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Cynthetiq · 01-06-2011, 02:51 PM

Quote:

P.C. insult to a Mark Twain classic - CNN.com
Gribben was also quoted in a Publishers Weekly article in which he explained, "After a number of talks, I was sought out by local teachers, and to a person they said we would love to teach ('Tom Sawyer') and 'Huckleberry Finn,' but we feel we can't do it anymore. In the new classroom, it's really not acceptable."

That particular line of apology, as it happens, was brilliantly countered in the December 30 edition of the New York Daily News by the eminent Mark Twain scholar Shelley Fisher Fishkin. Responding to an entirely separate attack on the legitimacy of racial slurs in the mouths of Twain's less-than-heroic characters, Fishkin wrote:

"It's ironic ... that the principle (invoked) to ban Mark Twain's anti-racist classic -- that books filled with the N-word shouldn't be taught -- would also ban from the nation's classrooms many of the greatest and most inspiring works by black writers in the 19th and 20th centuries.

"The N-word is key to critiques of racism found in nonfiction from Frederick Douglass' "Narrative," to W.E.B. Du Bois' "Souls of Black Folk," to Richard Wright's "Black Boy," to James Baldwin's "Notes of a Native Son," to "The Autobiography of Malcolm X."

Fishkin concludes: "To expose a racist society for what it is, you have to show racists as they are, speaking as they would speak. ... Taking one of the greatest American anti-racist novels out of schools because the persistence of racism today makes the book's language painful is wrongheaded and counterproductive."

I like what Fishkin says here. It is wrongheaded and counterproductive. I think that it is important to leave the work whole and discuss it as it is, no different than To Kill A Mockingbird, Catch-22, or Catcher In the Rye.