One of the first people to ban Huckleberry Finn was Louisa May Alcott. Like many other people at the time, it wasn’t the n-word that particularly upset her but the use of vernacular speech for everyone. They considered it vulgar.
“I’m trying to imagine teaching Beloved while skipping over infanticide.”
I imagine the teacher would want to skip over the significance of the ‘tree’ embedded on the back as well. May as well not assign the text at all.
I think both Huckleberry Finn and To Kill a Mockingbird were seminal books in helping white folks understand racism, but I think a reasonable argument can be made that we should be listening to African-American voices instead .
I do think that HF’s message is that Huck learns to see Jim as a human being and that the use of the n-word is not endorsement of it. But I am not a person, so I don’t think I am the right person to say how hurtful it seems to one who is in that particular book.
Many teachers do pair To Kill A Mockingbird with other first hand African American perspectives. For instance, I teach To Kill A Mockingbird and pair it with videos about the life of Maya Angelou; we read interviews from different racial groups from that time period, and discuss poetry including Langston Hughes in partnership with the text. If anyone has additional resources for pairing the text with African American writings, I’d love to investigate.
https://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story
This is a fabulous TedTalk video from an African author, Chimamanda Ngozi. She warns against just portraying one side of the story, particularly when it is the dominant group’s perspective.
To Kill A Mockingbird is a life changing, powerful novel. It is compelling because it not only expresses injustice through the eyes of a child, but it serves as a time capsule of days gone by. It is astounding to find that students are often more amazed at the way children spent their days rolling tires, playing theater games and wandering about without parents. They are less shocked by the n----- term. To us it is painful to hear; to them–their only association may be that they have heard the word in rap music. It is so vital that they understand that the word has its roots in injustice. Telling them this is not effective. Showing them through storytelling hits the target.
When adults are asked which novel they enjoyed the most from school, this novel is usually at the top of their list—for good reason!
1966–Harper Lee wrote this note to a school board when they banned TKMB.
http://www.businessinsider.com/harper-lee-letter-to-a-school-board-trying-to-ban-mockingbird-2016-2
@mathmom Seminal books by white authors and later books by black authors are not mutually exclusive. In fact, it would be quite instructive to teach them together.
I use an ad blocker because I don’t want to be advertised to constantly. More and more sites are refusing entry if you don’t disable your ad blocker. Unfortunately the link above is making that demand, so I won’t be reading it.
Business Insider and Forbes, yep. Funny how they’re both business sites.
Somewhere up thread I think someone was making a point about how we shouldn’t keep things as canon just because that’s how they’ve “always” been. I agree completely. Unfortunately, people who challenge these types of books aren’t making any sort of argument about how we should try something else. It’s just ban, ban, ban.
Instead? Why should we care about the race of the author more than about the quality of the book?
@sorghum: “Instead? Why should we care about the race of the author more than about the quality of the book?”
I think the idea goes to control of the narrative, @sorghum.
Very often the observer, the chronicler, the reporter, the teller of the story takes that which is present in the core of the story, at its heart, and “fixes” it to make it more palatable to the wider, more mainstream audience.
In doing so, perspectives, language and ideas can truly be lost. When those perspectives and that language are lost, it is only the voice, tone and angle of the storyteller which remains, and to which are conferred the stamp of authority. When newer voices, other voices, seek to relay what may seem the very same story, but done in a different voice, employing different techniques and rendering different heroes and heroines, quite often the response has been one of needing to critique the newest voice within the framework of the established voices, and then determining that there is little value to this new and different voice.
I do not have a problem with the works and voices of both the observer and the observed, or both witnesses to the story or event, being given the chance to present their ideas and take on what things looked like, felt like, smelled like…you get it.
In truth it is kind of crazy to know and see that we can view Americans as having lived such parallel existences, -existing at the same time, across a line - and yet had such vastly different experiences under and inside of the same societal systems.
As a white person, I just think that the more I can understand about the black experience, the better. Some white voices can be very valuable, like Harper Lee’s. But the fact is, it is extremely difficult for any white person to really know what it’s like to be black, day after day, year after year. There are injustices which are 100% invisible to whites unless we intentionally seek out the people who will tell us about them, and those voices are going to be mostly black. Romani is right, book-banners don’t usually propose black authors instead of Harper Lee. They are not seeking any expression of the black experience at all. They don’t want to hear it, and they especially don’t want their children to hear it. IMO.
This strikes me as the exact reason why middle schools, high schools and colleges have gone off the deep end and are producing ignorant students in many disciplines, not just history.
The true intellectual approach is to be listening to both sides, white and black perspectives, to understand racism. Both perspectives are important to provide full context, as to why slavery existed and to really give context as to how far we have come since those days, especially when much of the world is still far behind in this regard.
(Emphasis mine)
Awc, do you seriously think that there’s a sentient human in this county who doesn’t understand the white perspective?
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I think that approach makes sense with most social issues, but with slavery in the U.S.?? Seems like from the white perspective it is just one big “mea culpa.” What other perspective is there?
Many people know the moon is not made of green cheese and that it affects the tides on Earth. but, educationally, we do not depend on these few known facts to absolve us from teaching about its history, development, evolution etc., including alternate theories of its development. This same diligence of teaching should apply to history and any other discipline.
Additionally, I find it somewhat strange you think all humans know the same facts of a particular subject and, worse, have reached the same conclusions, and thus have the same perspective about something.
I never enter a discussion even thinking I know what someone understands re a particular perspective on something unless they tell me, as I am not a mind reader, and I do not know what they know or believe until they tell me. Hey, but that is just me. I do not to assume anything about what people know and believe.
Uh, you do realize there are people in this country that are neither black or white, don’t you?
I always love the idea that there are “two sides to every issue.” Let’s take slavery. It’s going to look a hell of a lot different if you were black man, black woman, white woman married to a landowning white male, white male with land, white male wage worker, and on and on.
So sure, if you really want to provide full context, you’re going to have to provide a dozen+ perspectives. But, again, the people looking to ban books don’t want full context or multiple different perspectives. They want a sanitized, watered-down version of deeply horrific episodes in our history.
I will once again point out the irony that the same people who want these books banned are generally the same people who whine and moan about college students wanting “safe spaces.”
You would be wrong about that. It used to be the right that wanted to ban books, but these days it tends to be those on the left.