Sanitizing of history worse than murder

The murderous rampage that took place in Arizona and included the critical wounding of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, D-Ariz., was the transmorphing of thoughts into actions that culminated in a finality of unparalleled tragedy and sorrow. But lost in shadows of tragedy – now relegated to the back pages – is another tragedy that in its own way is even more epic. I'm talking about the planned, senseless sanitizing of language in great works of literature for students who already find themselves trailing the world academically.

I can appreciate asking oneself: How can I equate heinous, calculated shootings to education (or the lack thereof)? Let me tell you. The shootings, while tragic and shocking to our nation, were limited in scope. But the deliberate sanitizing of literature – for the purpose of redefining an already failing system – under the guise of inspiring learning, has quantifiable wholistic and negative consequences for generations of children to come.

I know in the minds of some I'm reaching here, but in my mind, anything that hampers or limits the educational attainment and completeness of America's future damages our society in a way that no single act of violence can.

The idea that the republishing "Huckleberry Finn" into something that it's not will somehow inspire black children (and their parents) to revel in education is a grievous injustice, as has been accurately articulated in Tony Norman's "Effort to sanitize 'Huck Finn' is pure insanity" (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Jan. 7, 2011):

Huckleberry Finn [was] a dagger to the heart of [what was then] white privilege and its all-pervasive cultural assumptions. That's why the racists of [Mark] Twain's time despised the book. They knew it was a veiled attack. We're too culturally self-absorbed to see what was obvious to them. We're so hung up on a word we miss the liberating speeches.

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Who is the intended audience for a sanitized version of "Huckleberry Finn"? Is it the 30 percent to 70 percent of black students who'll drop out of inner-city public schools this year? I doubt it. If they're reading anything, it's garish urban fiction featuring the epithet in every conceivable iteration.

Is it to spare the delicate sensibilities of the black [children] who remain? Unless those [children] are also shielded from corporate-owned black popular culture, the epithet will be impossible to dodge outside the classroom.

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Removing "nigger" from the pages of one of our most prophetic and subversive novels creates a space for ever more glibness and self-deception by preserving the conceit that we're a society that doesn't see color.

While I would agree that the last paragraph of Norman's brutally insightful and accurate essay is indicative of the black mindset, the sanitizing obfuscates the contempt many blacks harbor for whites, and it surreptitiously undermines the positive relational strides all America enjoys today.

Even more egregious, it contributes to the further decline of America's future. Consider the numbers of children – specifically black and Hispanic children – growing up in homes where rap, television and electronic games, combined with dysfunctional parenting, is the norm. What can we reasonably expect these children to contribute in the future? What career paths are they being prepared for as adults?

America's children are failing in math, science, history, and now we add to this even a deeper fail rate in literature. Are these simply misguided attempts by well-meaning educators, or is it a Machiavellian attempt to create a class of people totally dependent upon the government for their total subsistence?

Possibly, it's a combination of both, but I think it is more the sinister attempts of those who believe themselves capable of creating a utopian existence – where behavior and socialization are by design and coding, not created by the natural attraction of people sharing in commonality.

As Norman wrote: "Twain once described 'Huckleberry Finn' as a book of mine where a sound heart and conscience come into collision and conscience suffers defeat."

A tragic, inexplicable act of violence affects us in the present – but the willful revision of history, intended to socially engineer a people in ways that relegates them to the lowest educational skill levels hurts us, not just in the present, but it makes it impossible for America to compete on a world level in the future.