Politics
Debate Rages Over Sanitized Version Of Huckleberry Finn
Loading ...Before the holidays, there was much debate about the appropriateness of giving elementary school kids poetry with references to crackheads performing oral sex. City Councilman Charles Barron argued that ‘Huckleberry Finn’ was more offensive, since it included over 200 uses of the N-word. While nobody may want Barron to be their Governor, it seems as though the publishing industry was listening: Publishers Weekly announced the release of a new edition of the Mark Twain classic, which will leave out the N-word entirely. And that hasn’t gotten anybody riled up at all.
The new edition of the book will substitute “slave” for the N-word, and “Indian” for “injun,” and will be released in February. The changes have gotten a lot of bad press and inspired a lot of nasty e-mails so far, but the book’s editor, Professor Alan Gribben, who teaches English at Auburn University, argued to the Birmingham News that critics were proving his point: “One thing that has amused me about it is that in the e-mails that take me to task for substituting the word ‘slave,’ not one of these hotly worded e-mails has mentioned the n-word…They won’t say the word, and they won’t write the word.”
Continue Reading at Gothamist.
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