with "slave," and "injun" with "Indian," manages to accomplish one thing: it worsens the problem it claims to want to solve.
Twain scholar Alan Gribben of Auburn University – whose new edition of the book will come out next month as a joint volume containing The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and a similarly-sterilized Tom Sawyer – has an affable enough explanation for his revisionist escapade. Since Huck Finn is so widely outlawed in schools (it is reportedly the fourth-most-banned book in America), Gribben reasons, why should we let a mere word deny students the chance to read one of the great American novels? As the BBC quotes him, "It's such a shame that one word should be a barrier between a marvelous reading experience and a lot of readers."
But here is the problem: Huck Finn was not meant to be a "marvelous reading experience." It was meant to be a story in which the reader is forced to feel the grating contradiction between racism and true human interaction. A story in which the white protagonist's voice, uttering "nigger" 219 times, comes up against the experience of his compelling relationship with an actual black person. The hideous and hurtful resonance of racism throughout Huck Finn is not a "barrier" blocking understanding of the book; it is the very point of the book, by which the reader is confronted with an excruciating question: What created this unjust and insane situation for two people rafting down a river?
There are two ways for readers (and teachers) to respond to this. One is to answer the question. The other is to paint over the question, like a picket fence in need of whitewashing, so that students can be spared the ugliness inherent in the story's lesson and instead enjoy their "marvelous reading experience." By choosing the latter, Gribben actually strengthens the unspoken influence of racism by prettifying it and denying it. It is as if a scholar were to write a revised history of the Holocaust that deleted references to Auschwitz and Dachau so that young people could have an unimpeded "marvelous reading experience" about Nazi society. The entire idea is cowardly and absurd.
Yes, teaching Huck Finn raises profound problems for students, teachers, and parents. It demands context, compassionate support, strong guidance of reading and classroom conversation, and a lot of informed preparation for everyone involved. And it requires particular attention to the needs and feelings of students of color who come to the text already having had a lifetime of demeaning, abusive and injurious racial experiences. These are real problems for teachers in a racist society. But is the answer to ban history? Or to help students to deal with it?
Alan Gribben may mean well. But, like whites who have insisted to me that they "don't see color," he isn't part of the solution. He is part of the problem.
Comments