Last week a bit of ballyhoo erupted in the U.S. of States regarding an updated and 'improved' version of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, in which the word 'nigger' was replaced with 'slave'. NY Times reports here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/07/books/07huck.html
This isn't just stupid, it's offensive. It's an insult to history and deprives modern readers of a valuable insight not just into race relations in American history, but into the purpose of language itself.
In Holland we have a chocolate-marshmallow treat similar to a mallomar called a 'negerzoen', literally translating as 'negro-kiss', though historically the word 'neger' had a far less charged meaning than its English-language neighbors. Nonetheless some companies changed the names of these products a year ago, which I still think is just damn stupid as well.
Understand that as an Irish-Indonesian living in the Netherlands my skin is pretty pale in winter, but I turn nice and brown in summer. I'm tall, with European cheekbones, but with a light almond shape to my eyes. I'm mildly lactose intolerant, and benefit from vitamin D supplements.
Still, despite all this, it's only very occasionally that I'll remember 'Wait a minute, I'm not white'. My most common experience of race issues is a profound delight in a diversity of faces, figures, languages and cultures. I've often remarked how happy it makes me to work in a highly multicultural company.
Since Google N-Gram is such a cool tool (it plots the relative frequency of selected words in English publications over time) I thought I'd plug these words in: negro, nigger, and African American.
I find the surge immediately following the American Civil Rights Movement particularly interesting, though the point of this graph is to show how very recent poliical correctness is, and how it doesn't at all seem to have altered the frequency of the words it replaced.
To call a black person a 'nigger' is not just uncivil, it's verbal violence and has no place in modern conversation.
But Huckleberry Finn's friend and companion, nobler by far than the white-skinned degenrates they met on the Mississippi, was Nigger Jim.
Not Slave Jim or N-Word Jim or African-American Jim or American Citizen Jim of African Descent.
His name was Nigger Jim; that's what Huck called him, without a trace of malice.
Even though Jim's acceptance of the word might be interpreted as a sign of a downtrodden soul, a man so convinced of his worthlessness that he's come to accept it -- the book as a whole says otherwise, and unequivocally so. Nigger Jim is an honorable man, to be respected and admired, even through the follies he and Huck stumble through.
This is a lesson that readers of the 'improved' edition are denied:
Words are only conveyors of meaning, not containers.
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