I agree with Hal Bush, and Alan Kitty, and Ben Wise, and Gretchen Martin.
If I see another Huck = racist screed, I'm moving to France.  But since,
even with the free health care, free retirement, and free schooling for my
children, I can't afford to move to France, I offer instead the following 2
francs, or Euros, or whatever the hell they are spending over there.

Will we never be done with the claim that Huckleberry Finn is a racist text?
It is an argument that should incite mirth. Yet it seems to command respect
from many pedagogues and scholars. To be sure, Twain himself would have
laughed and sent thank-you notes to the various censoring librarians. He
understood the commercial value of censorship. But isn't it time, 130 years
after the writing of the greatest work in American literature, that the
defense prevail?

To say Huckleberry Finn is a racist text is akin to saying the court
reporter who took down the exploits of the Nazis at Nuremberg is an
anti-Semite. It's like blaming the historian who excavated Columbus'
startling praise of native Americans ("They would make fine servants. With
fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.").
It's criticizing Dean Swift's appetite for Irish children.

There are two answers to this charge. One defends the writing, the other
defends the man. Twain supplied both defenses in his lifetime.

He spoke in eloquent and ample detail about the role of the native novelist.
Without the contributions of a thousand native novelists, we should be
remitted to the history written by the historians. Huckleberry Finn could
give us a Happy Valley account of race relations, or it could tell us what
life was like. Mark Twain knew it couldn't do both. 

So what exactly is the problem? Is it that his book uses the n-word over 200
times? Or is it that the word was used in Missouri, Illinois, Indiana,
Kentucky, Mississippi, Arkansas, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, and God knows
where else many many more times (and still is, I wager---my alternative
sources bring me the news that it's been used for 30 or 40 years by a
Chicago cop recently put on trial for torturing black people into false
confessions)? How do you write the history of a people without using the
language they used? 

Twain said history is the life of the people.  Orwell pointed out that to
destroy a people the first thing is to destroy their history.  People
forget, I think, that in writing this first white history of the real South,
Twain was simply doing a yeoman's job of reporting. "History?" you object.
Well, of course all the incidents were made up. But they were made up from
real life. If a real Huck had floated down the river with a real Jim, these
things might well have happened to both of them. Twain was not recording
what people thought about race relations, he was illustrating the race
relations that actually existed at one time and place. At a time like the
present, when race prejudice is intentionally blurred or neutered out of
politeness or deceit, it is more important than ever that we have the
incisive view of the native novelist. (It was Hemingway, after all---who saw
Huckleberry Finn as the beginning of our literature---who said you should
never trust a Southerner, unless he is a Negro).

Twain was not merely not a racist. He was the most important white man in
ending racism.

Not that he ended it.

But what other white or black man had a hand both in criticizing Plessy vs.
Ferguson and also in vindicating Brown vs. Board of Education?  What?  Say
again?

Yes. Mark Twain played a crucial role at the beginning and at the end of
this racial saga. How is that possible, since he died in 1910? It's possible
because of his investments. What investments? His investments in people. In
1885, as Huck Finn was rearing its ugly head in this country, Mark Twain
made an investment in a young Negro who desired to go to law school, Yale no
less. Twain paid his expenses. Like so many of his other investments, Twain
got nothing in return. But that boy became the mentor in Baltimore of a
lawyer named Thurgood Marshall. And Marshall argued Brown vs Board of
Education, so do you begin to see how the father of our beginning literature
was also the father of our beginning racial healing?

What about Plessy vs. Ferguson? Well, while that case was wending its way
toward denouement in the Supreme Court in 1896, Twain was writing his novel
Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894). It could not have escaped well-informed readers
that the premise of his work was the same racial doctrine that underlay
Plessy: viz., that a single drop of Negro blood makes you a Negro, entitled
to all that that identity is heir to. The brilliant irony of that work, and
its scathing indictment of our racist law and politics, is among the highest
of Twain's achievements, whether or not the experts ever get around to
figuring out what he was talking about.

It is part of the national shame, and it stands toward the front of the
line, that Americans today could call Twain a racist. Huckleberry Finn's
Chapter 31 ("All right, then, I'll go to hell!") is the apex of our
literature and of our coming to terms with the race question. It should be
read out loud once a year by every American. I never read it without
weeping, and I never weep without wondering if they are tears of sadness or
of joy. Twain's courage in writing it is only exceeded by Huck's in living
it, for he knew his act would bring society and religion down on him and
forfeit the eternal life. Huck probably didn't know what it meant to be a
traitor to his class and his race, but he knew what it felt like.

Young people who are black and white need to know about Huck. But the Huck
who was taught to say "nigger" is not the Huck who is made to say something
else in the new Bowdlerized and pacified versions. 

Let me be clear. Huck remains arguably without peer as the hero of our
literature. "Nigger" was not his epithet; it was his predicament. If you rob
him of that, you diminish the grandeur of his moral feat and his victory.

The stupendous sweep of his courage must not be diluted by our own shame at
forcing him to his moral choice. For the children of today are faced with
their own choices, and they need our help, not our embarrassed protection.
We are not sparing the children when we excise the language that describes
our own shortcomings, not theirs.  If the black child learns that his
countrymen once said "nigger" he may be steeled against their still saying
it, under their breath, or thinking it. This is a loss of innocence, yes,
but is there not a world to gain?

We're not much in this country for truth and reconciliation. Maybe because
we think we're exceptional, we prefer hypocrisy and forgetting. But Twain
wasn't like that at all. He had the courage to stare the beast in the mouth.
He favored truth and reconciliation---and recompense. On Christmas Eve day,
1885, he wrote to the dean of Yale Law School as follows:

"If it were a matter of charity, I do not believe I would very cheerfully
help a white student who would ask a benevolence of a stranger, but I do not
feel so about the other color. We have ground the manhood out of them, and
the shame is ours, not theirs, and we should pay for it."

And pay he did. The result was Warner T. McGuinn, first in his class at Yale
Law School, on whose death in 1937 Thurgood Marshall commented:

"He was the best lawyer in Baltimore. If he were white, they would have made
him a judge."

Thirty years later, they made Marshall a judge, and Twain's investment bore
its final return.

Do you see? If all children were white, or if all men were brothers, we
wouldn't need to insist on Twain's words. The first will never be true, and
the second won't either, unless we insist on his words. All of them.

Michel L. Stone
STONE & SUTTON, P.A.
116 East Fourth Street
Panama City, Florida  32401
(850) 785-7272  office
(850) 785-7094   fax
[log in to unmask]   

NOTICE:  Due to Presidential Executive Orders, the National Security Agency
may have read this email without warning, warrant, or notice.  They may do
this without any judicial or legislative oversight and it can happen to
ordinary Americans like you and me. You have no recourse nor protection save
to vote against any incumbent endorsing such unlawful acts.  That may not
work, either.
____________________________________

Check out my new play, Mark Twain Interruption:
http://www.stageplays.com/products/mark_twain_interruptioncategorycyberpress
code417 



-----Original Message-----
From: Mark Twain Forum [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Hal Bush
Sent: Wednesday, February 20, 2013 11:34 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: MLA 2014 cfp: Roundtable on Teaching Racist Texts

Folks:  here is a brand new CFP from C19, titled "Teaching Racist Texts"...
and guess what is this critic's star attraction?

I'm troubled by the concept of a "racist text" being displayed so cavalierly
(especially now 40 years give or take after Derrida, Bakhtin et
al)  and wondered if others on here would be too.  there are certainly
racist tendencies in the text, but it's not exactly The Leopard's Spots or
anything, right??

Further, it would seem that the author of a "racist text" is also a racist.

Much of this has been debated in Twain studies ad  nauseum, I know;  I'm
just thinking of how to (politely?) respond, and show my displeasure at what
I consider an unjust characterization of HF as a "racist text."

comments?  -hb




---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Brigitte Fielder <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Wed, Feb 20, 2013 at 11:08 AM
Subject: MLA 2014 cfp: Roundtable on Teaching Racist Texts
To: [log in to unmask]


Teaching Racist Texts: A Roundtable on Pedagogy

 While continuing efforts have been made to incorporate a more diverse array
of writers into the American literary canon, the problem of racism still
presents a pedagogical challenge.  As literature courses seek to engage
students in meaningful conversations about the assigned texts, they must
also deal with the problem of those texts=92 content. Some literature
contains material which is offensive =96 racial epithets, derogatory
depictions of non-white people, assumptions of white supremacy.  The 2011
New South Books publication of Mark Twain=92s Adventures of Huckleberry Fin=
n sparked popular controversy by replacing the text=92s 219 uses of the
=93n-word=94 with the word =93slave.=94  While this change makes the text m=
ore palatable for some to read aloud, it does not evacuate all that is
problematic about the texts=92 presentation of race and racism. Rather than
evacuating, dismissing, or ignoring racist content, engaging students in
frank conversations about the racism inherent in much of American literature
will help them to address the difficult =96 sometimes offensive = or hurtful
=96 content of the literatures we read, discuss, and write about.

The pedagogy of dealing with the racist content of American literature will
be the subject of this roundtable.  Participants will share their insights
into common problems encountered when teaching racist texts, and strategies
for teaching students how to talk and write about this racism.

Moreover, the pedagogical practice of attending to racism can help students
to better understand the literature at the center of our classroom
discussions.

Roundtable discussion topics may include:

Student reluctance to talking about race Preconceptions about race and
racism Historical contexts / racism in the present Dealing with dialect
Redeeming texts / absolving authors Racist language =96 to repeat or not to
repeat?
Being mindful of students=92 racialized persons The embodied professor =96
who gets to talk about race?
How to write about racism without sounding like a racist

100-word abstracts by 15 March to Brigitte Fielder (
[log in to unmask]).

- --=20
Brigitte Nicole Fielder, PhD
Associate Lecturer in English
University of Wisconsin, Madison
Helen C. White Hall
600 North Park Street
Madison, WI 53706




- --=20
Prof. Harold K. Bush
Professor of English
3800 Lindell
Saint Louis University
St. Louis, MO  63108
314-977-3616 (w); 314-771-6795 (h)
<www.slu.edu/x23809.xml>