Kim Murphy, Los Angeles Times, Jan. 19, 2009
John Foley figures he has pretty much maxed out on explaining to African American mothers why it’s OK to call a black man the N-word—as long as it’s in a novel that is considered a classic.
For years, English teachers have been explaining away the obvious racism in Mark Twain’s “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” And for years, the book that perhaps best explains Americans’ genetic predilection for hitting the road, only to later find themselves, has stayed near the top of many high school reading lists.
However, with an African American about to be inaugurated as president, Foley wonders whether ‘Huck Finn’ ought to be sent back down the river. Why not replace it with a more modern, less discomfiting novel documenting the epic journey of discovery?
“The time has arrived to update the literature we use in high school classrooms,” Foley wrote in a guest column this month for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. “Barack Obama is president-elect of the United States, and novels that use the ‘N-word’ repeatedly need to go.”
Foley, 48, teaches at a largely white suburban high school near Portland, Ore. Year after year, he said, he patiently explains to his students that Jim, a black man, is actually the hero of the novel, and that Huck comes to see the error of his ways and commits to helping Jim escape slavery. But many of them find the book dull and plodding, and they sometimes never get past the demeaning word Huck uses to refer to his friend.
“This is particularly true, of course, of African American students,” Foley wrote. “With few exceptions, all the black students in my classes over the years have appeared very uncomfortable when I’ve discussed these matters at the beginning of the unit. And I never want to rationalize ‘Huck Finn’ to an angry African American mom again as long as I breathe.”
He also thinks “To Kill a Mockingbird,” Harper Lee’s classic about racial inequity in the Deep South, and John Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men” should be removed from the curriculum for similar reasons.
{snip}
Foley said he doesn’t want to ban the books. He just thinks they shouldn’t be the backbone of the American literature curriculum in 2009, he said, at a time when getting kids to read anything at all is a struggle.
“You have to remember, it’s hard to sell kids these days on books. I write young adult novels, and sometimes I wonder, why bother? You’re writing for three girls who like to read.”
Original article
(Posted on January 19, 2009)
Comments
Will all the rap music that uses the N word repeatedly, rhythmically, and gratuitously also have to be banned?
I recall the five Latinos in one of my education classes, four of them already working as teachers. Not one had the slightest interest in English literature, or any literature older than themselves. All they cared to read were current novels. If the teachers are so ignorant and uninterested in anything outside their own experience, we can’t expect them to persuade the students to learn anything.
Interesting. I never was assigned reading Mark Twain in high school. That was considered a child’s book and we were in high school. Most of the guys (and myself) I knew had already read the Huck Finn And Tom Sawyer novels when we were 11-12 yrs old. We also took the “n” word in the stories in the vein it was intended. We realized that it was just the way people spoke in those days. It wasn’t used as a pejorative in any way. The real interesting thing here is that as the teacher said, you can’t go any further once the n word has been introduced into a conversation. These kids must have some real mental problems, always walking around worried about a slip of the tongue. I don’t know why a teacher would try to explain something like Twain’s usage of the n word to some stupid black parent. all he has to do is tell her to tell her son/daughter not to read the book. Case closed.
Tom Iron…
From everything I can read and discuss with family members that are teachers, the vast majority of teachers need to be expelled themselves. The teachers union and the boards of education have been in the monetary pockets of special interests groups for many years. They have their agenda. I had a family member whom is a teacher in a local high school tell me that the best bet for a kid to get a good education is home schooling. The only solution otherwise is to separate the races.
How many more books will have to be “burned” as the list of banned words expands? The problem is about banning any word in a free society. In a free society, people who do not feel comfortable with a given societies literature and art have the option of ignoring it or leaving if they don’t like it. But here in the West, we are sold on the idea that changing it is virtuous and will lead to a virtuous society - something that I cannot see happening at all. What I do see is society degradating itself daily and its members devolving.
If they would simply announce that this is no longer a free society, then they would not have to justify banning books or anything or anyone. Also, declaring the state would allow those of us who want to live free to choose if we want to live in such a society. I do wish they would announce themselves and the state soon. The sneakiness of the entire social engineering movement in the West is dastardly and Obama seems to be the lead agent representing all of the deception and manipulation it has to offer.
So the teacher can’t get students to read?, - fail them!
I know many teachers feel like giving up on their students and perhaps they have been treated the most unfairly as the spearhead of efforts to intergrate and produce a multicultural soceity. However, they seem to have largely bought into the idea. But such a society, if it rejects the American culture and replaces it with nothng but hip-hop and vulgarity in films and books is not long for this world either.
If we are being eliminated, that fact at least is our revenge.
Have you ever heard of Rethinking Schools magazine? I recommend it to all readers here, it will open your eyes to the politics of modern public school education.
Did you know that:
* Three Little Pigs is a racist children’s story because it implies that brick houses are superior to houses made of straw?
* Oregon Trail is a racist children’s game because it depicts white settlers and Native Americans getting along?
* Wikipedia is a racist encyclopedia because it devotes more entries and longer articles to white males than to blacks or Hispanics?
* Traditional world maps are racist because they show Africa as being only about three times the size of Europe, instead of the eight times larger that it actually is?
* Investigative researchers supported by taxpayer money have proven that the only reason for the gap in test scores between blacks and whites is that blacks can only learn from white teachers, and there are not enough black teachers in our schools?
I could fill this page with miles of information I’ve learned from reading this enlightening magazine, but I simply cannot do it justice.
p.s. To bring this back on topic: Children’s book publishing is far from dead. Animorphs sold over 50 million copies, which is more than one copy per child in the United States. And Harry Potter blows that away, having crossed over the 1 billion mark a short time ago.
Could we, by any possibility, do more agonizing over that word, that blacks call each other all the time, than we already do? Was there ever an obscenity or profanity that (some) people got as upset about, as “the ‘N’ word”? Why, it’s so verboten that even here on a White nationalist website we dare not use it, for fear of having our posts summarily removed.
I’ve not read “To Kill A Mockingbird” or “Of Mice and Men,” but “Huck Finn” is not just another piece of fiction; it’s THE GREAT American novel. The N-word is used too often in it? Surprise! That’s the way people in that era, both White and black, talked. That’s why militant blacks and White liberals don’t like “Huck Finn:” It’s too honest, too prone to talk just exactly like people talked in those days.
If it was a novel replete with vulgarities and descriptions of sexual activity, the “P.C.” crowd would be calling it “edgy,” “courageous,” ad nauseum. But because it routinely uses the horrible, terrible, unforgivable “N-word,” they want it banned or, at the very least, withdrawn from use in classrooms. Where I come from, they call that “hypocrisy.”
I had to read “Huck” for my Banned Books and Censorship class, and I didn’t like it either, because I thought its happy ending felt “tacked on”. I also didn’t like “The Catcher in the Rye”, but for a different reason.
This “teacher” is poisoning the minds of children, and needs to be fired immediately; he has no business in a classroom. And anyway, this retard should know that the National Council of Teachers of English works tirelessly to promote the reading of challenging material. John Foley sounds like another deluded liberal arts graduate who thought he could change the world, but ended up in an ill-fitting profession. If he was a real English teacher he would encourage students to read MORE classic literate, not LESS; Foley would also be familiar with the Students Right to Read: http://www.ncte.org/positions/statements/righttoreadguideline, which is a document I’m confident this “teacher” has never read.
If this is what we can expect from Obama’s goons, then I’m going on a full literary offensive! What next? “Lolita” removed once we get a pedophile president?
The Great White Expulsion. It just goes on.
Three GIRLS?
Interesting how the same black and hispanic teens who use the N-word every three seconds are suddenly offended when they see it in print.
Mr. Foley is missing the point. The mere fact that African Americans are depicted in works like Huckleberry Finn as they are simply reflects the views and values or better said the reality of the times. Much like a mulatto becoming president in our day being a reflection of our times.
Get ready for a flood of incidents like this; hard-left, liberal ideology will feel empowered to impose its will on every aspect of our society. The assault on our culture, heritage and our heroes will now be in full swing.
We’re unlikely to see books being burned (that would be bad PR by the left who don’t want to be associated with Nazi tactics) but I can envision books being pulled from the selves and retired to the closed stacks and made available ‘by request only’.
“He who controls the present, controls the past. He who controls the past, controls the future.” - George Orwell
While clearly these great books should not be banned, there is a point to not making them the backbone of the American literature curriculum. There are other good books for kids. Besides, I think TO Kill A Mockingbird” may make blacks resentful by giving the wrong impression that blacks have been mostly wrongly accused of rape of white women, when in fact it has been all too common:
http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=F3E3CD97-197F-4D31-BF36-A4CBA45FCB13
“Barack Obama is president-elect of the United States, and novels that use the ‘N-word’ repeatedly need to go.”
I am not sure why people like John Foley somehow think the whole world has changed overnight, just because we elected Obama as president. Are we now a Black nation? Do we have to erase almost 500 years of European history, culture, and civilization. because a bunch of fools believed the liberal lies, drank the Kool-Aid and voted for Obama?
If we have become a Black nation, then we have a lot more to worry about than “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” “To Kill a Mockingbird,” and “Of Mice and Men.” Maybe before it’s to late America will wake up with a Kool-Aid hangover and straighten out the mess they have made of America.
Why get rid of ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’? As a naive, ignorant, impressionable 14 year old who had to read it for English. It was instrumental in introducing me to white guilt 20 or so years ago. I remember a Norman Rockwell painting titled ‘Breaking Home Ties’ It is one of my favorites. It shows a middle aged farmer who after all his hard work was aged well beyond his years and his radiant son decked out in his Sunday best sitting on the running board of an old truck. The father is seeing his boy off for college and they are probably waiting for a train or bus. It’s a poignant and bittersweet scene where the father seems to be vexed with a variety of emotions and seems to be fidgeting with a cigarette. I saw this painting on a Norman Rockwell calendar several years later and the father’s cigarette was painted out. So some do-gooder had to tamper with something frozen in history and “correct” it, even though smoking cigarettes were normal in the early 50’s.
These classics are too horrible for kids and books like “Heather Has Two Mommies” or “Daddy’s Roommate” arent? I would immediatly take your kids out of public school if you have not already and either teach them at home or get them into a private school. I have no idea what the public schools are teaching kids these days but I remember being 13 and being horrified that my cousin who was 10 at the time did not know what state or country she lived in. She went to the highly vaunted California schools but obviously she was not getting any sort of an education.
Forget about getting rid of these books. Why are the students not reading some realistic books, like “Paved with Good Intentions”, or “The Race Card”, or “Hating Whitey, and Other Progressive Causes”? Because they only want to indoctrinate students with fiction that origionated from someones imagination, and not real facts.
I can’t see why anyone would be upset about of Mice and Men. The only black in it is a cranky, arthritic black man, who is segregated from the white trash in the bunkhouse. Steinbeck shows sympathy for him, and he becomes an important contributor the George’s and Lenny’s dream of having a place of their home, with all the significant implications of place.
[i]But many of them find the book dull and plodding[/i]
If his students find the classics of American literature dull and plodding, it is only because they have had their little minds rotted away by Black rappers, latino TV stars, and white’s in the media who only exist as the foolish counterparts of the wiser, multicultural, co-stars. A damn shame, too.
The classics like Huck Finn are ideologically unacceptable since it doesn’t conform to cultural Marxism. These classics will soon be replaced by books that advance the multicult/cultural Marxist party line. Perhaps Obama will submit a reading list to all public schools which to further brainwash hapless white children.
“The real interesting thing here is that, as the teacher said, you can’t go any further once the n word has been introduced into a conversation. These kids must have some real mental problems, always walking around worried about a slip of the tongue. I don’t know why a teacher would try to explain something like Twain’s usage of the n word to some stupid black parent.” — Tom Iron
Ever listen to a bunch of black children in a playground or on a bus? The saltiest sailor would blush! The biggest irony is that those kids (and their black parents too) probably have a blistering vocabulary of their own that would singe your ears; but yet, people like that are so squeamish about hearing a word that they would not hesitate to say,… that word and plenty more as well that are much worse and more abusive. The hypocrites!
Remember that bad joke of a professor ‘teaching’ at a Boulder, Colorado diploma mill? He started brainwashing his classes with the “White Privilege” nonsense. Trying to make White students feel needless guilt for their heritage, the fact they have both parents having raised and nurtured them. For having parents who CARED enough to work to provide a decent homelife and good education for their offspring.
For heavens sakes, PLEASE make an effort to reach your own children. Make them PROUD to be what they are. White intelligent people. Help them see thru the anti-White propaganda and garbage pumped into them daily by the media, the entertainment industry, and by their teachers. Had it not been for the White race, the world today would be steeped in primitive feudalism like 18th Century China; or languishing at a barely post-Stone Age culture like Africa when White Europeans started exploring and colonizing Africa.
Perhaps instead of “Huck Finn” the teacher could assign Ray Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451.” Excerpt: “You must understand that our civilization is so vast that we can”t have our minorities upset and stirred.” “Colored people don’t like ‘Little Black Sambo’. Burn it.” “Cram them full of noncombustible data, chock them so damned full of ‘facts’ they fell stuffed, but absolutely ‘brilliant’ with information. Then they’ll feel they’re thinking, they’ll get a sense of motion without moving.”
Since the aim of this is the destruction of American White culture, perhaps it would be prudent to bring back the “Seperate but Equal” schooling that was destroyed in the judicial activism of the 1950s.
Blacks could study all the BLACKS they want and be happy.
You would think the ‘letter-after-M-word’ (I dare not use the actual letter…the one before ‘O’. That might be racist.)was some sort of MAGIC WORD, capable of doing actual harm….capable of putting a hoodoo on someone….but only when uttered by a white person.
So John Foley writes guest columns for the Seattle Post Intelligencer. That figures. A friend in Seattle just told me that the paper is going bankrupt, and nobody is offering to buy it. Over the years, he’s referenced the paper a couple of times, always with extreme contempt, and in a way that led me to believe most of Seattle felt the same way. His comment last night was that he would subscribe to a paper that actually prints the news, rather than one that distorts the news to advance someone’s social agenda. He subscribes to no paper, and neither do I.
And I’m sure his comments would also fit the (also failing) New York Times. White people might be too nice to come out and say it, but nobody wants to read that tripe. The internet is not the reason people have stopped buying newspapers and magazines. The real reason is that whites are not eager to read about how lousy they supposedly are, and about how noble and wonderful nonwhites are. I balked when Vanity Fair came out with their Africa Issue, have not bought an issue since then, and may never buy one, again.
For replacing Huckleberry Finn, I’d suggest something more appropriate for today’s eleventh-graders. May I modestly propose BARNEY’S BOOK OF HUGS? Or, even better, BARNEY’S BOOK OF COLORS! I know this will be challenging material for these nineteen-year-old single parents to master….but at the end of the semester (if they’ve managed to finish the whole book), the teacher can hand out fresh eight-packs of Crayola(R) Multicultural Crayons, so that the students can fully express their reactions to the poignant scenes in the book.
I recall the five Latinos in one of my education classes, four of them already working as teachers. Not one had the slightest interest in English literature, or any literature older than themselves. All they cared to read were current novels. If the teachers are so ignorant and uninterested in anything outside their own experience, we can’t expect them to persuade the students to learn anything.
I was required to do a book report on “Huck finn” in the 9th grade and I refused, I was not interested in the book or the style of writing. I DID do a report on the “Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire” edited it to several hundred pages, and got a good grade.
Jim was not the hero of Huck Finn. Huck Finn was a journey saga, a quest narrative like so many others. Huck and Jim were both heroes.
They were partner heroes like Arthur and Lancelot, Marshall Dillon and Chester, Don Quixote and Pancho, Hans Solo and Luke Skywalker. This partner hero has been used by many writers over the ages.
In addition to being a hero, Jim is a narrator. While Huck, a child, believes everything the Duke and the Dauphin say,Jim is sceptical of them from the first. Jim also wonders how the townspeople accept the Duke and Dauphin as the long lost brothers of the recently deceased wealthy Peter Wilkes.
As for the ridiculous Grangerford feud, Jim observers that the feuding families have wealth, health and good fortune. They have everything they need and more. So why do these stupid folks mess up their lives with an unneccessary feud?
I understand all too well how this school teacher is sick and tired of battling black mammas year after year over the n-word.
He should plant a recorder under the bench at the bus stop. He can record the black students using the n-word at the beginning of every sentence as they arrive and depart school.
The year he retires, he could play the recording over the speaker system daily.
“The classics like Huck Finn are ideologically unacceptable since it doesn’t conform to cultural Marxism”
That’s a bit of doublethink isn’t it?
‘to kill a mockingbird’, and anything by Steinbeck, Isn’t ‘cultural Marxism’, it’s out and out Marxism. And then there is ‘Huckleberry Finn’, Helping out good Jim all the way.
These three books are a communists dream. Of course, perhaps these three books do need re-evaluated. A progressives work is never done (sarcasm).
“The classics like Huck Finn are ideologically unacceptable since it doesn’t conform to cultural Marxism”
These three books are a communists dream.
Actually, Mark Twain was considered quite leftish and liberal for his day. It’s amazing that he’s now condemned as a backwward and bigoted “dead white male”! It makes me wonder if those three “communist books” will someday, in a Marxist anti-white dictatorship, also be considered too mild and will be condemned because they’re not extreme enough
Question… Who hasn’t heard the N-word more than 5 times.. you would have to live a very conservative life to not have heard that by highschool. Maybe they should have a permission slip for it but honestly.. Why would this be such a big deal? Maybe people should like.. not care.
