To BLEEP a BLEEP

Oh. My. God. This is going to be another rant.

I heard on the radioo the other day that there is a new edition of Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn that replaces all "n-words" with "slave". Next up for the printing company (which is headed by an English professor) is Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, and possibly several others. The new editions are considered to be more accessible to children and teachers. The man in charge of this said that books that are considered classics need to be rethought if they are going to be read by people during and after Barack Obama's presidency. He also insinuated that books with the n-word-or other profanities- in them were lucky to be considered classics and didn't really deserve that distinction.

I was so mad when I heard this.

In my opinion, censorship is the worst thing that can happen to books. I would rather see Huckleberry Finn banned than see it transformed into a watered-down, "politically correct" version of its former self. Censorship totally invalidates the integrity of books. The message in To Kill a Mockingbird would not be nearly as strong if Harper Lee had not described so vividly the effects of racism in the south. The impact these two books had, respectively, was due to their honest portrayal of life in the time periods they were set in. It sounds shocking to us, maybe, but the fact is that they were extremely realistic situations.

Denying that these words were written is trying to deny our history. We can't just shrug it off and say that Twain and Lee exaggerated for shock value. If they were simply slinging around racial epithets just for the fun of it, and not to illustrate a genuine problem, that might be cause for concern. But we can't erase these problems from our past; doing so would be ignorant and an insult to those who suffered to solve them. These books were not written to demean, they were written to enlighten. It's unfortunate that people are missing that point. It's also sad that they don't realize the fact that censoring them obliviates their significance.

I don't support banning books, either, but at least banned books are left in their original state and are not attempted to be passed off as the real thing. Most classic books-even the Bible-have been banned somewhere, for some reason, and the true mark of being a classic is that they are able to transcend this. They are classics because the message they convey is more important than the words on their pages. It's not just about Tom Robinson-it's about all African-Americans who were enslaved by society's lingering prejudice.

I understand that our nation's history has not always been pretty, and we would often like to forget that certain things ever happened. But to truly be able to be, as a nation, guilt-free, we must first admit that these things happened. Destoying the traces is turning a blind eye to the atrocities of our past, and thereby clearing the way for more in our future.