This year a new version of the literary classic ‘Huckleberry Finn’ will have the racial epithets removed from its text, including “nigger” and “Injun”. Seems a little late…the book as been out since 1885, but hey better 126 years late than never…
Huckleberry Finn is uniquely marvelous because it is of its time yet manages to transcend it. In spite of the limitations of vocabulary, cultural expectations, and racial stereotypes, it lays bare the inhumanity of slavery through the power of satire. To remove it from this context is to strip it of its power — and to needlessly whitewash a period that deserves no whitewashing.
There is nothing quite parallel to this sort of change. It’s not about avoiding an awkward classroom moment, or they would have removed the word “ejaculate” from Victorian novels, where everybody is always ejaculating about everything.
It would be like renaming 1984 2084, “because the current title does not reflect how pleasant life was under the Reagan administration.”
This is like changing War and Peace to Peace, because war is unpleasant to remember, or removing World War I from All Quiet on the Western Front.
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