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Most of the time, a school bans a book because they have heard that it uses racist words or has inappropriate themes, but these are some of the very stories that have shaped literature today.1 I think that the criteria for banning books should be lifted completely or at least slightly altered. After parent complaints about the use of racist epithets in To Kill a Mockingbirds Adventures of Huckleberry Finns The Cays Of Mice and Mens and Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, the Burbank (CA) Unified School District superintendent issued a statement removing the books from the district s required reading lists for its English curriculum and banned the use of the N-word in all school classes. 3 Ron Titus, "Banned Books 2022- The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" Marshall Libraries, https://www.marshall.edu/library/bannedbooks/the-adventures-of-huckleberry-finn/ 4 Richard Luscombe, "Major Publishers Sue Florida over 'Unconstitutional' School Book Ban," The Guardian, 30 August 2024, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ article/2024/aug/30/florida-school-book-ban-publishers-lawsuit
For any readers who may find that the criteria for banning books should be changed, I stand right there with you. In all seriousness, libraries across the US ban books in their schools curriculum for various reasons. Most of the time, a school bans a book because they have heard that it uses racist words or has inappropriate themes, but these are some of the very stories that have shaped literature today.1 I think that the criteria for banning books should be lifted completely or at least slightly altered.
When I was in high school, one of my favorite teachers said that we were reading Adventures of Huckleberry Finn at the end of the year, and I was ecstatic. This was the end of my junior year, and after reading that story, I went up to my teacher and told him that I wanted to know all there is to know about Twain. He offered to let me take his higher level writing class which specialized in Twain my senior year. Through this class we would read Mark Twains personal letters, unfinished manuscripts, articles in papers, and other novels. From this class we learned a lot about Twains private life and about his rationale, which a lot of people today are missing.
Mark Twain, born Samuel Langhorne Clemens, was an author during the late nineteenth century into the beginning of the twentieth century. Twain was born in Missouri under Halleys Comet in 1835 and died under Halleys Comet on April 21, 1910. Most people assume that Twain was a racist because he grew up in the Deep South. This thinking is incorrect. Twain sympathized with almost every marginalized group during his life, but everyone hangs onto the fact that he said the n-word in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Yes, Twain used a lot of terms in his stories that may be looked at as not politically correct today but for a white man writing in the nineteenth century people don't really give him the credit for what he was really talking about.
Back to my point, a lot of people lack context. What we talked about one day in class was the fact that ever since the rise of the civil rights movement, people have honed in on Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in particular because he uses the n-word' 213 times.2 Coupled with this was the use of the character Jim, our main character's side-character, who was a slave. Because he was a slave, Twain stays true to this and uses a lot of words that slaves would use at the time to make the story more authentic, but a little bit harder to read today.
A lot of Twain supporters try to defend Twain because others, who have not necessarily read his stories, claim them to be racist. What he was actually doing was exposing the hypocrisy of white society during his time-ironic coming from a white man. A lot of people use this against him, saying that white men shouldn't be talking about these types of issues or using the words that he was using. In this example, specifically, going back to Jim and Huck Finn, throughout the story we see that the person with the most common sense is Jim, and that many of the white characters in the story are the epitome of ignorance, showing the hypocrisy of the society that Twain grew up in.
Looking at different libraries from around the country, we see that the common reasoning for novels being banned from their shelves is because of parent complaints. What I have found is that most schools ban these books from the reading curriculum (requiring students to read these books), but they don't ban the books from being in a classroom library or something similar. An article from Marshall University states:
After parent complaints about the use of racist epithets in To Kill a Mockingbirds Adventures of Huckleberry Finns The Cays Of Mice and Mens and Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, the Burbank (CA) Unified School District superintendent issued a statement removing the books from the district s required reading lists for its English curriculum and banned the use of the N-word in all school classes. The books will be allowed in classroom libraries, but no student can be required to read them. At a board meeting, the superintendent stated, "This is not about censorship, this is about righting the wrongs of the past."3
I do not agree with the last sentence of this little excerpt saying that this is not about censorship but righting the wrongs of the past. If anyone wanted to right a wrong, they should allow people to read this Twain novel which is filled with anecdotes and humor that gives a pretty gnarly critique about the society of the time. Here we have this white man who attacks the predominately white society and portrays a lot of the white characters as very selfish people who take advantage of the situations in front of them, but in a negative and humorous way. But what is good to hear, at least for me, is the fact that some people do want to completely lift the book ban in some places. In Florida, an article written by Richard Luscombe details both sides of this argument. Major book publishers are filing a suit because they think that purging books from the library is unconstitutional, which isn't completely false. Luscombe states, "These bans have a chilling effect on what authors write about, and they damage authors' reputations by creating the false notion that there is something unseemly about their books."4 These are perfect examples showing that first, these banned books already give these authors a negative connotation, and second that these same authors are having their voices silenced. To make matters worse, most of the people who make these rules probably have not even read one of their stories.
So, we see that Twain, my favorite author, was given a bad rap by people who have never even read his stories, but there are people fighting to change the rules on banning stories like his. Twain is one of many authors whose stories have been removed from academic settings, and the only thing people can do to change this is to read him and try to understand. But there are some people fighting for this, mainly the money hungry publishing companies, but still, this is a step forward towards uncensoring some of the most powerful pieces of literature.
Notes
1 Jonah Hofmeyer, "I'm Pro Book Banning. Here's Why," The Diamond Editor, 6 Jan 2024, https://dordtdiamond.com/2024/01/06/im-pro-book-banning-heres-why/.
2 Elizabeth R. Purdy, "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn? Free Speech Center, (Middle Tennessee State University: 9 July 2024).
3 Ron Titus, "Banned Books 2022- The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" Marshall Libraries, https://www.marshall.edu/library/bannedbooks/the-adventures-of-huckleberry-finn/
4 Richard Luscombe, "Major Publishers Sue Florida over 'Unconstitutional' School Book Ban," The Guardian, 30 August 2024, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ article/2024/aug/30/florida-school-book-ban-publishers-lawsuit
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