We Need Ugly Words

Check it out--Mark Twain writes an anti-racist, anti-slavery book (you might have heard of it, ‘Tom Sawyer’), which many consider THE seminal American novel, and it gets banned from libraries by BOTH Left and Right for stupid reasons. Now “New South Publishing” has come out with a bowlderized edition which exchanges every instance of the word ‘nigger’ for ‘slave’, as in “Slave Jim and I were going down the river.”

We KNOW that racist people back then never said ‘slave’ when they *meant* ‘nigger’. The word is very ugly, and that’s why Twain chose to use it--he WANTED an ugly word to illustrate the ideology of an ugly society-- as in the scene where Huck tells the Widder that a steamship blew up, and she asks “Oh Lordy! Was anyone injured?” Huck replies: “No ma’am; killed a nigger.” The Widder, with relief, says “Well, that’s good, because you know, sometimes people do get hurt.”

RIGHT THERE you have their whole society in a nutshell; they don’t even see Blacks as humans to be counted. Yet Huck, a pig-ignorant racist to begin with, ends up holding Jim in high esteem before it’s all done, and if we were ignorant about racism before we read 'Huck Finn', we are no longer.

Watering great books down (and pissing on the author thereby), or making them unavailable, because they don’t fit comfortably into your political world view, is (how shall I say it?) FUCKED.