KU professor who used n-word in class discussion is placed on leave

[deutsey]

12. There is a text of Huck Finn that has THE WORD edited out of it

One of America's best Twain scholars, Alan Gribben, created it because more and more high schools and universities were not teaching it.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/07/books/07huck.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

I'm an independent Twain scholar and have interacted with Alan, who edits the Mark Twain Journal and has been very supportive of my research. I've heard him give a talk on this "sanitized" book at a Twain conference. Personally, I don't agree with changing the text, but I completely understand why he did it.

Huck Finn is a crucial part of American and even world literature. I think in a perfect world, it would be taught by teachers who know how to place it within its proper context and would be able to foster discussion and debate around whether Huck and his creator were racists (and, big picture, America's own racist legacy).

Giving Huck a reading that goes beyond the superficial, it's pretty obvious that Huck comes to realize Jim's humanity and rejects the social conditioning of his racist society. In the novel's pivotal moment, he even chooses going to hell over betraying his friend (which is what his church has taught him will happen to people who help runaway slaves).

Twain, himself, was also not a racist and was rather progressive for his times. Not only did he marry into a family of abolitionists and were close friends with ministers who were instrumental in abolitionism and Emancipation, he also met and admired Fredrick Douglass and was in favor of reparations. He paid the tuition for one of Yale Law School's first African-American students (Warner Thornton McGuinn), who went on to be Thurgood Marshall's mentor.

It's very unfair to consider Twain a racist and I think it's a complete misreading of Huck Finn to call it an offensive and racist text. And although I like Chris Rock and Louis CK, I've seen routines of theirs about both Twain and Huck that were misinformed and erroneously portrayed Twain as a racist.

In a perfect world, they might have known better because Huck was properly taught in the classroom. However, we're obviously far from a perfect world, so maybe Gribben's approach is a sad compromise we have to make in order to keep this important text in the canon.