Have Common Sense, Not Censorship
Apparently literature is no longer sacred. New South Books finds it appropriate to censor a masterpiece.
By Brad Matthews ’11
As I read Yahoo! News on Tuesday -as I manage to do almost every day-, I found something that shocked and disturbed me, amidst the football, the dead birds, the celebrities and the useless crap that normally pollute the Yahoo! News pages. Apparently, NewSouth Books is releasing a censored version of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, omitting the slur “injun” and eliminating the n-word in front of Jim’s name, replacing it with the less offensive “slave”.
Is any of our literature safe? Will the classics of the past that featured offensive language be completely whitewashed? Is nothing sacred? Huck Finn has been read by schoolchildren for years in the public school system, and the two offending words happen to bring both realism and strength to Twain’s satire of the antebellum South. Both words are considered offensive to the sensitive palate of the modern world, but eliminating them forces 21st Century values on a book made for the 1800s, when racism was accepted and espoused, above and below the Mason-Dixon line.
This move reminds me a lot of the classic novella Fahrenheit 451, wherein all literature is banned due to years of political correctness whittling down the texts into mush. This censorship destroys the basic attack that Twain makes in the book: by using the n-word so frequently, he both illuminates the ignorance of the South and attacks the people for being oppressive. “Slave Jim” does not carry the power of “N-Word Jim”, and to destroy the label destroys the positive message of the book.
More than anything, the book is used precisely to show children the horrors of slavery, in order to stress tolerance as the only proper mode of etiquette. The ridiculousness of the South is supposed to show kids that intolerance is silly. Getting rid of the n-word does not kill the word, nor eliminate the history behind it, nor undo the evils of our society.
On a larger scale, I oppose this move because it shows the creeping rise of censorship in all walks of life. Curses are bleeped, privates covered, books banned and words changed all due to the prevalence of censorship. The biggest proponents of censorship claim to protect children from the harms of the world. Guess what, Focus on the Family? Maybe if you got up and actually involved yourselves in your children’s media intake, you wouldn’t need to ruin society for the rest of us. The real world is a “naughty” place, filled with “naughty” ideas and “naughty” words. Keeping the children insulated will only harm them in the end- imagine the shock of entering the real world! If they are not exposed to the disease now, they will succumb that much easier to it later.
Censorship such as this is a threat to the free speech and publication in this country. More and more, we desire clean media and purity at the expense of freedom. Sorry folks- the real world is a bad place that isn’t so clean. Why should media be restricted just for “the children”? Does society revolve around the child? No! Society is an adult invention, made for adults with adult media! Parents must take responsibility for their children’s upbringing, rather than having society censor itself. Better to be free and “impure” than clean and living with no free media.