Mediaculture: Reflections on the effect of media and culture on our faith

A new kind of censorship is becoming vogue. Rather than removing documents from the public, some are editing history to make some documents nicer, less offensive to an increasingly ignorant nation of readers.

In February, NewSouth Books released a new version of Mark Twain’s novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in which all 219 occurrences of the word “nigger” will be replaced with the word “slave.”

Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts, who is an African American, argues that this fix, despite good intentions, is wrong. He offers three reasons against it.

First, he writes, “any work of art represents a series of conscious choices on the part of the artist,” and the audience, while free to accept or reject those choices, is not free to “substitute its own.”

Second, he writes, “it is never a good idea to sugarcoat the past,” and “Twain’s use of the reprehensible word was an accurate reflection of that era.”

Third, he laments that the state of reading comprehension in this country is so bad that “not only can our children not divine the nuances of a masterpiece but that we will now protect them from having to even try.”

Lorrie Moore, a fiction writer, claims a position “between traditionalists outraged at censorship and those who feel this might be a way to get teenagers, especially African-American boys, comfortable reading a literary classic.” She thinks both are mistaken.

She agrees it is wrong to replace the N-word with “slave,” since “the latter word is already in the novel and has a different meaning from ‘nigger,’ so that substitution just mucks up the prose — its meaning, its voice, its verisimilitude.” The remedy, she writes, is “to refuse to teach this novel in high school and to wait until college.”

Moore goes on to write: “The young black American male of today, whose dignity in our public schools is not always preserved or made a priority, does not need at the start of his literary life to be immersed in an even more racist era … not if one’s goal is to get that teenager to like books.”

Instead, she would recommend, for example, Sherman Alexie’s Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian.

Meanwhile, the new House of Representatives convened on Jan. 6, and the Republican leadership started the session by reading the text of the U.S. Constitution aloud. The readers, however, omitted the text of Article I, Section 2, that deals with the apportionment of House seats among the states, which is said to be based on “the whole number of free persons” and “three-fifths of all other persons.”

In an op-ed piece in the New York Times, Adam Kirsch points out that “trying to distract us from something ugly only makes the ugliness harder to miss.” He acknowledges that “for many readers, encountering classic literature means sometimes finding yourself excluded, or insulted, in this way. For blacks reading Twain, certainly, but also for Jews reading Shakespeare or Dickens, and for women reading, say, Plato (among countless others).”

The Constitution, Kirsch writes, “was written in the expectation that it would be corrected. And it needed correction, or amendment, for the same essential reason: the framers’ imagination of the people they led was not full enough.”

We are to study and learn from history, not try to fix it. Ignoring the fallible humanity of the founding fathers, for example, only removes us from the real world.

Gordon Houser is associate editor of The Mennonite.