Tuesday, January 4, 2011

Sign of the Times: Dead Birds, Dead Fish, & Even the N-Word Dies in Huckleberry Finn

Look people, there's some really weird shit going on in America right now. No seriously, we got birds falling out of the sky in Arkansas and Louisiana by the thousands; fishes going belly-up all of a sudden; then, Wacka Flocka  and Gucci Mane get arrested and mysteriously the I.Q. of black youth has increased.

The shit is scary, people!

And of course some are touting these as events of biblical proportions - yes, the Gucci Mane arrest too - signalling the end of the world with that "we're living in our last days," talk. But me, I think this is all some delayed Y2K shit that has hit us eleven years late, so you won't see me on some Dispensationalism kick.

But then again, they never caught Bin Laden, so this could be some terrorist shit as in birds and fishes coming home to roost. Oh well, end of the world or not, I'm gonna enjoy what little post-racialism we have left. Especially since South Carolina is talking about releasing "Coon Hunters" license plates, and the word "nigger" is being replaced in the Mark Twain literary classic, Huckleberry Finn:
Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a classic by most any measure—T.S. Eliot called it a masterpiece, and Ernest Hemingway pronounced it the source of “all modern American literature.” Yet, for decades, it has been disappearing from grade school curricula across the country, relegated to optional reading lists, or banned outright, appearing again and again on lists of the nation’s most challenged books, and all for its repeated use of a single, singularly offensive word: “nigger.”

Twain himself defined a “classic” as “a book which people praise and don’t read.” Rather than see Twain’s most important work succumb to that fate, Twain scholar Alan Gribben and NewSouth Books plan to release a version of Huckleberry Finn, in a single volume with The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, that does away with the “n” word (as well as the “in” word, “Injun”) by replacing it with the word “slave.”

“This is not an effort to render Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn colorblind,” said Gribben, speaking from his office at Auburn University at Montgomery, where he’s spent most of the past 20 years heading the English department. “Race matters in these books. It’s a matter of how you express that in the 21st century.”

“After a number of talks, I was sought out by local teachers, and to a person they said we would love to teach this novel, and Huckleberry Finn, but we feel we can’t do it anymore. In the new classroom, it’s really not acceptable.” Gribben became determined to offer an alternative for grade school classrooms and “general readers” that would allow them to appreciate and enjoy all the book has to offer. “For a single word to form a barrier, it seems such an unnecessary state of affairs,” he said. (Source: Publisher's Weekly)
Probably good news for those Negroes who may have purposely forgotten that they were, and in some cases, still are "niggers". But so not a good look for Native Americans, or former "Injuns", who will now be known as "slaves". Can't wait for them, to redo that infamous "My name is Toby," beat-down in Roots with creative license and in the name of political correctness be changed to "time out" much like kids are disciplined. Damn shame for the world to end now just as Black folks started to enjoy it with all this post-racial bliss and all.

Apture

wibiya widget

LinkWithin

Related Posts with Thumbnails