Rewriting books is doubleplusungood

[MrsJoseph]

Originally Posted by Redcard

I'd rather the book not be taught at all than changed and taught.

Twain deliberately chose words that would make the reader uncomfortable. In fact, the more you get to know the characters, the more uncomfortable it should be. The word "nigger" dehumanizes people and Twain's characters are very human. Twain WANTS you to feel offended for Jim. Twain wants you to have the same revelation that Huck does during the book. All of this is taken away by "sanitizing." Like another poster said, without that, Huck Finn is just another coming of age story. There are millions of them.

book sanitizers

[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by luqmaninbmore

While I agree that the term "injun" is in today's context an insult, I have to ask you: preferred by whom? By the people they describe or by white people trying to distance themselves from the facts of history and (possibly) the deeds of their ancestors?

Preferred by most of the Native people I've met online, and several racial activism blogs. I gather there's no one absolute answer, and some no doubt prefer Indian. Some prefer specific tribal labels. From the outside, it looks a bit like the debates about the terms "Black" vs "African-American;" I try to sort out which version an individual prefers and go with that.

[boxcorner]

Here's a further twist to this story:

After the N-word row, another finger-wagging assault on poor old Mark Twain – for smoking

"In this Twain-targeting censorship, it was not the word “nigger” that was airbrushed from history, but a cigar ... Because Holbrook spends virtually the entire 90 minutes of the play chomping on a cigar, just as Twain did for most of his life, and these days smoking in public is considered even more morally depraved than uttering the N-word."

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/br...ld-mark-twain/

[Joe Minton]

Sam Clemens knew what he was doing and he did it well. The fact that many find reasons for not reading him or for not educating their children about what he was trying to say may be important. Truth should not be controversial; something is wrong when it is.

I learned to read on my mother's lap at the age of four. My favorite character was "Little Brown Coco." He was featured as a tabloid-sized cartoon on the back page of "My Weekly Reader." His mother was named "Mammy" and wore a red and white spotted kerchief on her head, a full print dress and a white apron. The little brown boy was forever trying to find a way to steal a watermelon from the garden. Mammy would always prevail and chase him away with her broom.
I loved that little boy, and still do. I did not know that he was made a nigger so they could attribute bad behavior and not have to admit that little white boys might like to steal watermelons. I didn't steal watermelons; I stole grapes.
I would have admired him just as much if he had been white or, like the boy who swallowed the sea, Chinese.

It was later, when I was seven, that I learned about racism. The event that brought it to my attention and conscience was something between white men, including my father, and a black man at a gas station. I witnessed and rejected racism that day; I also learned to no longer fear my father and his leather belt, but that is another story. I am preparing to write about that day and until recently struggled about using that word, you know the one, the n-word, the nigger word.
Given the time (1948) and the circumstances, this important event in my life cannot carry its full weight if I do not quote those stupid, fear-filled, white men. There was nothing polite about what happened that day and it should not be softened. I want anyone who might read what I write to face the matter squarely. It was offensive as the truth often is. It would be a dereliction to soften what was said as what was said fully exposed the bigotry, fear, subsequent anger and stupidity of those men.

Racism remains in America, not a little racism, a lot of racism and much of it in the South where they still fly Rebel flags. Don't try to tell me it isn't there for I know better. These days, racist euphemisms abound and one can see most of them in discussions about our current president, such as: not one of us, a Kenyan, a Muslim, a socialist – call him anything but nigger because we can’t do that anymore.

Remember the movie "Sounder." The movie had the father going to jail for a year because he stole a ham and some sausages to feed his family. The reality in much of the South was that black men were arrested on trumped charges so they could be put to work as virtual slaves. I won't go into details of this practice but the book version of Sounder implied it: the father spent three years as a slave until he was injured such that he was of no further economic use to his captors.
This chain-gang form of slavery continued until around 1938 in, I believe, Alabama.

We Americans have much to answer for and our continued and barely disguised racism is at the top of the list. So, I say, do not use the nigger word; I don't. But -- do not leave it out when it needs to be left in.

Joe Minton

[Kali Yuga]

FYI, the Old Gray Lady (or whatever its nickname is) has a few articles on this:

http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate...nn?ref=opinion

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/06/op...=1&ref=opinion

[Belfaborac]

Very well said Mr. Minton!

[boxcorner]

[whitearrow]

Originally Posted by luqmaninbmore

Of course, Native American is often not a self-description but a label invented by white people to integrate indigenous peoples into the grand narrative of Eagleland. I think its telling that movements that spring from the grass roots of Indian life name themselves things like "American Indian Movement" or refer to "Indian Country." Even in officialdom, the national museum dedicated to the indigenous peoples of the Americas is the "Museum of the American Indian."

And we have the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Indian Child Welfare Act, among other official uses of the word.

[jgaiser]

And Ron Powers doesn't think much of it either.

[Mark Twain biographer. Second link to CNN]

[Iphinome]

Originally Posted by gastan

There is everything wrong with being politically correct. The term itself implies a condition imposed by others against your better judgment. It shows a sheep mentality which "goes with the flow." It implies a weak willed wuss that doesn't have enough backbone to have any principles of their own, right or wrong as they may be. It leads to ridiculous and outrageous situations such as banning books.

This is the argument of someone who wants their own prejudices reinforced, who refuses to speak on neutral terms. People who's arguments are so weak they need the terms rather than the ideas to speak for them. The people who won't use words like pro-life and pro-choice because if they can throw in a word that insults the other side then they have no argument. Neutral terms, the politically correct ones avoid implicature.

Rather than being a "weak willed wuss" it shows someone willing to discuss merits rather than connotations. This is useful.

Censoring the past is not so useful however and censoring art is I think unkind to the artist.

[gastan]

Originally Posted by Iphinome

This is the argument of someone who wants their own prejudices reinforced, who refuses to speak on neutral terms.

Attempting to demonize me by implying that I'm a prejudicial bully won't work. Sorry. My comments were specifically directed at your attitude illustrated by your statement, "There is nothing wrong with being politically correct now." I did not comment on the methods of debate or the theme of ideas vs words, only on the idea expressed by your statement. Political correctness does have something wrong with it. It has tangible results, very often negative results, in the real world -- book banning being only one example.

[Hellmark]

Originally Posted by Fastolfe

Well, and of course there's Agatha Christie's "Ten little n-words" that got renamed "And then there were none"

Well, if you have ten things people find offensive, and take away what is offensive, there would be none left!

[Fastolfe]

The famous controversial comic book Tintin in the congo depicts black people with the usual prejudices of the day: shiny black skin, caricatural faces, and mildly derogatory names such as Snowball. No wonder, it was drawn in 1930 by a Belgian, whose country owned the Congo at the time. Duh...

This one can't be "cleansed". There are offensively-drawn black people from start to finish. Should it be taken off the shelves outright? Of course not. Stupid knee-jerk anti-racist groups would want no better, but intelligent ones should use it to educate children on how people of the past century viewed different people.

Counter-productively, If Tintin in the Congo disappears or Huck Finn becomes PG-13, today's kids won't be able to learn what people of the past did to their fellow human beings, and what they themselves shouldn't be doing. Not to mention, they'll never learn to recognize irony when they see it, as in the case of Mark Twain: whoever thinks the use of the word nigger in Huck Finn is gratuitous should take lessons in rhetoric.

It's not limited to racism either: for example, since the end of WW2, Jewish organizations the world over have lobbied for a strict ban on Nazi literature and memorabilia, as well as criminalizing antisemitic speech - and they got it in many countries. The net result is, there has never been so much antisemitism around since the 20s. Why? Because people are attracted to forbidden things.

Let speech be free, and let education and intelligence help people make sense of it. If you ban it or clean it, whatever you banned or cleaned will rear its ugly head again some day.

[analogdrift]

Originally Posted by Garp

His main argument was that Twain is being taken out of the classroom solely to his usage of this one word.

Originally Posted by Garp

However, the issue is that the book is not being taught in schools. And it's due to those 219 words.

Is there evidence to support that argument? I do see Huckleberry Finn at number five on the American Library Association's list of The 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 1990–2001, but how often does a challenge result in the removal of a book from a library or a curriculum? An attempt to bar Huckleberry Finn from a public school would fall to a challenge in court.

Bowdlerization of books is pathetic, but let people do what they will.

Truncate your text,
Bind your own mind—
Literature soars,
Leaves you behind.

[boxcorner]

Originally Posted by MrsJoseph

I would say you are 99% right. "Injun" would be considered a dialect spelling, not so much an insult. The insult would be "redskin" or "red" in the south. I can assume that someone can and will be offended by "injun" if they happen to hear it, but if they hear it in the south, 9 times out of 10 the speaker was saying "Indian" (in their own way).

So, depending in which era and state someone was living, if they shouted, "There's a red under the bed", upon opening their front door they might be faced with either a lynch-mob, the FBI, or a CSI forensics team - having misheard "there's red" - arriving to determine its nature. The subtleties of the English language never cease to astound me.