By Rachel Hanna
Huckleberry Finn, the classic novel by Mark Twain contains the word “nigger” 219 times. As a result it has been widely challenged by school boards and teachers across America who are uncomfortable with having such a word read out in a class room of impressionable students. This has led to a growing number of young people not being exposed to a brilliant book that ultimately carries a message of non discrimination and equality. Dr Alan Gribben, a Twain scholar, felt that this injustice could be righted by substituting all instances of the word “nigger” for “slave”. Now a new edition is being published by NewSouth under Gribben’s guidance which omits racial slurs “nigger” and “injun” from the original text. Gribben insists that these omissions do not lesson the power of the book, and that they are necessary to allow students to enjoy in Twain’s masterpiece.
My question is, can censorship, even when well intentioned, ever be justified? Censorship is an extremely dangerous concept, that even when coming from a well meaning place leads to confusion, misinformation, and at its most severe, oppression. Once we allow words to be removed here and there, it opens the door for offending passages being lost or books being banned. While in this instance there may not be any sinister Orwellian subtext, a person’s right to free speech, should never be tampered with.
On a more practical level removing the word that packs the most punch in satirizing the racism inherent of the time lessons the impact of Huckleberry Finn. How can one present an unblinking account of bigotry if the defining racist term is omitted? Twain is famous for his use of vernacular, it is central to his craft as a writer. I doubt he would have supported the decision to produce copies which changed the language to reflect a political correctness that simply wasn’t there when the book was set.
Huck Finn depicts racial attitudes along the Mississippi before the Civil War; to simply erase the racial slurs that were commonly used almost serves to white wash a part of history. Are we to tell these children that oppression and slavery never happened? That a word that hateful was never commonly used? The George Santayana quote that “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” seems apt when one considers how easily history can be forgotten, America, now with a black president, smug in its open mindedness, could easily forget hundreds of years of slavery.
The publishers argue that teachers do not want to read aloud passages which contain the offending word to classes with a mixed set of races. They argue it could prompt a divide in such classes, and the rebirth of the word in its ugliest form. My only response to that is, what do they think these schools are teaching high schoolers if they cannot be expected to understand the simple concept of context? Will the teacher in teaching the novel not bother to explain the themes, time period and overall subtext of the book? If this is the case then we should be looking at the teaching of the book not the book itself. If a teacher cannot read aloud the offending word, without fear of the PC police despite it being neither his own words nor a racist piece of literature of itself, then maybe their own prejudice is coming into play.
Furthermore, if you censor or make a word “bad” it becomes all the more attractive and gives a power to the word it previously may not have received. Whereas if the readers are going to see the word in print over two hundred times it loses any allure it may have had and becomes what it is: an ugly derogatory slur. The chuckles or gasps subside and Twain’s message is received. Censorship isn’t the answer. Rather than hearing the “n-word” said in hushed tones by the scandalised middle class, or its “nigga” variants in rap songs which seek to take the word back so to speak, maybe the best way, to educate generations to come on the dangers of human fear, maliciousness and ignorance is to present them with the word, in plain ink, within a context which aims to denigrate racist attitudes.
