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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
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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.