Frontispiece in: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Tom Sawyer's Comrade) / by Mark Twain. New York : Charles L. Webster and Co., 1885, c1884.
Last week, Hanna and I woke up to a story on public radio about a new expurgated edition of Huckleberry Finn in which the word “nigger” is replaced with the word “slave.” (The word “injun” is also being removed, though the stories I’ve read did not say what will take its place.) Since then, a zillion folks on the interwebs have blogged about the story (see below), so I’m a little late in the news cycle here. But I still wanted to weigh in with a few “first impressions” from my perspective as both a librarian and historian … and in light of last week’s post on fundamentalist history. Then I thought I’d open the floor for discussion; I’ll provide a few prompts at the end of the post.
So for those of you who aren’t familiar with the details of what’s happened, Benedicte Page of The Guardian (UK) provides a good overview. Basically, an Alabama-based publisher, NewSouth Books, is publishing an edition of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain in which they have replaced the word racist slurs with more neutral words. The publisher argues that this change in vocabulary will allow for wider adoption of Twain’s text in school curricula, since Huck Finn has been one of the most consistently-challenged books assigned to students in American classrooms (#14 on the American Library Association’s Top 100 Banned/Challenged Books: 2000-2009). The Twain scholar who edited the new volume, Dr. Alan Gribben of Auburn University (Montgomery, Alabama), chose to make the changes due to his own discomfort in the classroom
Gribben said he had decided on the move because over decades of teaching Twain, and reading sections of the text aloud, he had found himself recoiling from uttering the racial slurs in the words of the young protagonists. “The n-word possessed, then as now, demeaning implications more vile than almost any insult that can be applied to other racial groups,” he said. “As a result, with every passing decade this affront appears to gain rather than lose its impact.”
“We may applaud Twain’s ability as a prominent American literary realist to record the speech of a particular region during a specific historical era,” Gribben added, “but abusive racial insults that bear distinct connotations of permanent inferiority nonetheless repulse modern-day readers.” (The Guardian)
Angus Johnston, an historian of student activism and advocate of student organizing for social change has an excellent two-part counterpoint to this perspective on teaching difficult texts and difficult history (see The “N-Word” and White Anti-Racist Pedagogy and The “N-Word” and White Anti-Racist Pedagogy, Part Two). He writes at his blog, Student Activism, that teaching about racism and other forms of social injustice in the classroom — particulary if one happens to be a member of a privileged group (i.e. a white person teaching about racism, a man teaching about sexism, a straight person discussing homophobia) — is both scary and essential.
As a person who teaches American history on the college level, I address the country’s traumatic racial past in my classrooms on a regular basis. And as a white person who teaches American history in classes made up primarily of students of color, I come to such moments with a particular perspective and a particular set of challenges.
You can’t teach American history in any serious way without talking bluntly about lynching, about slavery, about anti-immigrant sentiment, about malign policies toward Native Americans, about the deployment of racism as a tactic of terrorism and a instrument of social control. But for a white professor in a mostly-not-white class, such blunt talk can be not just awkward but perilous.
wtfhellokitty, one of the folks I follow on Tumblr, posted an excellent analysis of the situation titled “White privilege is being able to erase and edit someone else’s record of your wrongdoing and repackaging it as ‘more accessible to a wider audience.’” In it she writes,
[Y]oung readers will have reactions, but they should learn about the whole story of HF. It is not up to them to make final decisions on curriculum. (We should allow them to express their opinions, of course.) This book will not be the first introduction of the N word to most Black kids in the U.S. No need to shield them. Yes to educating them. And it is up to adults, teachers, school admins, parents, and other primary caregivers to educate the kids. Have conversations and discussions about the book, race, and all the messiness that lies in between.
There’s a world of difference hearing the N word said aloud and reading the word on the printed page. I agree that it sounds and feels horrible at book readings and lectures. But it seems vital that the original word remain on the pages in context for all to see. Would Samuel Clemens really adjust his language if speaking to a modern audience? Yes, but he also wouldn’t write HF.
As a person who thinks about questions of censorship, access and history on both a personal and professional basis, my initial reactions to this story are
1. Erasing hurtful words that were already written is categorically not the same as choosing not to use them in the first place. If a teacher or a student or a shop clerk or an elected official used a racial slur in our present-day context when referring to another person, then the speaker should absolutely be challenged concerning their word choice. Today, we widely recognize “nigger” to be a dehumanizing word with intimate connections to America’s history of race-based slave labor and race-based discrimination. No White person, certainly, should use that word in reference to another human being (as a White woman myself, I can’t speak to the politics of re-appropriation here, although I do believe in general that it’s possible to reclaim words — “lesbian”? “queer”? “bitch” anyone? — if you are part of the group against whom the word was used).
However, when we take a text that has already been written and change the language to conform to our present-day understanding of what words are appropriate, we are not being anti-racist. We’re actually supporting the erasure of racism from literature and from history. This is the opposite of anti-racism. This is magical thinking about the past that imagines a history of America where white people we in the present-day believe were not bigoted would not have used language we now understand to be racist. But of course they did. Sometimes, in the case of Mark Twain, it was to capture vernacular speech — but sometimes it was in earnest. Human beings are complicated, flawed individuals and “good” people can still hold extremely prejudiced or blind beliefs. Which is, in part, why people in social justice work talk so incessantly about the concept of privilege. It’s far too simplistic to think of people in clear-cut categories of “racist” and “not-racist,” “good” and “bad.”
As Johnston put it, “If you can’t handle that kind of a discussion, you have no business teaching history in such an environment. Period.”
2. Official censorship is rarely the answer to dealing with stuff we dislike, and selective editing on a personal level isn’t so hot either. I became a librarian in part because I believe in access to information, which helps us develop knowledge and understanding about the world. People across the political spectrum (radical feminists as well as constitutional originalists) have responded to ideas and language and images they find threatening by calling for those offensive things to be made illegal, or removed from public spaces. What NewSouth publishers is doing, assuming they’re making it clear in the printed volume that they have altered the text, is perfectly legal and I don’t think anyone should stop them from doing it. As an historian, the fact that such an altered text appears at all is a type of historically-contextual commentary on how we, as a society, are struggling to deal with the sins of the past. I just happen to think it’s a damn poor way of dealing.
At the same time, I can see future historians and literary scholars of 21st century America drooling over the emerging debate about the existence of this book. It’ll be proposed as a dissertation topic sooner rather than later! So bring it on, I say.
Just please for goodness sake don’t adopt it as a classroom text! (Unless you’ll be reading it alongside the original text.)
With that, I’ll open the floor to Harpylings to discuss. What were your initial thoughts on hearing about Dr. Gribben’s work? If you’ve taught and/or studied Huck Finn in a classroom setting, how was the language and/or racism within the novel dealt with in class? What do you think the existence of this new version says about how we as a culture are dealing (or not dealing) with difficult aspects of our collective past?
If you can’t or won’t discuss historical context when you’re teaching a 19th century novel, you are a giant teaching FAIL. Whitewashing a text so that you don’t have to tackle the upsetting bits is dishonest and a waste of everyone’s time.
What’s been interesting to me in this debate is how many of my conservative friends, especially Southerners are all outraged by “ZOMG CENSORSHIP!!1!” but for all the wrong reasons. They’re coming from a place of jackass white privilege—they simply can’t handle it when someone says white people shouldn’t use objectionable language. Because, y’know, it’s their Constitutional right .
PS I was NOT taught Huck Finn , although I had to read Tom Sawyer more than once in grade school.
Read Huck Finn in Junior High for English class. No long lasting damage from reading that word or any other slur contain therein. Reading Romeo & Juliet as a HS freshman didn’t cause me to contemplate (fake or real) suicide as a viable alternative either.
I can’t quite fathom why people are so uncomfortable with this word; repulsed, I get, but in it’s context I find it more offense to delete it as if it never happened.
Should we also pretend women were treated as equals in HF? Where does the revisionist philosophy stop? What does that tell us about the world today?
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by audreybayley. audreybayley said: Expurgating “Huck Finn”: A few thoughts on hurtful words – The …: … text in school curricula, since Huck Fin… http://bit.ly/ib32bJ [...]
I have no new thoughts to add to the discussion but I would like to say that I agree with this statement by you, anna:
“when we take a text that has already been written and change the language to conform to our present-day understanding of what words are appropriate, we are not being anti-racist. We’re actually supporting the erasure of racism from literature and from history.”
I believe it’s the worst thing we can do for future generations… to pretend like the uglier parts of our past didn’t exist…
I haven’t had any conversations like BeckySharper relates personally, but I do think it illustrates the problem with treating this as a censorship problem without understanding the racism issues. I think it’s important not to gloss over racism, sexism, classism, etc-isms in classrooms (at any level, with age-appropriate content and communication, kids can grapple with these ideas — most of them already deal with it on a daily basis!).
My guess (albeit from my own perspective as a White person) is that the folks who are extremely uncomfortable with the word per se are White folks who haven’t come to terms with their own racism and/or racism in the culture at large. With the history of racism in this country. My guess is that Black people who object to, for example, a White teacher reading the word aloud in class are responding not just to the word but the context it was read in. For example, a teacher who was refusing to deal with the racism in the text. In that context, I can see how kids might grab hold of the use of the word “nigger” as offensive when actually they’re responding to a larger climate of ignored inequality.
I think part of the problem behind this is the idea that HF is a childrens’ book. It’s not. Tom Sawyer was written for children/YA; Huck Finn was not.
This is not to say that young people shouldn’t read it, but I think a a lot of the furore is all “THINK OF THE CHILDREN!” Because children are best kept ignorant of our horrible racial past, so they don’t notice our horrible racial present.
I think the world would be a better place if we got away from the idea of “protecting” children from inequality and instead thought about how we could create safe(r) spaces for them to discuss the inequalities they experience, and give them tools to analyze and criticize.
While I think forcing kids to watch the evening news with graphic depictions of the violence of war (for example) is a bad idea, it’s an adult FAIL to imagine that no children experience war (or racism!) and therefore to ignore it is to protect them through ignorance. When adults ignore those things, kids learn they’re taboo and frightening topics that adults aren’t willing to handle. Which is a really, really bad message to send.
We certainly wouldn’t literature to challenge, shock, provoke, or move readers to any other emotional reaction other than a pleasant sense of calm, now would we?
“…the fact that such an altered text appears at all is a type of historically-contextual commentary on how we, as a society, are struggling to deal with the sins of the past. I just happen to think it’s a damn poor way of dealing.”
I was having this exact conversation with fellow librarians the other day, and this was one of the points I made. It’s an interesting cultural moment, but I think that teachers (and librarians!) should be treating it as a very bad option for dealing with problematic subject matter.
Mind you, few teachers (and even fewer librarians) would embrace the bowdlerisation of a culturally important text. It’s one of the things that I love about our profession. I suspect that the reason this is on everyone’s radar is because most people who are likely to be teaching or distributing this text find it ridiculous and outrageous. Gives me hope.
Oh, and the questions themselves:
We read it in school in the late ’60′s. I loved it then and have re-read it many time since. Huck is an extraordinarily honest character, even when it causes him pain to be that way.
Literature is as much a piece of history as any other primary document, and any attempt to alter or expurgate it to suit the tastes of later readers is despicable-and dangerous.
I never read Huck Finn in school. However, my 9th grade English teacher (a white woman in her 20′s) actually taught a poem that is specifically about the poet’s experience being called “nigger” and the word is the the poem in full. I remember being surprised by her choice but none of us were traumatized by the experience. The black kids in class seemed to be pleased to have an experience specific to them included and shared their own experiences with the word. Overall I thought it was a positive learning experience for the whole class.
What I don’t understand is why teachers can’t simply go over some of the same points that were raised in this post, and then teach the book as-is. I’m pretty sure that’s how it went when I had to read the book for a class in high school. I think discussing objectionable content either before or while students are reading said content is the way to go. I mean, is Huck Finn ever taught WITHOUT a discussion or mention regarding the n word? I seriously hope not!
However, I suppose all this is dependent on whether a teacher chooses to teach the text in the first place, which itself is dependent on whether the teacher is willing to give a lecture/lead a discussion on an uncomfortable subject.
I translate talks on various topics, frequently including racism, every week, from English to Spanish, live.
This past week I ran into a new issue. A speaker I had not yet worked with, who is a black man, used the word Black to describe race, which I translated to the word negro/negra depending on gender.* He didn’t have much knowledge of Spanish and asked me about it afterwards. He was made uncomfortable by my translation.
I bring this up to illustrate just how troubling the use of the N word is, and not as if you didn’t already know, harpies. Our history and present of racism is a huge gaping wound.
I don’t justify Gribben’s decision with this little story, only point to one possible “why”. I think wtfhellokitty’s is assessment is right.
*BTW Spanish speakers please help me with this one, as some of you have in the past!
@rodriguez: Yes, that’s always been a quirk of English-Spanish translation that I’ve never really known how to deal with. Negro/a doesn’t have the iffy connotations in Spanish that it does in English. I remember translating some poems by the Afro-Cuban poet Nicolás Guillén, and the endearment “mi negrito/a” kept popping up. I wound up just translating it as “my sweetie” because I simply couldn’t think of a way to render it literally that wouldn’t sound awful to English-speakers (“my little blackie?” “my little darkie?” Yikes.)
Sometimes in Spanish I’ve used “Afro-Americano” or “Afro-whatever” (-cubano, -brazileño, -dominicano) but those seem oddly long and pedantic in Spanish, and people tend to think I’m just being excessively precise or politically correct.
So, yeah. Not sure what to do about that, really.
I’m sorta stuck, I think. Half the audience are native Spanish speakers, and I translate for them. The other half are not, but are mostly people of color. Some of them listen to me while I translate, sometimes just to learn a few words of Spanish.
I hadn’t really considered what my words sound like to that group until now. I don’t think I can adequately address this without sacrificing something in my translation to the Spanish speakers.
So back around to Huck Finn: if a person of color lives in our racist society, it makes sense that words that even sort of sound like the N word sets off alarm bells. Huck Finn is really problematic from that pov, for all that I love Mark Twain.
Censoring language is also erasing a particular part of our history even though we are not proud of everything it involved. Anyway, what will remaind us of the mistakes we made in relation to slavery if we erase the mention of it even in our literary works?