So, as the Rachel Maddow show blog noted:
…the Constitution will be read in its most modern, amended form. This will prevent lawmakers from having to recite politically uncomfortable portions, notably the provisions on the “three-fifths compromise” under which slaves were counted as three-fifths of a person for the purposes of taxation and representation.
This happens just as we learn that Mark Twain is being censored as well.
I shall now paraphrase what should be a familiar phrase, and say that those who attempt to rewrite history are bound to repeat it.
Here’s the thing: we are a messy nation, with a deep and consistent history of racism, one that neither easily escaped nor simply remedied.
But we have choices how to respond to that. We can:
- ignore the bigotry and hope it fades away;
- accept the bigotry and figure it’s all in the past;
- accept the bigotry and remember that there’s still work to be done.
#1 is a problem for me. It clearly hasn’t worked, and when you completely ignore your history it tends to creep back up again. It’s like ignoring sand at a nude beach. You can pretend it’s not there and you can ignore it for a time, but at some point, you have to acknowledge that you’ve managed to get the sand in the strangest of places.
#2 is something I can understand, but fact teaches us otherwise. Just do a Google image search for “Obama racist images” and you’ll see what I mean.
Which leaves us with #3.
There is argument in support of removing the n-word from Huck Finn. But this isn’t it:
It wouldn’t be considered a classic… If it insulted jews. Jewish people protect themselves very well, ask Rick Sanchez. I’ve often thought if Black Americans would want to consider a Big Brother mentor race we would look to the Jews. A slave race that has not forgotten it’s roots in slavery and are able to be proud of it. No one ever thinks that the Romans were good guys. No one is still walking around doing balls celebrating Nazism like they do the confederacy. All those things pile up on a Black American. Then when we say ouch this hurts, the overwhelming reaction seems to be, yeah well no one solved anything by making it less ugly. That’s real easy when the ugliness isn’t at you.
I’m not posting this to judge the perspective in the above quote– I’m not able to speak to whether or not it’s right for anyone to support the censorship of Mark Twain. I’m writing this, however, to respond to the claim of fact made, and to question the conclusions that have been derived as such.
Because classic works of literature include comments hostile towards pretty much everyone.
Take, for example, this classic work by John Donne:
Spit in my face you Jews, and pierce my side,
Buffet, and scoff, scourge, and crucify me,
For I have sinned, and sinned, and only he
Who could do no iniquity hath died:
But by my death can not be satisfied
My sins, which pass the Jews’ impiety:
They killed once an inglorious man, but I
Crucify him daily, being now glorified.
Oh let me, then, his strange love still admire:
Kings pardon, but he bore our punishment.
And Jacob came clothed in vile harsh attire
But to supplant, and with gainful intent:
God clothed himself in vile man’s flesh, that so
He might be weak enough to suffer woe.
Now– I want to be clear: I think Donne is a fantastic poet, but he’s a product of his times, and I would not have us teach Donne while pretending that this poem does not exist.
If you’re familiar with the classic Noir detective work “The Maltese Falcon,” both the movie and the book use the term “gunsel.” Gunsel is not generally used today, but at the time that Hammett was writing, it was a derogatory term used to reference effeminate gay men. If you want more examples of classic works that demonize lesbians and gay men, you should watch “The Celluoid Closet.”
The fact that the Hichcock classic film “Rebecca” has a lesbian villain who is portrayed in a creepy and disturbing fashion is, again, something that shouldn’t be ignored, but it shouldn’t be a cause for censoring the movie either. It’s an important film, and a very good film. But it’s a film that has a bigoted premise, that’s a product of its time.
What about Ayn Rand’s “The Fountainhead” or Margaret Mitchell’s “Gone With the Wind?” Both these stories (I’ve read the Rand book and seen the film version of Mitchell’s) not only have critical scenes which involve rape, they actively glorify it. In both stories, the rape is a crucial moment which frees and inspires the woman being raped.
Again– this is a criticism of these works, but I would not have us print versions of them which pretended the rape did not exist or toned them down to be more “polite” versions.
When we whitewash our own history, it doesn’t mean that we’ve gotten past these past grievances. It doesn’t mean we’ve escaped it. It just means we are pretending it didn’t happen.
And indeed, this can be done with good intent. There are words that are deeply offensive and I totally understand why they are offensive. But I also understand that there are ways in which we give that language more power by hiding it, by moving it into the shadows and refusing to challenge it directly.
And for me, it boils down to this: if we’re going to teach Mark Twain, we should teach Mark Twain. We shouldn’t teach a whitewashed, watered down version of it. If you’re going to censor it, censor it openly, by putting black marks across the word rather than replacing it with “slave” (which, for some reason, is oddly not considered offensive).
I will convey two stories, both of which involve Richard Prior, though not for the same reasons:
In an interview with Mel Brooks, he talks about the movie “Blazing Saddles,” which makes prolific use of the N-word, such as in this scene:
When Mel Brooks was writing this film, he made a point of hiring Richard Pryor to be on the writing team because he was afraid he wouldn’t be able to judge for himself what was crossing the line in terms of satire. I have this fear, when I see stories about us whitewashing the constitution and Mark Twain, that someday someone will produce a new version of Blazing Saddles which dubs the word “African American” into every moment with the offending word.
The other story is from an interview with Gene Wilder on Terry Gross’ Fresh Air about the film Silver Streak. There is a scene in this movie in which Gene Wilder puts on black face to evade the police. Prior was visibly upset over this, and considered backing out of the movie. The two of them had a conversation about it and they actually reworked the scene together. The result was still a scene which included black face, but took it in a different direction than the original skit. They turned the joke around on all the white characters, making it about how incredibly absurd Wilder’s use of black face was and basically about the complete racial cluelessness of the white characters– the mere idea that Gene Wilder could pass for black in this scene is completely ridiculous, but it’s played for laughs:
I bring these examples up because it would be easy to confuse the two clips above with racism when, in fact, they’re poking fun at racism, at racist history and at our own country’s attitudes towards race, just as the clip at the end of this piece does.
I guess all I’m saying is that it’s easy to pretend that this racism and bigotry in our history doesn’t exist, and it’s easy to pretend it doesn’t hurt, but both these things are true. Twain came from a background that used language differently from how we use it today and used language that is considered beyond the pale in most polite company today. So I get the urge to avoid it, to hide from it, but I don’t think that this, in the long run, serves us well. I’m not saying we need to accept it or think of it as appropriate. I’m saying that when we hide it, just as when we hide the fact that the constitution as originally written included the 3/5ths rule by omitting it without acknowledgment from public readings of the document, it diminishes our history.
If we refuse to teach John Donne because of his derogatory reference to Jews, who are we serving? If we stop teaching Shakespeare because of Merchant of Venice, does it enrich our culture? What if we refuse to teach works which use the words “queer” or “bitch?” Is it worth us to ban classic works because they are offensive? I don’t think it is, and I don’t think it serves us to do so.
For what it’s worth, I’m just going to end with this, which has the added benefit of being not quite as funny when the words are all bleeped, but still pretty damned funny.
Thank you, Julie. I woke up about 5:30 a.m. today, went down stairs, made a fire, and then took a browse of the Internet, landing eventually on GMD and your provocative and inspirational meditation on the uses and abuses of language and the attempts to “whitewash” offensive words ex post facto. It is truly difficult to consider all the issues you raised, particularly in an abbreviated format.
Let me observe:
1. Obviously, although we live in a supposedly “visual age”, words still have enormous power (as my wife constantly reminds me about the words I choose). At the time certain forms of speech are used in a particular cultural context, they can have a bludgeoning and tarring effect and, in many ways, a dehumanizing effect. Yes, calling someone a “nigger” attempts to dehumanize someone of color, but the use of such words also dehumanize those use utter them. These words and curses make their targets into objects, rather than subjects, and when someone is reduced to objectivized status, they are prey to abuse.
2. If we do not face up to the historical legacy and effect of cutting, biting, labeling and harmful words, we will never face up to our own responsibility for how we objectify people today. Therefore, we must not erase from our literature and history that which we find uncomfortable facing — not just about the past but also the present.
During my theology training, we spent a great deal of time on Matthew’s Gospel, which was the dominant gospel of Christianity for almost 1,500 years. Matthew 23 contains the (in)famous passages known as the “woes”, as in “woe to you scribes and pharisees.” While Matthew’s Gospel was essentially an argument within the Jewish community, the so-called woes came to underpin centuries of anti-Semitism by Christians. If we were to go back and change the words used in the woes, to soften them and make them less harsh, we would never have to face how those original words helped legitimize horrible acts and pograms waged against Jews by Christians.
So, again, thank you for one of the most profound postings I have read here on GMD or in many other places.
Is a means of hiding from it and all its implications, not a means of “getting past” it.
The past is always rewritten with an agenda in mind, and the true intent is rarely benign.
When my daughter was old enough to read Nancy Drew, we found that the stories had been rewritten from the ones I’d read (a kind neighbor woman who grew up w/Nancy Drew had loaned me her childhood copies from the 1930s).
The rewrites removed some of the bigotry that had been in the originals, but it also removed much of the independence of the female characters – among other things, the plots post-rewrite resulted in Nancy being rescued by the newly created boyfriend Ned or her father, every single time. We had to go out of our way to find used versions (and later re-releases) of the older editions, so our child could have a strong female role model. As we dug for the older books we found a bit about the history of the rewrites.
The originals had been written in the heart of the Great Depression, when women were “allowed” to be strong from a cultural perspective. By the 1950s, however, as the right wing was in the ascendancy, the uppity Nancy was banned from public libraries, and simply had to be constrained in order to be considered sufficiently acceptable in depths of the McCarthy era, and thus her character was significantly rewritten as a more subservient and child-like character. From “The Mystery of Nancy Drew,” by Jackie Vivelo:
It is deeply troubling that anyone is trying to rewrite Twain. I think whitewash is more accurate on more levels than the simple erasure of race – this whitewash is attempting to cover the sins of the past as a means of tempering criticism of the sins of the present, and more importantly, planting the seeds for the future in which racism’s prior existence can be denied to upcoming generations, by simply pointing to the expunged record as proof that its engineered lack of presence means it was never there at all.