Freedom, race, and morality

April 8, 2020

If you find a word in a book offensive, should that word prevent you, or me, from reading that book?

The answer to that question is yes, according to my former high school district. Starting in September of this year, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn will no longer be on the approved reading list for the four high schools in the Acalanes Union High School District in Contra Costa County.

That means that the great classic by Mark Twain will no longer be taught in the English literature classes at my alma mater, Acalanes High School. And why not? Because it contains the word nigger, which is offensive to African American students. Never mind that there are very few black students in those four high schools. The book will now be censored to prevent all students from being exposed to this one word.

Granted, the word is used over 200 times in Huckleberry Finn. And the book won’t be completely banned, as it will still be available in the school libraries. But Twain’s masterpiece, arguably the greatest American novel of all time, will no longer be part of the curriculum. It has a bad word.

Some schools elsewhere in the U.S. have also taken the same approach. One publishing company has tried to get around the controversy by replacing “nigger” with “slave.” But besides the fact that they are changing the text without the author’s permission, they are also rewriting history, watering down the language, and lessening the impact of the novel.

When Twain grew up in Hannibal, Missouri in the 1840’s, the same location and time period as Huckleberry Finn, Missouri was a slave state, and the word nigger was a common and sometimes derogatory term for slaves. Twain hated slavery, and later wrote an anti-lynching editorial entitled “Only a Nigger” for a New York newspaper, as well as writing sympathetic portrayals of African Americans such as in his short tale “A True Story.” Huckleberry Finn is one of the most anti-racial bias books ever written in America, so it is especially ironic that a novel about racial compassion and tolerance is targeted by people advocating racial sensitivity.

Huckleberry Finn is about a beautiful friendship between a 14 year old white boy and a middle aged black man. Huck and Jim are both outsiders; Huck is poor, usually homeless, often beaten by his drunken father, and is described as white trash. Jim is a kindly runaway slave who, in the course of their raft journey down the Mississippi, becomes like an older brother to Huck. Huck doesn’t question the institution of slavery, as he has grown up in a society where it was the norm. In fact, much as he comes to love Jim, Huck feels guilty for helping a slave to escape his owner. But in the moral climax to the story, Huck, believing that he will be eternally damned if he violates society’s laws and morality regarding the institution of slavery, nevertheless decides that he cannot betray his friend Jim to slave hunters, and says, “All right, then, I’ll go to Hell.”

When I was younger, I thought that I might someday run for public office. If I did and was elected, I decided that rather than swearing an oath of office on a Bible, I would swear my allegiance on a copy of Huckleberry Finn. What better book could one find to represent the love of friendship and freedom and the appreciation of humor and racial understanding? Plus, it would be fun to make a statement about values that is both reverent and irreverent at the same time. So to learn that my high school is part of a plan to sacrifice this wonderful and at times hilarious story on the altar of political correctness saddens me.

According to the Acalanes Blueprint student newspaper (for which I was once a reporter and editor), “Although removing Huckleberry Finn was a controversial and small step, the district hopes that further measures will be taken to diversify the English curriculum.” Translation: diversity trumps quality. I wonder if they’ll eventually have race quotas for the authors they study. But if they do, they’ll have to leave out The Autobiography of Malcom X by Alex Haley, along with To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, and Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck, because those three books (and many others) contain the word nigger. And while they’re at it, they’ll need to censor all books that contain the word racist, since racist and nigger mean the same thing: I’m superior to you.

I’m grateful that I had the opportunity to read Huckleberry Finn uncensored in high school and study it as an English major at Berkeley. And while I may not be as happy go lucky as Hucky (as Tom Sawyer sometimes called him), I do fancy myself to be a bit of a kindred free spirit. So as racial politics and dogmas increase social pressures to conform, I may just follow Huck’s lead at the end of the novel and, in my own way, “light out for the Territory.”