The School Newspaper of Winston Churchill High School.

The Observer

The School Newspaper of Winston Churchill High School.

The Observer

The School Newspaper of Winston Churchill High School.

The Observer

Twain censorship insults American history

In mid-February, NewSouth, Inc., an Alabama-based publication company, released revised versions of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer in which all uses of the n-word and the word “injun” have been removed and replaced with “slave” and “Indian,” respectively.
In a Jan. 4 article addressing the censorship on their website, NewSouth stated it will be replacing “two hurtful epithets that appear hundreds of times in the texts with less offensive words” and that if this action sparks debate then their “mission in publishing this new edition of Twain’s works will be more emphatically fulfilled.”
The use of these two derogatory terms for minorities is essential to understanding Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. These words were not put there by chance or because Twain was racist, (he was satirizing America) and the reading of these texts today is essential to understanding the South during the period before the Civil War and the impact and progress of racial discrimination.
NewSouth made the decision to exclude these words because teachers reported offended students and because schools felt they were not appropriate to be read. To remove these books from the curriculum or to pacify children who are hurt by the words in them is to refuse to address a major issue in America: the prevalence of racism.
Reading the n-word in context of American history should teach us not only how far we have come since the antebellum period but also how far we still have to go. It is a sign of progress that we recognize the use of the n-word as hateful, but our sensitivity to it is a reminder that it is still used today.
In defense of the exclusion, Twain scholar and Auburn University professor Dr. Alan Gribben wrote the foreword for the NewSouth publication of Tom Sawyer and supported this action in a Jan. 3 Publishers Weekly article by claiming that he hopes the new edition will be more acceptable to the “new classroom,” although he suspects that “textual purists will be horrified.”
Gribben, however, underestimates the impact this action will have. Many African Americans and supporters will likely be enraged by the ignorance of this action and the fact that this Alabama-based company has the audacity to not only ignore, but effectively erase a dark chapter of American history.
This particular avoidance of the race issue is not the limit of school censorship in literature, however. While school curriculums pretend to be race-conscious by teaching Farewell to Manzanar and To Kill a Mockingbird, most of the novels read in school are actually watered-down versions of actual events .It is noteworthy that the CHS curriculum often includes such powerful novels as Hiroshima and Night, but CHS is unfortunately an exception to the rule.
The re-publication of Twain’s novels follows the trend in school literature and only seeks to postpone the exposure of school children to problems they will have to face as adults. Whether consciously or unknowingly, the actual action taken by the company was to turn a blind eye to an issue that Mark Twain brought to his readers’ attention over a century ago in his attempt to address the flaws of American society. We seem far more content to live in a cloud of ignorance than to face the fact that American society is not the equal, peaceful nation we like to pretend it is.

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Twain censorship insults American history