So there have been reports in the news recently that THE ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN and TOM SAWYER are being revised.
These new additions are not going to contain the N word. Which is found 219 times in HUCKLEBERRY FINN and 4 times in TOM SAWYER. They are planning on replacing this word with “slave”. Which clearly does not have the same effect at all.
I personally don’t like that word at all and I enforce a strict rule at my home that it is not allowed to be said. That being said, I don’t think we have a right to change history. Mark Twain deliberately put the that word in his books. Mark Twain apparently once wrote, “the difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter.”
I think that this word should make people uncomfortable. When it does we need to take the opportunity to talk about it and address it, instead of erase it and sweep the entire issue under the proverbial rug.
From TWAIN CLASSICS…..“Twain published Huckleberry Finn in 1885, and it is set in pre-Civil War days when the character Jim was still in the grips of slavery. Twain set out to depict a southern U.S. of the past and Jim, a close friend of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, is frequently referred to with a racial slur.”
So my question is this are we now going to go through every single book in the history of the printed word and change anything that someone deems politically incorrect?
Once Upon the Moon 