A publisher is planning on releasing a version of Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn without the word "nigger". While I am really not a fan of that word, its use in that particular work is important and used as part of a larger historical context, and as such I disagree with this change on a very deep level.
However, since the work is in public domain, there is nothing I can really do about it. I mean, if the Kindle versions of public domain books can have words changed to mark them as those versions then I suppose in theory they can do this.
But this kind of political correctness bothers me on a lot of levels, not the least of which is it messes with history and plays into efforts to revise the past into something it wasn't. The past was in many ways a brutish, nasty time where people did bad things to each other. I am not idealizing the present by the way. We as a collective still do some brutal things to each other on an institutional level. But somehow trying to put a little bit of a glossy veneer on social norms of the past isn't helping anyone.
Because in trying to distance Huck Finn from that word and that world, the editor who is making that decision is also in many ways trying to eliminate the conversation that goes along with that word. And it is a conversation which Mark Twain wanted people to have.
And while I don't know the entire thought processes of Mark Twain, I think it is safe to assume that he certainly wouldn't want the above changes to be applied to his work.
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