes. Unattractive people. Nuanced people. Our entertainment media turns people into single note characters who have only that one thing about them emphasized. Of course we stereotype people – it is what we are shown in the shows we watch, the movies we see, the books we read. The bottom line is that most people have a mix of things that make them who they are. It isn't just that they are fat or gay or black or a womanizer or a jerk or a pollyanna. It's that they are a complex mix of such things. We can't fix what ails us by removing texture from our society. Instead of smoothing it out – maybe we ought to just focus on people being who they are without drawing conclusions about them based on one or two things such as the color of their skin, the size of their a$$es, or their sexual orientation.
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I'm sure were he alive, Mark Twain would have a few choice words to say on the matter, but who knows in the current environment, he himself would've been demonized as a hate mongerer. I was listening to a director's commentary for Family Guy a few months ago and there was an Archie Bunker reference in one of the episodes. Seth McFarlane pointed out that in light of all the battles he has w/the FCC and Standards & Practices that All in the Family would NOT have been made today, because people today (in the general public, Washington and hollywood ) are NOT SMART ENOUGH to figure out satire and parody. He rightly pointed out that as it is All in the Family is not really shown in reruns anywhere and if it is….it's only shown after 9 or 10pm. In a related point, there's an Family Guy episode that has a "cut away" to Peter Griffin as Huck Finn on a raft w/Jim….it's probably on YouTube.
Didn't the powers that be at one point demand clothing be painted on the Sistene Chapel ceiling?
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SirusXm
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I am kind of mixed about his whole censership thing over certain words that are considered offensive by some but not words that are considered by others. Where does the line end as far as offensive words. And to an extent, who can say them. If I, a white person, were to say the n-word to a black I would be in a lot of trouble, especially if I had use it in my former profession. Yet while working then I heard the young black males calling each other it all the time.
Now to use an example of Mel Brooks who has been critized for being a Jew and using Nazi's as plot points for comic relief. When asked he said, (paraphrasing) "When you make fun of them their views become a joke and they become irrelevant."
The point is if you point out a word or phrase as being "extremely bad" and you forbid people from saying it then it just feeds into it continuing being a bad word where people keep using it.
How many words that were used a hundred or more years ago just faded from use being replaced by others. Maybe if worse words?
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Censorship is wrong, period. Where is this stupid PC crap going to end?
Brave New World is upon us.
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With a whole lot of 1984 thrown in
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**** like this hampers creativity why do anything if it will be changed from the intended vision, /angry.png' class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':rolleyes:' />
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The point is if you point out a word or phrase as being "extremely bad" and you forbid people from saying it then it just feeds into it continuing being a bad word where people keep using it.
Yes. We give words a lot more power than they ought to have. And when we get all uptight about a word, then it gives it even more weight and power. Human beings are crazy.
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I never believe in censorship, I see there are schools that have pulled the Little House books from the shelves because they say Indians and make reference to them in a bad way. These were true life books and the way people felt was real. People in the old west were afraid of Native Americans with good reason, the Indians were fighting back against us for all we did to them.
Anyway that was my rant on censorship and though Im veering off the mark twain topic, i think you get it, that was how people talked then and that's why its there, my school never had us read mark twain ever. I read them on my own.
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You know there has been a lot of Mark Twain talk lately because they finally released either an autobiography or officially authorized biography of the man recently…only because he wanted it released 100 years after his death (I guess so that no one would go after anyone in his immediate family….lol). I'd read a couple of biographies on him and he was quite an interesting character, later becoming the archetype for the modern day curmudgeon.
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The funny thing is – I have several black friends and they just laugh. Whites cannot use the "N" word but Blacks can. Think about that. They use it all the time, yes they do, between themselves. It's actually another word they use instead of "DUDE".
The problem is – either the word is OFF LIMITS FOR ALL or it is not off limits for all.
I mean "****" (wow – censored) "H. O. N. K. Y.", SEE! Even that word is "BAD" ….. (I rest my case.) which is basically their version of the N word for whites. Yes it is. It's not good when a white person gets called, "****" or "Salt".
Are we going to ask that **** – SALT – or what ever be not used? Trust me it would/will never be brought up, because it would be a dead-end request. – AKA – Never going to happen!
This is just subtle History Revision.
Certain Muslems want the Jewish Consentration Camps erased from history books. This was not bad thing to them, Jews killed by Hitler. In some countries, like Britian .. ya Britian … this History of WWII is being ERASED FROM THE HISTORY BOOKS.
When does censorship stop? After we sterilize all of history so it's just .. well names and dates and that's it … NO HISTORY.
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I heard that the person behind this was a middle aged, southern, white, female publisher who claims her only goal was to make the literature available to a larger audience. I'm throwing up the whitewash flag. /dry.png' class='bbc_emoticon' alt=';)' />
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