17 January 2011
Update:
John McIntyre of the You Don’t Say blog has an excellent post on the topic:
One of the great moments in that novel is the point at which Huck recognizes, confronts, and rejects the casual racism in which he has been brought up. [...] The things that word stands for are central to the book, and if Huck can face them, so should we be able to. Besides, if a taboo word cannot appear even in a classroom, subject to analysis and study, then we have granted it a power beyond our control, and that cannot be a good thing.
Original (8 January 2011):
As many of you have probably heard, the publisher NewSouth Books is coming out with an edition of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn that edits out the words nigger and Injun, in the former case substituting the word slave. The stated intentions of the publisher are noble; the edition is an attempt to get the classic, which is perhaps the greatest American novel of the nineteenth century, back into schools that decline to teach it because of the presence of those words in the text. But the actual effect will likely be negative, glossing over and making more palatable the most evil aspect of American history.
G. L. at the Economist’s Johnson blog has an excellent discussion of why this well-intentioned edition is not a good thing. You can’t address racism unless you can discuss it, and what is needed is not a bowdlerized edition, but rather one with accompanying teaching aids and lesson plans for how to appropriately and effectively deal with the word when reading and discussing the novel in a classroom. The right answer is education, not the deliberate fostering of ignorance.
