Whitewashing History

Samuel Clemons, known by his pseudonym Mark Twain, captured not just the diction of his time with uncanny accuracy, but also the social climate. His masterpieces tell the backstory of a time in this country that included use of the terms nigger and slave to describe what were also referred to as colored people. The terms may be perjorative in light of today's society, but during Twain's time (1885), he was writing history, not politically correct rhetoric.

An article in the local newspaper describes one Twain scholar's attempts to make Twain's work less offensive to today's students by removing what is referred to as "the n word" in Twain's work. I disagree with that decision. Changing the way history is portrayed does not change history, but it does raise questions about why anyone fears the truth in writing and challenges today's youth to answer tough questions. Twain scholar Alan Gribben says that his experience with changing the terminology during public readings convinces him that the changes make Twain more accessible to today's readers, avoiding, as he puts it, putting "the books [Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn] in danger of joining the list of literary classics that Twain once humorously defined as those 'which people praise and don’t read'" (PHILLIP RAWLS • THE ASSOCIATED PRESS • JANUARY 5, 2011, http://www.mydesert.com/article/20110105/ LIFESTYLES0105/110105009/New+edition+removes+Mark+Twain+s ++offensive++ words).

The true offense is changing a classic work of literature to appease those who are unable to stand up to the truth and deal with it in open dialog. I feel equally as strong about Harper Lee's classic, To Kill a Mockingbird, a novel that portrays the reality of the deep South and the classic conflict between black and white. Lee allows the reader to decide not just the core issues, but the many options for using the past as a textbook for both the present and the future. We do not change people by changing language, but we do change how people respond to issues and the language used to express them when we presume to rewrite the way the world was to conform with anyone's idea of how it should be.

Mark Twain wrote that “... the difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter.” Gribben points out these words of Twain's as his defense for changing the classics because "the N-word appears 219 times in Huck Finn and four times in Tom Sawyer." For me, that means that I am afforded a total of 223 opportunities to allow my students to become engrossed in how the commonplace usage of labels for people can create a divisive environment between races, religions, political preferences, ethnic origins, and/or sexual orientation. The "n" word becomes a modern metaphor for all forms of discrimination and a dynamic teaching tool.

Avoiding truth creates falsehood, and falsehood is far too often used to obfuscate reality. Twain said that words are "... really a large matter," and to me, because the words do matter, they should never be changed.