Gosh we're lucky in Canada that we have the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council to protect us from nasty people like Dire Straits. The CBSC has just banned Money For Nothing because it used the word faggot three times.

It's so reassuring that this group is always "on top of things". It only took them 26 years to notice.

And, it would have been nice if they had listened to the song first to get the context. This is not a slur against a sexual group - it's about a working stiff who is jealous of rock stars and is making derogatory comments against them.

I sure would like it better if my tax dollars could go to something useful - like providing shelter for the homeless or putting food into the mouths of kids under the poverty line.

Gads.

ryck

Don't tell the CBSC about Thomas Hardy. "Return of the Native" has several passages that refer to burning faggots. (For those who are not enlightened, "faggot" in England does not necessarily mean a homosexual man and Hardy certainly did not use it that way. You can look it up.)

If I understand it correctly, the Council responded to a listener complaint filed last year. In its decision it states that it is aware of the fact that Dire Straits used the word sarcastically, yet still considers it 'improper'. Apparently K97 radio played MfN for one hour solid in protest earlier tonight.

As suggested elsewhere, the Council might want to take a look at Bob Dylan's Hurricane for an N-word, and Bruce Springsteen's Born in the USA for a 'yellow man' to mention just two other potential improprieties. It might just keep its members off the street in 2011...


Oops, only belatedly noticed the link to the relevant CBSC page...

Canada?

Who cares?


[KIDDING (you got some great bands up there).]

Where would the world be sans Neil and Joni?

Yes, and now there's even a move by an American publisher to sanitize Huckleberry Finn. Political Correctness runs amok.

ryck

Well, to be fair, the motivation behind banning those songs and the motivation behind changing the "N-word" in Huckleberry Finn are very different.

First, there's the matter that the changes to Huckleberry Finn don't make the original version unavailable. The two would only really be comparable if a publisher changed Huckleberry Finn and then passed an ordinance banning people from buying or reading the original.

I thought the Huck Finn thing was PC gone mad until I actually listened to the publisher and understood what they were trying to do. Essentially, what they're trying to do is to allow modern readers to read it the way that it was written. When it was written, the "N-word" did not have the same explosively emotional, hurtful overtones that it has today. Modern readers can't really get a sense of the original, because the word's emotional connotations tend to overshadow everything else. For that reason, teachers are often forbidden from teaching it in school, and people who might otherwise be able to get a valuable lens on American history through the stories simply aren't given the chance to be exposed to someone who is arguably one of the greatest American writers.

If the goal was somehow to purge all the original books, or to ban the original versions, then I could see being upset by it. But that's not what's happening. The original and the modified versions are still being printed side by side; people have the choice which one they want to read. The modified version can be taught in school, with the idea that people who are then more familiar with Mark Twain's original intentions free to reread the original.

So I see a huge difference between that and a government agency banning something completely, telling its citizens "You are not allowed to hear this at all because we have determined that it contains words you should not see."

1. The Canadian Broadcast Standards Council is not a government organization; it is a private one. Note the Prime Minister's commentary on same. Ergo, tax dollars shouldn't be an issue.

2. Huckleberry Finn revision by publisher, although well meaning (and they hope financially rewarding), is still revisionist history, with all its attendant downsides. Even some blacks (eg, Larry Wilmore of The Daily Show) point out how such revisionism denies them their history, which is even more offensive than the N-word.
And for some people the only books they'll ever read are in school where full historical context and meaning including current attitudes can be discussed in a nurturing, safe environment. (Oh, would that it were so!)

I'm with tacit. no matter how many times I tell my students that "gay" means happy....

And, on the other hand, the "n-word" has almost (and almost is almost an understatement) fallen into the vernacular here in NYC where I hear it all day long on the streets, in the subways, in stores, you name it.

I've long been of the opinion that the use of a word considered a slur, in ordinary context, by the slurred, dignifies it and makes its use by everybody well... if not acceptable, less than intolerable.

Perhaps. However, I lean toward grelber on this one. The cynic in me wonders if the publisher's rationale is a little less noble than making sure kids get exposed to important literature and a little more about increasing sales.

However, conceding that their motivation may be good, I wonder if it doesn't actually dilute the book's lessons. This is probably more for a teacher to answer but it seems to me that modifying the original language reduces the impact of lessons like Finn's changing attitude toward Jim.


But, isn't that why we have teachers? Isn't it better to have a teacher explain to a class ahead of the reading assignment that they are going to encounter this language, and put it into context? Isn't it better to have the kids talk about it?

If we don't allow the original language and context in the classroom, and open it to discussion among the kids, I think we miss a great opportunity to start getting rid of the word.


And that's really unfortunate. It also points out that it's the school administrations, not literary works, that need to be fixed. Instead of seizing an opportunity to do some good, by ensuring the curriculum adequately covers context, the administrations prefer to muzzle the teachers and put blinders on the kids.

ryck

Ideally? Yep. You bet. In a perfect world, the book would stay the same, and teachers would use it as a catalyst to talk about American history and the volatile place that race has always had in it.

But given an imperfect world, if the choice is between "teaching a modified version of Mark Twain's books" and "not teaching Mark Twain's books at all," I think the former is probably preferable to the latter.

Do you know whether the "updated" version is annotated and, if so, how much information is included?

Not likely annotated. And even if it were, it would have none of the academic exegesis one finds, for example, in The Interpreter's Bible, and would require as hefty a tome as the latter to do the subject justice.

Let's consider the reverse situation too: the blackballing of writers such as Henry Miller, whose works were banned in the good ol' USofA for decades, although if one got them in translation, they were perfectly "importable" (most likely because the border watchdogs were unilingual). The coarse sex and sexual references became acceptable and great writers found their way back into the American consciousness, albeit through the back door, via foreign (then domestic) publishers such as the Olympia Press.

Lorrie Moore OP-ED in Jan 15 New York Times: Send Huck Finn to College

Methinks her commentary is chock-a-block with deflection and misdirection. But that's just my take.
The book belongs in high school and university. I read it before the age of 12 (ie, while in elementary school) and was still able to glean and appreciate the relevant meanings and implications, as well as enjoy it as fine literature. But then that's just me.
It's important to be littiate. 'Member how Mark Clemmens starts off Huck Sawyer's appraisal of the Civilian War:
"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way ...."

Even the Indians qua Native Americans/Canadians don't like revisionist history.
See storyteller Doug Cuthand's opinion, Revising offensive history is to deny reality.

This discussion reminds me of a quote from George Santayana, "Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it." Revisionist history, no matter how well intended will inevitably contribute to forgetting the mistakes of the past and with equal inevitability lead to making the same mistake again in the future.

When well intentioned persons seek to remove offensive labels like "#$!&" or "faggot" they are denying today's children the opportunity to learn that critical lesson as anything other than a social should. Unless there has been "real" learning of the "why" behind the change, society will soon forget and new damaging labels will appear. We are not born knowing the why and each generation must learn the reasons anew, which is the real value of books like Huckleberry Finn in their unexpurgated form.

and I refer everyone to tacit's reply on the 15th, which states the difference between these two cases quite clearly, and the reasons behind the Twain "revision".

while I agree that the Dire Straits ban is ridiculous, the Twain revision allows teachers to teach what Twain meant, as opposed to what we think of when we hear the word. there is a big difference.

And just on the CBC hourly radio news: After receiving more than 200 complaints regarding the private Canadian Broadcast Standards Council's "banning" of the unedited version of Money for Nothing, the federally mandated Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) has requested the Council to "review" that decision (based on a single complaint out the Maritimes).

The original complaint was from St. John's, Newfoundland which is an Atlantic province, but is not one of the Maritime provinces of New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island.

…the Twain revision allows teachers to teach what Twain meant, as opposed to what we think of when we hear the word.

Roger, that word was just as much a slur back when Twain wrote Huckleberry Finn as it is today. Twain meant it that way. If you in fact want to teach what Twain meant, then you need to include the word. Substituting "slave" is pitiful.

What the publisher should have done was leave the text as is and include a forward that would explain the history of the word, the harm it's done, and why it's as horrible as it is.

Merci for the correction. I hadn't heard what the exact source was other than it was from out east.
What do you expect from a place which is always a half hour off the hour?
Newfoundland (and maybe Labrador) are renowned for producing great comedians, such as Rick Mercer, (in)famous for his Taling to Americans, and CODCO (Cathy Jones, Tommy Sexton, Greg Malone, Mary Walsh, Dyan Olsen). Maybe it's all an elaborate hoax, given that several of the above-mentioned are (openly) gay. Ooo, the mind boggles ....

thank you for your information; I was going by what tacit stated in his post. so I probably should look it up myself.

A post from the author Michael Chabon on how he handled reading Twain to his kids.

I was watching a movie on tv one day, starring Janet Jackson and Tupak Shakur. (Back in the 90's i think -- don't recall its title, could google later maybe). Anyway... after a flurry of highly gratuitous n-words were uttered in a very short period of time, i decided to start counting them. I stopped counting at 100... and the show hadn't ended yet.

Quoted from your linked article:


Don't you think the highlighted text is gratuitous without an explicit explanation?

(I've reposted my edits to this post in a new post to ensure that everybody sees them.)

Expanding on my earlier post:

Also, "black people I had known were just as uncomfortable using the word around white people" suggests that those black people were comfortable using it among themselves, i.e. considered it acceptable among themselves, to which I'll repeat my earlier statement that "I've long been of the opinion that the use of a word considered a slur, in ordinary context, by the slurred, dignifies it and makes its use by everybody well... if not acceptable, less than intolerable."

I think that piece opens up more worm-cans than it closes and doesn't deserve to see the light of day in the form in which it is presented.

(And, by the way, the (Auburn) article linked to in the article mentions that "Injun" has also been edited out of the book.)

too many people's brains just short out and behavior goes irrational when they hear the wrong words. really that needs to just stop but I don't see it happening anytime soon.

imho, the reactions to the words is far worse than the words themselves. You can't get rid of the words, you need to fix the way people react to them.

so, I feel the problem is not the words, but the way people react to them.

Deep wounds sometimes require inordinately long periods of time to heal, and I'm afraid that people just don't understand that.

Back when Heinlein's Stranger In A Strange Land was hot stuff, when people were scrawling "grok" on any and every surface, I found Michael Smith's "when waiting is filled" to be the meaningful words in the book, but, unfortunately, I also found them to be incomprehensible to most people. (Still do! )

I don't expect the words to ever go away, but I do expect people's reactions to them to s...l...ooo...w...l...y mellow.

It took 40 years from Dr. King's assassination for us to get a black man in the White House, but I'll bet you could have gotten some exceptional odds on that had you been crazy enough to believe that waiting would be filled in such a short period of time and placed your bet in 1968.

I actually don't think that's true.

It was a slur, yes, but its emotional impact then wasn't the same as its emotional impact today. I've been told repeatedly, by a number of different folks, that the emotional impact of the "N-word" is so much greater now than it was even, say forty years ago, that the book becomes almost unreadable to many folks today.

In any event, I would not call it 'revisionist history' in any realistic sense of the word. Certainly, nobody's ceasing publication of the original, nor attempting to say that any particular historical event didn't happen. If someone were to say that slavery didn't exist, or that all Africans came to this country voluntarily prior to the Civil War, or that slavery wan't really all that bad, that'd be revisionist history.

There is one potential benefit I see of this book. It's quite likely that this version of the book will be allowed in public schools that currently ban the original--and that, of and by itself, might give teachers the opportunity to open dialog on the subject. If I were such a teacher, I would begin my introduction to the book with "Today we are going to start reading Huckleberry Finn. The version you're about to read is different from the one Mark Twain wrote in this way, and here's why..."

I cannot fathom why any of those people would say that.

I have lived long enough that I can recall a time when the word had no meaning whatsoever to me. I remember, as a kid, buying a candy called N-Babies and at Christmas we always had Brazil nuts, but they were called N-toes. Nobody thought anything of it.

Then as a young man in the sixties , the real emotion-filled meaning of the word, as it was used elsewhere, became very clear. However, I also heard Lenny Bruce preach about words being given power by suppressing them. He had a routine called: "Are there any N's here tonight?" He would follow that word with a whole series of other epithets based on religions, racial backgrounds, nationalities et cetera. He believed that, if you used a word often enough, it would lose its meaning.

I think he was right. I also wonder if that isn't part of the rationale behind the N-word's widespread use in a lot of music and other art forms today. Are the artists trying to kick the crap out of the word by using it so much that nobody continues to notice? Is Lenny Bruce rolling over in his grave because people undermine the efforts of those artists by using the euphemism "N-word"?

Making a link from the sixties until today.........a few nights ago I watched a rerun of the 1967 movie "In the Heat of the Night" (Poitier/Steiger), a movie that uses the N-word several times. I have not heard or seen a single complaint in any medium. Maybe the aforementioned artists are succeeding.


I could not agree more that teachers should have their students discuss and debate the novel and the use of the N-word. However, if a teacher is going to open the discussion, what's the advantage of beginning with an expurgated version of the story? It seems to me that students mature enough to have the discussion must be also mature enough to read the original words.

ryck

I imagine the difference has everything to do with liability or the perception thereof. By this hypothesis, the educational infrastructure fears that presenting the original unexpurgated work may be taken as somehow endorsing the use of the word. And since all manner of interest groups have nowadays found their voices with respect to what they find offensive, the educational powers-that-be don't want to be found insensitive to the preferences of such groups.

To present the redacted version as part of an official curriculum is to refuse to legitimize the word. I'm not saying I agree with this reasoning, but it does make at least a modicum of sense.

I'm more irritated by PRI's insistence on bleeping profanity from "spellbinding short stories by established and emerging writers" deemed of sufficient cultural value to be read to a concert-hall audience by "stars of the stage and screen."

In today's "not child left behind" classroom unless the "n" word is on the state test there is no time available for the discussion you propose. Besides that if a parent should complain because the teacher used the "n" word, regardless of the context, that teacher would be looking for a new job the next morning.

Which all goes to show that the K-12 educational system(s) should be chucked in their entirety and then be reconstructed on the model from the 1950s and early 1960s (ie, before "new math", "ebonics", and their ilk).
Maybe even reinstitute respect for teachers without their having to pander to special interests (including parents, helicopter or otherwise).
That would be a truly elegant "retro" plan with solid results.
(And let's leave '50s battlegrounds such as Brooklyn schools out of the equation. They were great for teachers, who got hazard [read: war] pay, but did nothing for the inmates. The "blackboard jungle" was indeed a reality, not just a groovy motion picture.}

That's really unfortunate on at least a couple of levels. The idea that a single complaint could generate such a drastic result is appalling. It sounds somehow undemocratic that one individual could cause such a change affecting the many.

Secondly, I can't imagine how any teacher can educate properly if they have to work under such a cloud. How can they possibly teach tolerance of any kind if they have to worry that it might cost them their job?

This could be the worst consequence because teachers, who are the role models with most exposure to the young, are best positioned to change attitudes. As Helen Keller said: "The highest result of education is tolerance."

Again, maybe it's the administrative ideas, not literary works, that need to be fixed.

ryck

The problem, in my mind, is that many of these interest groups have very narrow interests to match their narrow minds. It's not a problem restricted to the U.S. We had a huge commotion here when schools introduced books that showed families with both parents of the same sex.

The opposition ranged from outright bias to the idea that young minds shouldn't be "exposed to such ideas".

I thought about one of my daughters who, when she was very young, had a best friend whose parents were a natural father, who was gay, and his male partner. It was different than other parental couples my daughter was familiar with but she never thought there was something wrong. On her own she simply concluded that parents were just two people who loved one another.

I don't recall any of her other friends thinking differently. Apparently young minds "exposed to such ideas" are able to come to more rational conclusions that the adults who profess to be protecting them.

ryck

Neither can I, personally. However, I have not had the experience of growing up black in American society, nor had to deal with the day-to-day racism that is still way too prevalent. As a privileged member of society, it's not my place or within my ability to comment on someone else's pain.



I think that's more a school administration thing than a schoolteacher thing. I can easily see where school administrators might not permit the original version but might permit the edited version, at which point it falls to the teachers to actually open that dialog.



I can see that line of reasoning, as well, and I can even endorse it. At the end of the day, I'm a pragmatist. I think that Mark Twain's writings are an extremely important part of the American story. If this lets more people be exposed to them, then that's an end result I can get behind.



"New math" is just arithmetic and algebra. The "old math" it replaced is, frankly, bizarre. For example, have you ever seen how to subtract two large numbers the old way? It is, frankly, a Byzantine process.



Heh That's nothing. In American society, we are so terrified of anything even remotely controversial that we only just barely stop short of requiring all teachers to be celibate virgins. God help any public school teacher who is, or is rumored to be, gay or otherwise in any sort of non-traditional relationship at all, or who has ever in the past, even before becoming a teacher, been involved in any sort of non-traditional relationship.

I don't think so at all. If anything, the target of the remark would have been more reticent to express an objection back then.

Click! That would be the sound of the light going on.

I hadn't realized until now just who you were speaking of specifically. I had just gone on the assumption that people of various backgrounds will have discomfort with the word, much like the fact than many non-Jews, for example, are appalled at the names used for them.

However, given your clarification, neither would I presume to comment on the pain of a person who's lived it. Without any intention of being indelicate, I would add that these folks are not compelled to read an unexpurgated version any more than a native American who is repelled by "Injun Joe".

It would be interesting to know who holds the opposite view, and say: "Hey! Don't sweep this under the rug. We don't want anyone to forget that, as ugly as it is, it's part of our history in North America."

In the end, I think we can agree that it, or other forms of bigotry, will never end until we get children talking about it in the absence of bigoted adults.


One can only wonder how many new Jane Elliotts are not allowed to blossom when school boards are themselves so bigoted.

ryck

I'm not in a position to say; I'm not the target of that particular slur. I do know that it has been expressed to me that it is more painful now than it was fifty or even twenty years ago.



I recently was part of a rather lengthy discussion on the topic of racism and bigotry on another forum.

Part of the issue isn't simply individual bigotry. There are still openly racist, bigoted people who are pleased to thump their chests and spout off about the supremacy of the white race, sure, but they're actually fairly uncommon.

The more insidious problem is the forms of racial privilege that are utterly invisible, even to people who are not themselves overtly racist. It's very difficult for someone who's white to even see all the various advantages he has in American society; when we grow up living in an environment of privilege, that privilege becomes as invisible to us as air.

And because it's so invisible, even people who aren't racist and who don't harbor bigotries still make assumptions about what it's like to be a member of another race without taking into account the fact that we have those advantages. Just by benefitting from advantages that we neither earned nor asked for--advantages which, half the time, we don't even SEE--we can inadvertently promote a vey subtle sort of institutionalized racism, without being overtly racist ourselves at all.

And because those subtle forces are so institutionalized, simply removing bigoted adults from the equation won't likely make them go away.

There's an awesome essay called Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack that talks about those invisible advantages that white skin confers. It was written by Peggy McIntosh, a woman's studies professor who kept beating her head against the fact that men hold an advantaged position in American society but often refuse to acknowledge, or even see, their own privileged state. She turned that observation on herself and asked the question "Do I have privileges that I don't see, as well?"

The result is really worth reading, I think. I can't recommend the essay enough.



Indeed. By catering to moral panic and enforcing an unrealistic standard that tries to treat schoolteachers as identical, chase, sexless entities with no lives outside the classroom, we deny kids the ability to learn some very important lessons, including the notion that who a person sleeps with or in what position really has no bearing on that person's worth, dignity, or ability to do a job.

And that robs everyone of something valuable, I think.