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.

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.

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!

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.

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 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.

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.