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Video: NMA Huckleberry Finn, Charles Barron Weighs In

John Del Signore

Published Jan 7, 2011

Modified Jan 7, 2011

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John Del Signore

Published Jan 7, 2011

Modified Jan 7, 2011

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As you may have heard, NewSouth Books is publishing a new edition of the Mark Twain classic Huckleberry Finn, which will omit out the N-word entirely, replacing it with "slave." And now another new edition is being sold that replaces the N-word with the also hurtful H-word (H--ster). But no controversial news story is complete until the Animators of Record at NMA.tv have covered it! So here, for the ages, is their definitive segment on "the PC police" going after Huck Finn.

City Council Member Charles Barron has also weighed in on this nonsense. You may recall that last month Barron made headlines when he told the Daily News, "I'd like to see 'Huckleberry Finn' banned." The comment was made in the context of a controversy swirling around Barron's goddaughter, Tylibah Washington, a hip-hop artist and self-published author of the book Streets in Poem Form: A Compilation of My Thoughts.

Washington was criticized by some educators when she concluded a four-week writing workshop at PS 279 in Canarsie by handing out copies of her book, which includes poems such as "Supa-Dupa!" (which contains a reference to a crackhead performing oral sex) and "Who's The Evil Axis?" (which says George W. Bush "loves war so much he gets an erection!"). Today we called Barron for a follow-up about the latest Huckleberry Finn imbroglio, and asked him if he still thinks the book should be banned. He told us:

That was taken out of context. That was in the context of me defending Tylibah Washington, who is my goddaughter, when they made an uproar out of her using a book that had 33 poems about the urban experience that were all positive, but two of them were considered inappropriate. My point was that if Huckleberry Finn is taught in schools and has that word over 200 times, what's wrong with her poems—that are all positive about the urban community—using certain words?

When I've seen other articles written about this, people ask, what about James Baldwin? What about Maya Angelou? What about Dick Gregory? I will not compare Mark Twain to any of them. Mark Twain does not compare to anyone who has lived this experience. I'm not for censoring Huckleberry Finn, I just think we should be consistent. If it's good for Twain it's good for Tylibah. When you can have that kind of language in his book, don't talk about the language of our writers who have lived the urban experience and are writing about it first-hand.

Of course, what we don't want to have is the sanitizing of all these books, and before you know it we won't even be able to mention that racism exists. But we also don't want white authors abusing the language that's offense to our people. It's a good debate. But to take out the word nigger and put in the word slave, I don't think is making much progress. The question is: How much do we keep the ugly scars of racism in its raw form in terms of language and not become revisionist in history? And at the same time not let some folks abuse it and bring harm to other people.

I think either version of the book is going to be acceptable in schools and it's up to the schools to decide. But let's be consistent and play by the same set of rules. I think it's interesting that it's gone to this level. I even heard that Jesse Jackson Jr. was upset when they read the Constitution in the opening session of Congress, because they read that we are 3/5ths of human beings. Now, do you take that out and not let the world know the ugly history of racism in America, or do you leave it in, offending people? I think people should know for historical purposes.

Tagged

Charles Barron

huck finn

huckleberry finn

NMA.tv

Tylibah Washington

John Del Signore

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Originally from the Albany area, John Del Signore has called NYC home since 1995. In addition to his thousands of meticulously-crafted bespoke blog posts for Gothamist, his writing has also been published in The Awl, Deadspin, The Nervous Breakdown, and performed at The Brick Theater in Brooklyn.

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