The topic is already all over the news and blogs, but I can’t help adding my own two cents. As you may have heard, NewSouth Books has announced a forthcoming edition of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which will replace the word “nigger” with “slave” and “injun” with “Indian.”
That the words have an uncomfortable history is an understatement, but shouldn’t children be made aware of that history? Mark Twain is among the most prolific American writers in existence, who surely chose his words with purpose. Whose right is it to alter his art in this way? Yes, publishers are going wild with the public domain with crazy new editions of Jane Austen multiplying daily, but those editions respect the original work and create an entirely new work in the process. This proposed edition of Twain’s masterpiece does not create another piece of art, but only succeeds in watering down the original.
The idea behind the new edition of making the book more accessible and easier to teach in schools, while still not permissible in my eyes, is at least respectable, but I have to wonder what this is really teaching. Perhaps it says it’s okay to ignore a difficult topic and pretend it never existed. Perhaps there is no need to respect history and the great artists who came before us. It is most certainly teaching that the easy road is the road best taken, but the over-arching lesson to students is that they are incapable of handling anything difficult and the adults in power lack faith in them.
Ultimately, the new edition points to a larger problem that may have catasrophic effects: Our school system is lazy. Of course this isn’t true of every single teacher in existence, but the trend is toward apathy. Many don’t care enough to take the time and effort to properly teach the hard topics that students will be forced to encounter anyway, like those in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
Some of my favorite articles concerning the Twain drama are listed below.
Michiko Kakutani for The New York Times
Ishmael Reed for The Wall Street Journal
Akim Reinhardt for The Huffington Post
And my ultimate favorite: A comic strip by Ruben Bolling
