Schools in the Duluth school district in Northern Minnesota will no longer require high school students to read two classic novels, To Kill a Mockingbird and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, because it might bother their feelings. The Star Tribune reports Duluth schools will keep the books in the library, but the kids won’t study them in English class, due to the “racial slurs” in the novels.
Revising or erasing history, even artistic interpretations of time periods, does a grave disservice to the very students whose “feelings” they are trying to protect.
Stephan Witherspoon, president of the Duluth chapter of the NAACP, said the works have “oppressive language for our kids.” He continued, “Our kids don’t need to read the N-word in school. They deal with that every day out in the community and in their life. Racism still exists in a very big way.” This is where Witherspoon and the school districts are wrong.
Reading the N-word, in an appropriate context, and particularly in a novel like To Kill a Mockingbird, which highlights the adverse effects of racism, provides important lessons from history as well as morality.
To Kill A Mockingbird is one of the greatest novels in the American lexicon, particularly about the Depression era. (See here for a summary of the plot.) While the novel is about race and there certainly are racial slurs, segregation and racial division are not praised, which is why it’s ironic to ban or stop requiring the book because of its racial slurs.
Atticus Finch is obviously the hero, because he puts aside racism to help his fellow man. The slurs are merely a reflection of society at that time — another important point for high schoolers to understand — and the moral of this particular story is how Finch rises above that.
While The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn perhaps doesn’t teach as many lessons as To Kill a Mockingbird, it’s an important read because of the unique style of the syntax (written in vernacular English) and its colorful descriptions of life along the Mississippi. Mark Twain wrote the novel in his usual style, providing a scathing satire on people and places of that time, which includes racism and the use of the N-word. If anything, while the use of the word hardly glamorizes the concept, seeing it in print would help young people understand racism of that time period, as that very racism helped people ultimately condemn it.
Racism is awful, and the use of the N-word is too. But banning books for serious study because stories showcase it, or even condemn it, does a disservice to our young people who can learn a lot from history and the great novels that represent it.
Nicole Russell is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. She is a journalist in Washington, D.C., who previously worked in Republican politics in Minnesota. She was the 2010 recipient of the American Spectator’s Young Journalist Award.
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