The Continued Censorship of Huckleberry Finn

eldavojohn writes "Over a hundred years after the death of its author, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn will be released in a censored format, removing two derogatory racial slurs: 'injun' and 'nigger.' The latter appears some 219 times in the original novel but both will be replaced by the word 'slave.' An Alabama publisher named NewSouth Books will be editing and censoring the book so that schools and parents might provide their children the ability to study the classic without fear of properly addressing the torturous history of racism and slavery in The United States of America. The Forbes Blog speculates that e-readers could provide us this service automatically. Salon admirably provides point versus counterpoint while the internet at large is in an uproar over this seemingly large acceptance of censorship as necessary even on books a hundred years old. The legendary Samuel Langhorne Clemens himself once wrote, 'the difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter,' and now his own writing shall test the truth in that today."

Re:Ministry of Truth?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date. In this way every prediction made by the Party could be shown by documentary evidence to have been correct; nor was any item of news, or any expression of opinion, which conflicted with the needs of the moment, ever allowed to remain on record. All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary."
- George Orwell, 1984, Book 1, Chapter 3

Re:And why start NWO censorship with this kind of.

[grub]

I guess the GNAA will have to rename their fine organization.

Re:Ministry of Truth?

[jimbolauski]

Here is a great quote that the morons failed to realize when they read the book because they were too offended to learn the lesson Twain was trying to teach.
Russell Baker wrote:

"The people whom Huck and Jim encounter on the Mississippi are drunkards, murderers, bullies, swindlers, lynchers, thieves, liars, mows, frauds, child abusers, numbskulls, hypocrites, windbags and traders in human flesh. All are white. The one man of honor in this phantasmagoria is 'Nigger Jim,' as Twain called him to emphasize the irony of a society in which the only true gentleman was held beneath contempt."

Re:I'll make you a deal

[Quietust]

This sort of thing has already been done with other works, such as some of the DVD releases of certain Looney Tunes cartoons bearing a disclaimer [wikipedia.org] along the lines of "The cartoons you are about to see are products of their time. They may depict some of the ethnic and racial prejudices that were commonplace in the U.S society. These depictions were wrong then and they are wrong today. While the following does not represent the Warner Bros. view of today's society, these cartoons are being presented as they were originally created, because to do otherwise would be the same as claiming that these prejudices never existed ."

Re:Two Words

[ari_j]

That's a strange assumption to make.

Re:I have a much more ambitious vision

[QuantumPion]

Broken Window Fallacy [wikipedia.org]. If we didn't have to pay a groundskeeper to clean up your litter, we could spend the money on something that produces wealth (e.g. teachers, new roads, etc).

Re:Ministry of Truth?

[dkleinsc]

Read the official secession documents [utk.edu], and then tell me that this was about the right to choose more than the right to own slaves.

Re:Ministry of Truth?

[hedwards]

To some extent in depends on the particular person. Mark Twain was noted for considering the Southerners for being less civilized than Africans. And his use of the word nigger in its place in the books was necessary for the purposes of portraying the story accurately. It would be a bit like writing a story with a Klan member as a character without the use of any racial epithets or nasty things to say about Jewish people.

It's not so much that it really depends on the author so much as how and why the author is using the language. Some cases of censorship are more egregious than others are.