Apologies for the poor video quality; MSNBC videos don’t embed in WordPress. The audio is really all you need for this one.
By now, everyone’s heard about the new revised version of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, removing two racial pejoratives (the n-word and “Injun”). The publisher’s claim is that cleaning up the language will make Huck more accessible to younger readers, since schools often ban the book based on language and the uncomfortable history conveyed through that language.
I think Melissa Harris-Perry hits the nail on the head with her point that calling Jim a slave doesn’t actually help things – slavery is the denial of one’s autonomy, but the whole point of Jim as a character was for him to establish his autonomy. As Olbermann points out, this was one of the original reasons schools wanted to ban the book. A black person being presented as a real human being with his own wants and needs? Let’s take a minute to clutch our pearls over that one.
What is so problematic is that changing the language actually diminishes much of the book’s power. Twain created these characters in a specific social context, providing today’s readers with an enduring image of how America was at that time. Replacing the words to make the books more palatable to school boards erases much of that context, rendering the book completely toothless. What is the point of teaching Huckleberry Finn if it doesn’t challenge us?
Great video. Melissa Harris-Perry might be my new favorite person. I had a lengthy discussion with my mother, who is an English major with a teaching certification and works as a paraprofessional assisting special needs students. She said many of her students felt uncomfortable reading Huck Finn aloud in class (with oral readings being a mandatory part of the MA frameworks), yet thought it was important for them to discuss why this made them uncomfortable and why the character of Huck would use this word as part of his everyday speech. She also pointed out that the book is written at a middle school language level, so high school students are already much older than its ideal audience.
I’m going to go a little more in depth on my blog, but I think we’re moving away from being a reading culture and so children’s cultural exposure comes largely from network TV, which is sanitized by the FCC. They should be challenged in the classroom at a much younger age so that by the time they read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn they can handle the material and examine their own gut reactions to its content from an academic standpoint.
I’m looking forward to seeing your take on the matter. You’ve raised a really good point about how we’re moving away from being a reading culture, and seem to have multiple standards for the information we consume through reading, entertainment, and factual media. The n-word in a book is horrifying, but apparently A-OK in a rap song. Violent shoot-’em-up video games must be kept out of the hands of children who can see the same kinds of violence on the evening news.
The other thing I’ve been thinking about, and that you allude to, is the reading level versus Twain’s intended audience. I don’t think there was as clear a distinction in the past between children’s literature and general literature. Just because the main characters are kids, it isn’t necessarily a book for kids, regardless of the ease of reading. Watering down the language is almost insulting to today’s readers, as though the editor is suggesting that the reader, even one who is reading the book for school, isn’t mature enough to handle history.
You’re touching on a subject that I feel very passionate about: early media education. For example: Children are subject to violence on TV, but it’s sanitized violence that doesn’t address the reality (and thus horror) of violent acts. They’ll see a stabbing on a network TV show that magically causes no blood.
I saw “The Godfather” when I was about eight or nine years old. My mother explained what the violence in that movie was about and the history of violence in Italian-American society (I’m half-Italian). I think that seeing Sunny get shot up and then having this discussion was far more productive than seeing sanitized violence on network TV without any discussion afterwards. I learned from the well-crafted yet challenging film just as a child would learn from Mark Twain’s well-crafted yet challenging prose.
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