Essay 2.2 again

Huck Finn: High Schools Need it, Others Don't

            An editorial, published on January 6^th by the Lufkin Daily News out of Lufkin, Texas, discusses the virtues of replacing the word “nigger” with the word “slave” in new versions of Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer to be released by an Alabama publishing company in association with a “Mark Twain scholar” (paragraph 1).  The main reason behind the Lufkin Daily News’ support for the new versions of the Twain novels is that “schools… are simply not assigning it to students anymore” for fear of the word being used in classrooms (paragraphs 2 & 3).  We read the book when I was in high school, so which schools are no longer assigning Huckleberry Finn to students? The editorial offers an answer: elementary schools.  Since elementary schools should not be assigning Huckleberry Finn anyways, and from my own experience I can tell you that high schoolers are capable of being mature about the word, there is no need for an edited version of either Tom Sawyer or Huckleberry Finn to be published.

The Lufkin Daily News suggests that “the surest way to make kids use the word inappropriately is to tell them not to use it inappropriately” (paragraph 3).  How old are these “kids?”  No elementary schooler is mature enough to handle the frequent use of the word “nigger” appropriately, but no elementary schooler is mature enough to explore hardly any of the concepts Twain seeks to display in Huckleberry Finn, let alone understand them.  Why then, does the Lufkin Daily News boldly state that the edited version is appropriate “for the lower-level grades” (paragraph 3)?  Elementary school students are not ready for any of the deeper meanings found in Huckleberry Finn or the Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and since the obvious goal of censoring these works is to prompt elementary schools to begin assigning these books as required reading, the books should certainly be left just as they are, so as to keep children from reading a book they simply cannot fully understand.  A fifth grader may know what the definition of the word prejudice is, but they cannot yet grasp the concept of it.  That is, unless they’ve been raised in a racist or otherwise prejudiced household, in which case the word, “nigger” is almost certainly not new to them.

            Maine, the state where I grew up, has one of the most isolated and exclusive cultures in the country.  In order for a person to be considered a real “Mainer” unless their father, grandfather, and great-grandfather all lived and died in Maine, and worked in some trade like carpentry, painting or lobstering.  No outsiders.  No exceptions.  They are legally able to marry cousins and so inbreeding isn’t at all unheard of, and yes, I have met some of them before.  They are quite ugly.  Mainers have isolated themselves so well from the rest of the world that a Mainer accent, something I thankfully do not possess, has hardly changed in the past few centuries.  The change has been so small in fact, that a Mainer accent is regarded by linguists as bearing the closest resemblance in the world to the way people spoke in around the time our country was founded.  I am acquainted with multiple families that have lived on the same property in the same house since the late 1860s, around the time when many Mainer families moved there.

Maine is the whitest state in the US, and by that I mean that only about 5% of the people currently living in Maine are not white.  Even Ithaca College is a bit of a culture shock to me.  There is one other prerequisite to being a Mainer though, and after what you have just read it should make a lot of sense.  You have to be white.  You see, the reason for the late 1860s migration, and why you have to be white, is because for a Mainer, racism runs just as deep as family and tradition.  That is why Maine has the highest Ku Klux Klan membership of any of the fifty states (dsjfgsd).

In high school, Huckleberry Finn was one of the books I was required to read for my tenth grade American Studies course with Mr. Doubleday, a funny middle aged bald man with a glorious red mustache.  As he was handing out copies of the book, we talked about ground rules for how class discussions would go, and what appropriate use of the word “nigger” was for that class.  A third of the students (the Mainers) laughed at the idea that “nigger” was not the best way to refer to a black person, and as the classes went by, their use of the word in and out of class skyrocketed.  One day we came into class and someone had written “I hate niggers” on the whiteboard.

I can say in all honesty, that reading that word over and over and over again, as Huckleberry referred to Sam as a “nigger” so casually, only made me hate the word more, and I was not alone.  I know I said that about a third of the class were prejudiced redneck bastards, but the rest of us were all pretty normal, and with every iteration of the word our disdain for it was solidified.  We were all sixteen, and despite the horrible language in and unfortunately out of the book as well, we were able to be mature and responsible about the word’s use.  I’m glad we were too, because I do not think that our experience reading Huckleberry Finn would have been the same, had Huckleberry referred to Sam as “slave.”

The word “slave” does not carry the same connotation of ignorance as the N-word does.  Had our class read a version of the novel in which every “nigger” had been replaced with “slave,” our appreciation for the story and our submersion in it would not have been as complete, and we would have gained far less from the reading of it. 

            The censorship of the N-word from Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer is wholly unnecessary.  The Lufkin Daily News’ support of such censorship is based on the false assumption that elementary school students should be reading Huckleberry Finn for class.  Elementary school students are nowhere near mature enough to handle the themes explored in Twain’s novel, and if keeping “nigger” in the books keeps them from reading it, there should not be any problem.  The censorship of the word only endangers those older students whose schools might have purchased to more politically correct version and assigned it in place of the original.  These students will be deprived of valuable learning and understanding of our nation’s cultural past, and therefore, this edited version of Huckleberry Finn should not be published.




Work Cited:
 

"Huck Finn: Censorship? Sure, It Is, but Changes to ‘Huckleberry Finn’ Are Warranted." Lufkin Daily   News, 26 Jan. 2011. Web. 10 Mar. 2011. <http://lufkindailynews.com/opinion/editorials/article_db4061d4-193f-11e0-9991-001cc4c002e0.html>.