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Censoring Huckleberry Finn is entirely bullshit, and other Southern revisionism.
Daedalus
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Registered User regular
So I took a quick glance through the thread titles and didn't see this; if it's somewhere else I apologize.
Alabama-based publisher NewSouth Books is releasing a censored version of Mark Twain's canonical piece of American literature, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. At Khoo's request, I'm not actually allowed to say the word that's being removed from the text on this forum, which I find slightly hilarious, but he's the guy who pays for the forum and not me. Anyway.
If you haven't read the book, why the fuck not? Download it in the format of your choice here and go read it.
Mark Twain wrote the book from the perspective of a poor white kid in the antebellum American South, smuggling an escaping slave to freedom. The book is largely a scathing indictment of the deeply ingrained racism of Southern culture, both pre- and post-war. It's written in the vernacular of the time, so a specific word (that I hilariously can't enter here) appears frequently. This has been the subject of some debate ever since the book was published, with people coming to obviously idiotic conclusions like "Twain was a racist" or "The word wasn't offensive when Twain wrote the book". The former complaint is dispelled by a casual reading of the fucking book (seriously, go back and read it, I put a link right there) and the latter I'll address briefly so that we can discard it. Yes, the term was offensive. It was offensive when Twain wrote it, and it was offensive in the time period in which the book takes place. It's supposed to be offensive, that's the whole fucking point. You, the reader, are supposed to be offended at the casual racism that comes up from essentially every white character in the book. That's why he wrote the damn book in the first place! If Twain rose from his grave today and heard that the word in question was now the most offensive word in the American English language, he might well be ecstatic, but he damn well wouldn't change it in the text.
But I'm not here to talk about political correctness or artistic integrity because I don't believe for one minute that the Alabama-based New South Books had that on their minds. To me, this episode in the same camp as Holocaust denial. We've seen constantly how the American South tries to whitewash the entire Civil War era. The Confederates at the time certainly didn't have a problem with proclaiming that the preservation and expansion of slavery was the main reason for their secession, but now, centuries later, we've seen that glossed over and replaced with revisionist bullshit about "tariffs" and "states' rights", as if the Davis administration didn't instate the same tariffs that the US government was applying, or as if the Southern states gave a shit about the dangers of Federal power when they wanted the Federal government to enforce fugitive slave laws. A few weeks ago there was a ball in South Carolina celebrating the sesquicentennial of that state's secession. They didn't mention slavery once, of course; it was all about how the "people of the state voted democratically to leave the tyranny of the Union" (funny, if I recall, South Carolina had more slaves than free men in it, and I don't think they were asked how they felt about the issue!) Of course, 150 years ago, the South Carolina government didn't pussy-foot around the issue; in their "Declaration of the Causes of Secession", they showed it was the first thing on their minds!
Now they want to take the racial context out of one of the finest pieces of American literature set in that period! It's not enough for them to start pulling this bullshit about ignoring their history of slavery, now they want to whitewash away (no pun intended) their entire horrifying legacy of institutionalized racism. It's as if a German publishing house wanted to re-release The Diary of Anne Frank and remove any references to Jews. If the South feels some unbearable shame about their ancestor's behavior, well, maybe they should. This Orwellian revisionism has gone too far.
Alabama-based publisher NewSouth Books is releasing a censored version of Mark Twain's canonical piece of American literature, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. At Khoo's request, I'm not actually allowed to say the word that's being removed from the text on this forum, which I find slightly hilarious, but he's the guy who pays for the forum and not me. Anyway.
If you haven't read the book, why the fuck not? Download it in the format of your choice here and go read it.
Mark Twain wrote the book from the perspective of a poor white kid in the antebellum American South, smuggling an escaping slave to freedom. The book is largely a scathing indictment of the deeply ingrained racism of Southern culture, both pre- and post-war. It's written in the vernacular of the time, so a specific word (that I hilariously can't enter here) appears frequently. This has been the subject of some debate ever since the book was published, with people coming to obviously idiotic conclusions like "Twain was a racist" or "The word wasn't offensive when Twain wrote the book". The former complaint is dispelled by a casual reading of the fucking book (seriously, go back and read it, I put a link right there) and the latter I'll address briefly so that we can discard it. Yes, the term was offensive. It was offensive when Twain wrote it, and it was offensive in the time period in which the book takes place. It's supposed to be offensive, that's the whole fucking point. You, the reader, are supposed to be offended at the casual racism that comes up from essentially every white character in the book. That's why he wrote the damn book in the first place! If Twain rose from his grave today and heard that the word in question was now the most offensive word in the American English language, he might well be ecstatic, but he damn well wouldn't change it in the text.
But I'm not here to talk about political correctness or artistic integrity because I don't believe for one minute that the Alabama-based New South Books had that on their minds. To me, this episode in the same camp as Holocaust denial. We've seen constantly how the American South tries to whitewash the entire Civil War era. The Confederates at the time certainly didn't have a problem with proclaiming that the preservation and expansion of slavery was the main reason for their secession, but now, centuries later, we've seen that glossed over and replaced with revisionist bullshit about "tariffs" and "states' rights", as if the Davis administration didn't instate the same tariffs that the US government was applying, or as if the Southern states gave a shit about the dangers of Federal power when they wanted the Federal government to enforce fugitive slave laws. A few weeks ago there was a ball in South Carolina celebrating the sesquicentennial of that state's secession. They didn't mention slavery once, of course; it was all about how the "people of the state voted democratically to leave the tyranny of the Union" (funny, if I recall, South Carolina had more slaves than free men in it, and I don't think they were asked how they felt about the issue!) Of course, 150 years ago, the South Carolina government didn't pussy-foot around the issue; in their "Declaration of the Causes of Secession", they showed it was the first thing on their minds!
Now they want to take the racial context out of one of the finest pieces of American literature set in that period! It's not enough for them to start pulling this bullshit about ignoring their history of slavery, now they want to whitewash away (no pun intended) their entire horrifying legacy of institutionalized racism. It's as if a German publishing house wanted to re-release The Diary of Anne Frank and remove any references to Jews. If the South feels some unbearable shame about their ancestor's behavior, well, maybe they should. This Orwellian revisionism has gone too far.
Daedalus on
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And there are people in the South who protests those displays.
Is the second group engaging in revisionism? Are they being disrespectful of history? Are they trying to sweep history under the rug?
Or is the problem that they know damned well what they history was, and they don't want to give other people an excuse to bring it back?
The issue with Huck Finn is context. Are the people protesting the use of the n-word because they want to pretend that the n-word was never used? Or are they protesting the n-word because they know damned well that the word was used, they continue to hear it today, and they don't want to give racists an excuse to keep using the word out of "historical" reasons?
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
No, the issue is creator's intent. Twain used the word for a reason. And replacing it with "slave" is especially inaccurate.
Somehow I doubt racists are promoting people reading Huckleberry Finn. I mean, that's about as likely as a militant atheist group passing out Chesterton's Orthodoxy, or something.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
We will not be repeating the spectacle. If you want to see the entire spectrum of potential arguments on either side, feel free to read through the aforementioned thread.