This is ridiculous:
Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a classic by most any measure—T.S. Eliot called it a masterpiece, and Ernest Hemingway pronounced it the source of "all modern American literature." Yet, for decades, it has been disappearing from grade school curricula across the country, relegated to optional reading lists, or banned outright, appearing again and again on lists of the nation's most challenged books, and all for its repeated use of a single, singularly offensive word: "nigger."
Twain himself defined a "classic" as "a book which people praise and don't read." Rather than see Twain's most important work succumb to that fate, Twain scholar Alan Gribben and NewSouth Books plan to release a version of Huckleberry Finn, in a single volume with The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, that does away with the "n" word (as well as the "in" word, "Injun") by replacing it with the word "slave."
I'm not going to give a stirring defense of American literature here. I'm just going to point out that in no way does it respect the descendants of slaves to erase the kind of language used to dehumanize their ancestors. This kind of political correctness is pernicious because it does not seek justice, it seeks innocence. They're not the same thing. You can't pursue justice through ignorance, and you can't erase "nigger" from history by taking it out of a book.
