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Page 14 1 M a r t in L u t h e r K in g J r . JE) January 12, 2011 2011 sp e c ia l eu i l ion Opinion articles do not necessarily represent the views o f the Portland Observer. We welcome reader essays, photos and story ideas. Submit to news@portlandobserver.com. Cleansing’ Huck Finn: I’m A’gin It Fictionalizing history for propaganda purposes by L ee A. D aniels Two recent events underscore the wis dom of the warning the great historian Barbara W. Tuchman gave in 1982 to those who would "practice” the craft of writing history. “Leaving things out because they do not fit,” she wrote in her book. Practicing History: Selected Essays, “is writing fiction, not history.” The powerful lure to fictionalize history some succumb to for propa ganda p u rp o se s, or out o f a wrongheaded attempt to “comfort” either the afflicted or the powerful has shown itself at work again. On the one hand, an Alabama-based publisher has a new edition of Mark Twain’s classic , The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, with the word “nigger” - which appears in the original 219 times - completely ex cised from it and replaced with the word “slave.” The new edition also substitutes the word “Indian” for the word ‘injun” twain used. This idiotic move is precisely the opposite of the search for the truth and the truthful meaning that makes any critical undertaking worth read ing. Yet, even this bit of the bizarre was topped by what occurred Thurs- day in the House of Representa reading of the “partial” Constitu tives on the first day of the new tion began and in a later statement Congress. his office released. There, its members read from the “Our expectation,” he said, “was floor the entire Constitution of the that the new Republican majority United States that was approved by would read the Constitution as writ the Constitutional Convention ten and its subsequent amendments of 1787 - except for those sec ... that [have] turned our Constitu tions of the document House tion into a living document paid for Republicans, who now consti by the blood, sweat and tears of tute the majority, deemed politi millions of Americans from the Revo- cally troublesome. lutionary War through the Civil War So, most notably, the politi to even our current conflicts.” cally palatable Constitution read He went on to say that the “re Thursday in the Congress did not dacted Constitutional reading gives include Article I, Section 2 of the little deference to the long history of Constitution - the Section which improving the Constitution... [and] used the infamous “bound to ser leaves out the need to continue to vice” and “three-fifths” clauses to refine the Constitution so that we euphemistically but unmistakably have a more perfect union.” endorse Negro Slavery. D espite the protestations o f But the 14thamendment to the NewSouth Books, its substituting Constitution, which the post-Civil in The Adventures of Huckleberry War Congress enacted along with Finn the word “slave” for the word the 13th and 15th amendments to “nigger,” evinces a similar desire to eradicate Article, Section 2, was glide over rather than confront the read. tradition of racism and exclusion Y ou can see their point, of course. that dominated American practices Reading Article 1, Section 2 would until well into the 20th century. illuminate the truth that the Consti Alan Gribben, a Twain scholar at tution, as great as it was in many Auburn University at Montgom respects, was also a flawed docu ery, who proposed the book to ment, one that was born of numer NewSouth, told the New York Times ous political com prom ises and that he had always wanted “not to needed significant excising of its pronounce that word when I was original flaws and a j udicious ¿unend teaching either ‘Huckleberry Finn' ing to accept new realities and new or ‘Tom Sawyer.' And I don't think needs of the American democratic I’m alone.” experiment. Prof. Gribben asserted he was That was one of the points the “by no means sanitizing MarkTwain Illinois Democratic Rep. Jesse Louis .... 1 just had to get us away from Jackson Jr. made in a brief remarks obsessing about this one word, and on the House floor just before the just let the stories stand alone.” But he’s got it exactly wrong. Twain’s goal was not to soothe its readers; it was to alert them to the great wrong at the heart of a society which boasted interminably of its commitment to liberty and opportu nity while simultaneously discrimi nating against African Americans, Native Americans and other entire groups of Americans. No white American before or during his time saw this more clearly than Twain. Few white novelists have written about it with such power. (My personal Twain favor ite is his 1894 novel, Pudd'nhead Wilson, in which he illuminates one of the central facts of Slavery - namely, that it was very often a distorted family affair.) Who cannot see the awesome power of the word “nigger” in Huck Finn? Who cannot see that Twain used it as a device not to disparage blacks but to compel the reader to look into the soul of white Ameri- cans?Toread, for example, the stun ning passage in which Twain intro duces us to Huck’s odious Pap is to, first, virtually feel the hurricane- force gale of Pap’s virulently racist rant about a black college professor he had recently encountered in his drunken wanderings - “a free nigger ... with the whitest shirt on you ever see, too.” Then, you understand that Pap’s hatred is driven by a fear of black competition, of black success and a reckoning with his own worthless ness - an insight that continues to be broadly relevant today as well. Shelley Fisher Fishkin, profes Health Reform is Smart Choice by M arian W right E i , eeman In 2010, there was finally good news for millions of unin sured children and families when the President and Con gress took a major step towards ensuring affordable and com prehensive health coverage for mil lions of children and families in America. With the passage of The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act more than 35 million Americans in cluding more than 95 percent of children will have access to the criti cal health coverage they need to survive and thrive. Among other important protec tions, the Affordable Care Act pro hibits insurers from denying health coverage to children who desper ately need it, those already sick with “pre-existing conditions.” Children like Katie in Texas who suffers from severe sei zure-like attacks that last as long as 11 hours caused by an undiag nosed neuro-develop- mental disorder. Katie is also deaf in one ear, has a feeding disorder and requires daily medication for asthma. In her short life, she has already made numerous visits to the emergency room and had several hospital stays. When Katie lost her health cov erage her father tried to buy private insurance through his employer but he couldn' t afford the nearly $ 1,000 a month cost, about 30 percent of his salary. No other private insurer would offer the family coverage for Katie due to her pre-existing condi tions. Today millions of children like Katie will be able to receive the health coverage they need to grow up healthy or in less pain because of protections in the Affordable Care Act. In our wealthy nation no child should be bom at low birthweight, at risk of future health and learning difficulties, because of preventable causes, or die in the first year of life because their mothers did not have adequate prenatal or postnatal care. U ndiagnosed, untreated, and poorly managed health and m en tal health problem s increase a ch ild ’s chances of falling behind in school or having disciplinary problem s and low er a c h ild ’s chances of succeeding in and out o f school. W ithout access to com p reh en siv e, affo rd a b le health care, more children will do poorly in school at a time when we need to be im proving our global com petitiveness. Good health at birth and throughout childhood is e s sential for them as children and as sor of English at Stanford Univer sity, made just this point in criticiz ing the damage done to Twain’s art. “Leading black writers in America from Frederick Douglass to Ralph Ellison have understood this: to criticize racism effectively you have to make your reader hear how rac ists sound in all their offensive ug liness. When Malcolm X famously asked “What do you call a black man with a Ph.D?” and answered ‘Nigger,’ he was testifying to the destructive power of this word and the world view it embodied.” The NewSouth edition of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn uses a euphemism for “nigger” and so distorts the reality of the era - what black Americans faced; what the majority of white Americans sought to look away from. A century before Twain wrote, the delegates to the Constitutional Convention used euphemisms to obscure the moral cowardice they justified as pragmatism. And Thursday, some members of Congress could not bring themselves to confront the real original Constitu tion, instead preferring the political comfort of a fictionalized one. Barbara Tuchman’s words have never rung truer. Nor have William Faulkner’s from his 1951 novel. Requiem for a Nun: The past is never dead. It’s not even past. Lee A. Daniels is Director o f Communications fo r the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc., and Editor-in-Chief o f TheDefendersOnline. new Congress is a travesty productive future workers. Ensuring children access to com prehensive health coverage is one of the smartest, most cost-effective choices our country can make. The hidden costs of not insuring chil dren include high costs of uncom pensated care for those without in surance; use of costly emergency room care instead of early access to primary care; long term treatment of preventable illnesses; and the costs of untreated emotional problems in children whose unmet needs bring them to the child welfare or juvenile justice systems. Millions of children and families are already depending on the pro tections in the Affordable Care Act and millions more will do so as the act is implemented over the next few years. That these new and long overdue protections are now sub ject to a repeal attempt by some members of the new Congress is a travesty. A vote to repeal the Affordable Care Act is a vote to deny at least 16 million children, parents, and child less adults eligibility for Medicaid; threaten the successful Children’s Health Insurance Program which now provides more than seven mil lion children health coverage and is expected to double in size by 2015; and deny health coverage for the more than 1.2 million young adults now eligible for coverage through their parents’ health plans as they graduate from school and seek work up to age 26. A vote to repeal the Affordable Care Act would undermine oppor tunities for help for hundreds of thousands of children with disabili ties and other special needs. Marian Wright Edelman is presi dent o f the Children's Defense Fund.
