Huck and Jim

[jlh]

Introduction to the NewSouth edition of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry FinnFantastic reading. If all you've seen of the current controversy is "they're taking out the n-word!" and/or sarcastic comments on Twitter, I urge you to read the introduction. (Particularly because they aren't just removing the word, but replacing it with "

Comments

[jlh]

But a novel isn't history and isn't taught in a history class. And this novel is often taught to kids not in high school but in junior high. I've taught actual historical documents with that word in it, and I can tell you-it's incredibly distracting and takes quite some time to get the class past that word to what is actually being said, especially for the African-American students who want to simply say, "this writer is a racist" and go no further, and that was a college class of 20-year-olds. I can only imagine a room full of 12-year-olds. People come to the novel itself with their understanding of the word-I don't think hearing Jim referred to as it will make them flinch from it in the future. I mean, if the first character of color you've ever met is Jim, and you're 14, that's already a problem.

(Also, are we that far removed from that reality? And is the job of that book to teach people about that moment in history, and how race was lived then?)

Anyway the book still exists. This is just one edition of many. If this edition can help the book from being one of the most challenged in school classrooms and libraries, and get the book into the hands of more students, I can't really say no to that, personally. (And note that some of those library and classroom challenges are from African American parents who believe that the very presence of that word in the book means it is a racist book.)

I guess for me, the practical considerations outweigh the wish to have the best possible situation, when we've been fighting for that for more than 20 years now and we still have this book getting banned all the time.

[ceares]

see, I think we are far enough from it to a certain extent that it becomes like the boogey man. We're only what, 25 yrs from the start of the Aids crisis and because it is or can be manageable, youngsters coming up on it from the back end don't look at it the same way.

I don't necessarily say it's the books job to teach about that moment in history but I think that it can be a valuable tool for that. We learned about slavery in school, true and I got that it was horrible, but there was no real connection to it or sense of what it could have been like for me until I saw Roots because suddenly it wasn't facts, it was a character I cared about and was invested in. (And I am only 4 generations removed from slavery)

Stories like the Diary of Anne Frank, or the Grapes of Wrath do the same thing. We read those books or saw those movies in my history classes as an addendum to what we were studying. If anything to me it's more important for kids just because they are so self involved to a certain extent that it's hard for them to conceptualize something that can seem very abstract.

I'm from a large, racially diverse city but I've known people from small towns that actually don't really know people of different races. Seen them, met them maybe in passing, but don't actually *know* anybody.

I like Twain and I don't want people to miss out on him because of certain words and banned books in general piss me off, because beyond the censorship issue, I think we should be discombobulated and made uncomfortable sometimes.

*sigh* I know there's no perfect answer for this. And part of it I guess it that it feels to a certain extent like giving in. I just want people to be smarter. You'd think after 42 years I'd realize that's not going to happen.

[ceares]

An addition to that--sorry, you've got me thinky now.

I'm sure you know what Arizona is doing with their Mexican American studies programs and what Texas is supposed to be doing with their history books, which could supposedly affect other states as well and it's just ways in which history gets buffed clean.

We read the Merchant of Venice in 9th grade and I remember my class being confused and kind of appalled and that became a teaching moment.