For those who haven't heard about this ruckus, below is a link to the report in PW Jan. 3 that started it all, written by my colleague, Marc Schultz, the magazine's Southern correspondent.

Upcoming NewSouth 'Huck Finn' eliminates the 'n' word

What's the "n word"?  Is it nigger?  Can we stop this shit?  Words only have the power that you give them.  Don't self identify as a nigger and it will never hurt you. Enough with the revisionist censorship.

Perhaps they could replace it with the Duluth euphemism "ghetto."

When books on paper disappear, the e-versions will probably have a political correctness filter button. Those who aren't afraid of words will leave the filter OFF. Those who can't see the forest (because it was cut down through their own stupidity) will push the button and relish their continued ignorance.

In related news our new 'house' has begun reading the amended slavery-free Constitution in it's entirety.

I just read Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn a few weeks ago.  The Duluth library had a really cool, old copy of Huck Finn with great illustrations.  

Vernacular is so much a part of those books, I think it would be especially wrong to mess with them.  The books portray a lot of narrow-minded views, but they should at least be allowed to portray them accurately.

I say leave art alone.  David should put some clothes on, though.

I just can't believe it!  It's a travesty....

Somebody explain to me why we're still reading this mediocre piece of junk?

That is:

When people say that the point of the book is to talk about race, this implies that Twain had a point about race to make when he wrote it.  I don't believe that.  I think that, starting with the moment that they decide to float south on the Mississippi to escape slavery, the book falls almost to pieces.  Excellent boy's adventure story, little more.

2 cents.

You know, "Huck" is dangerously close to another magically offensive word.  I think his name should be changed to Heath.

Professor Gribben's efforts are well-intentioned, but ridiculous. Of course, he wants to make the book more accessible and that's laudable. But, a better approach would be to talk with representatives of libraries and school districts that have removed it from reading lists in an effort to convince them to return to teaching the classic. A new edition without the potentially offensive (but, historically and academically useful) words is a lazy way to approach the problem.

By the way, I feel compelled to split a hair. What the professor is doing is not censorship. Censorship can only be done by an "official" entity. Usually, that means government. But, it might mean an owner of copyrighted material since they'd be the only ones with authority to make such changes, thus make the changes "official" and any other options prohibited according to government enforcement of copyright. Twain's works are now in the public domain, however, and anybody can publish any version they like. 

This is not a potential start down a slippery slope of censorship. It is, sadly, an acceleration down a slippery slope of intellectual laziness. Mr. Gribben should be ashamed that he decided to "find and replace" with a digital text rather than convince a couple of influential educators and scholars to promote the original classic.

For the record:

"Nigger" is a term that is used in a derogatory manner toward African-Americans ("Black People") by non-"Black People", and is also used as a term of neutrality/and-or/endearment towards "Black People" by other "Black People".

In conclusion, it is a word.

Relatedly, a wise man once said something like, "Skin color is a biological irrelevancy".

Also, Dbrewing is God.

Okay maybe it is splitting hairs. In my book it is only censorship if the orders come from the government. Maybe the public has been using the word censorship in a different way so much the meaning of it has changed. Similarly although the meaning of the n-word hasn't changed, the implications of its use has.

According to Dictionary.com
cen·sor

-noun
1.
an official who examines books, plays, news reports, motion pictures, radio and television programs, letters, cablegrams, etc., for the purpose of suppressing parts deemed objectionable on moral, political, military, or other grounds.
2.
any person who supervises the manners or morality of others.
3.
an adverse critic; faultfinder.
4.
(in the ancient Roman republic) either of two officials who kept the register or census of the citizens, awarded public contracts, and supervised manners and morals.
5.
(in early Freudian dream theory) the force that represses ideas, impulses, and feelings, and prevents them from entering consciousness in their original, undisguised forms.

Shane's right -- and the teachers should be using the text as a teaching tool. But are they? I read Huck Finn in 7th or 8th grade and I don't think the nuns addressed the issue of the derogatory and racist slurs at all. 

But, according to my colleague Marc Schultz, who actually has in hand an advance readers copy of the book, this edition is meant as a teaching tool for schoolchildren, with the editor including a clear explanation of the changes made to the text and the reasoning behind these changes. 

Marc, who actually interviewed the editor, says he's not trying to deny history or what Twain actually intended by using such offensive slurs, but, rather, to get this book back into classrooms. Because, Will, it's not always so easy to talk libraries and schools into bringing back a book that's been banned when you have all sorts of zealots breathing down your neck. If readers don't like this edition -- and I certainly count myself among them -- we can easily find other editions with all the racist slurs in them.

Like I wrote before, I don't agree with this scholar, but I am sympathetic to his wanting to get this often banned book into the hands of school children. I am hoping PW will do a follow up on how the book does. It'd be pretty interesting.

Let me be clear -- what I support is the free exchange of ideas amongst people of differing views in a civil manner (unless they are Michelle Bachman nutjobs, in which case...)

The editing may also put the racial slurs in the story more toward the historical context, instead of the modern one.

When the story was written, the racial slurs were still slurs, but did not have the emotional intensity they do today. Someone reading "nigger" or "injun" when the story came out would understand that they were racial slurs, but ones that were probably heard on a daily basis. Because our society has progressed much further in acceptance of other cultures, "nigger" and "injun" have become more emotional hot buttons when used in a modern sense. 

In 1840, if someone of fame used these racial slurs, it would not be looked at as unusual or overly offensive for the time period. In 2010, someone famous used the n-word 11 times, which resulted in national outrage and firing (which I totally agree with, Dr. Laura is a psycho bitch!).

My point is (Dr. Laura rant aside), that the emotional meaning of the words "nigger" and "injun" have changed and intensified in 170 years. Someone reading Huck Finn when it was published would be able to read the unedited book and understand the context in which the words were used. Modern readers may find find the antiquated terms as so emotionally jarring that it could affect the their ability to understand the story with the intent it was created. By using "slave", "indian" and "half-blood", the modern reader is left with the bad-taste of racism, but not blood-boiling anger, which is how it was intended to be interpreted.

The show Deadwood has enough profanity that it may very well kill any nuns who risk watching it, but that is an anachronism used by the creator to show the intent rather than literal usage of the words.

The modern usage of "god-damn" would hardly garner a PG rating, but in 1870 it would have silenced a tavern. The creators changed the words in order to keep the intensity of the words, not the literal use of the words themselves.

The comic artist Jean Giraud (Moebius) recolored his comic The Incal when it was released as an American edition, because he believed the American audience would not interpret it as intended. The French version of the comic showed the world of Incal in bright, garish colors, intending to show irony in how depraved their society was. When read by American audiences who were not familiar with it, they interpreted Incal as a more appealing place then it was intended to be, as we were used to seeing bright comic coloring to portray something more enticing. To keep the intent of the Story, the American edition was recolored in darker, stark colors to emphasis the dystopian world of Incal in a way that the readers would respond to.

So yeah, a few more things to consider on this issue. Can I go back to bitching about Dr. Laura now?

"The only ethnic group forced to listen to slurs in classic literature.." I don't think so. 

 Though I get your point about your personal experience, there are many instances of bias, intolerance, hatred etc. directed at many other ethnic groups in classic literature if you look for them.

 Eliminating a word will not change humankind's propensity to discriminate against one group or another. Editing literature to suit modern values robs it of its original perspective, its identity in time, and will very likely change little about the human condition.

 And why this book? Huck Finn actually has something to say about matters of conscience, and the conditions of race; why don't we start with Mein Kampf or Birth of a Nation?

Michiko Katukani wrote an interesting piece about the issue in today's NY Times, it's worth reading.

http://www.nytimes.com/pages/books/index.html

I think that my initial visceral reaction has been tempered a bit by two things: 1. I know what it's like to be a teacher, and 2. I have read what it's like to be a student, specifically the only black student in a classroom of white kids. 

I wonder if you (presumably most of you are white) can imagine reading this book aloud to a classroom full of black students. Would you yourself replace the words? Because a lot of teachers do in order to avoid having to be in that situation. Now, it can be argued that the book isn't that great to begin with, or that it isn't the best book to use to discuss racism with a bunch of high schoolers (after all, Jim is a buffoonish character--and so even taking out the language, he is a caricature of 19th century blackness). You wouldn't read Little Black Sambo, would you? But it's a heartwarming funny little story, my mother would say. One she grew up with. Same goes for James Chandler Harris' stories. 

I have read several accounts of what it was like to be a black student in a sea of whiteness and being asked to read this book. It has been noted that there isn't exactly a book we expect white students to read that is full of slurs against white folks (though some students do read the Autobiography of Malcolm X, so that comes to mind--it isn't, however, a standard "classic" text). I read one account where a teacher required the single black student in the class to read all the parts using "nigger" because it was only okay for it to come out of his mouth. (Now if that ain't some crazy, I don't know what.) 

I guess if I were a teacher, I'd be questioning whether this book fits the modern canon. Yes, it should be studied. But perhaps high school is no longer the correct place. Perhaps it more belongs in a college classroom, as an example of its time, and where students are more sophisticated and able to separate the times from the language, or to understand its context. I mean, it sucks--it's funny and it's meant to be a children's book. But there are a lot of other wonderful books that can teach about racism, slavery and the 19th century.  

The book is not being censored. A new edition has been put out that has been edited for the young, modern reader, so that teachers might avoid the problems associated with it. Now, you might argue that "children's versions" of books are a blasphemy, but I think most of you read kids' versions of several classics as children. You might not have known at the time that they were edited. And frankly, I would never buy my little nieces watered down versions of anything but perhaps Shakespeare. But I wouldn't argue that they shouldn't exist.

Whatever anyone says about the book, it did spawn one of the best songs that Roger Miller ever wrote.  And that's saying something:

"We all heard the word before we were 10 years old, did it effect our lives overall?....no."

I don't know, but your photo looks like you are white, so saying did it have not an effect on your life depends on at what level you were involved in the changes coming about in civil rights.

Learning that this word was a slur did have an effect on my life. The generation before me used the word a lot and interchangeably.

Turkey. Honky. Haole. Slant. Yellow. Nigger.

Emotionalism is not reality. Words have only the power we assign them. I assign them "powerlessness".

Censoring a text (classic or otherwise) is assigning ourselves a sense of powerlessness. We are each more powerful then a collection of letters.

Deep? Not deep. Sane.

Now, back to Peter Mayer on TPT!

I love Huck Finn, Twain's greatest work, and I think all should read an unedited version. I'm a teacher and have taught Huck Finn several years in a row to 9th graders.  But it does make you pause when you have black students in the classroom and you wonder if it is worth it to teach the book when he or she has to hear that word. (I tell the kids NOT to say it out loud, of course, but still). When I teach it, we have a conversation about the word, and what it means to be racist, and what is the difference between a racist society, a racist character, and a racist book.  Huck Finn, in my opinion, is not a racist book, rather it beautifully portrays a deformed world.

I really appreciate the insights here from hbh and from Mary. They're both teachers teaching this book in the classroom and having to actually deal with the points raised by this edition's editor. This edition of Huck Finn is meant to be used in the classroom, after all, not for general readership. BTW, the print run is 10,000 copies (to date).

Perhaps not all of what I will say relates directly to the Huck Finn issue, but regarding hbh's comments about moving the book to college classrooms, despite its original intention as a children's book:

I teach at UMD. A few years ago I was assigned to teach a cultural studies course called "Frontier Heritage." I decided to assign "Little House on the Prairie" as a means of addressing popular representations of the frontier and Native Americans. We also read James Welch's amazing novel, "Fool's Crow," which vividly evokes the experiences of Native peoples during the U.S.'s imperialist "frontier" era. 

That Little House book has several stereotyped and racist descriptions of "Indians" that made it really useful for working with college students on the implications of portrayals in writing and language as power. It was also useful for looking at a work of literature as a document of cultural attitudes, not just as an entertainment -- confirms, for me hbh's idea.

However, I also read all the Little House books repeatedly with both of my children. We ended up often having open discussions about what the books say about various individuals and groups. I don't believe in sugar-coating dialogue for kids -- they don't learn anything other than that grown-ups are evaders and deniers if you take that approach.

That's part of the education process -- but for that kind of approach to work, you have to have real and engaged conversations between children and adults, and between adults, about the realities of racism in our society. We don't have many support mechanisms in place for that to happen. Perhaps the Huck Finn editing issue ought to be an opportunity for US society to have a frank discussion about how far we have (and haven't) come related to racism? 

But, our society seems to take this as a chance to have a fadish moment of crying "censorship" rather than really grappling with the still present legacies of the "deformed world" that Mary points out was being portrayed in Twain's book.

All of my lit profs said that James Fenimore Cooper's "Last of the Mohicans" is the starting point of American Literature.

Please stop using the phrase "slippery slope." It is a logical fallacy.  Read Orwell's Politics and the English Language.

Berv, the name of the fallacy is derived from the experience of the phenomena, which validates its usage here.

The icy driveway leading to my garage is in fact a slippery slope, regardless of whether logicians have also used the term to describe a logical fallacy.

From the horse's mouth: Gribben talks about the controversy he ignited.

http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/columns-and-blogs/soapbox/article/45758-trouble-on-the-raft-defending-an-other-huck-finn.html