Ever since hearing about the controversy stirred up by a "new" edition of Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn in which the offensive racial epithets "injun" and "nigger" are replaced by "Indian" and "slave" respectively, I have been torn. I didn't like it, but I thought perhaps it was because I have never been affected by such racism or labels.
To me this is messing with a classic book. Yes, "nigger" is not a nice word, but it is the word used in the book. Are we supposed to pretend it never did?
I guess what scares me the most, is how many other books will be "adjusted" or "re-written" because some people think they should be?
On The View this morning, Whoopi Goldberg agreed that it should NOT have been changed. That is how Mark Twain wrote it. That was the language at that time. It is history. It should not be changed at the whim of a specific generation.
No comments:
Post a Comment