Does One Word Change 'Huckleberry Finn'?

[EuropeanFootballMale]

Come on, I have not seen that episode in about 15 years.

Next week it will be 20 years since that episode first aired. Unreal. On a related note should Fox go back and make Smithers not black in his first appearance?

[Non Sequitur]

When I was a kid I remember hearing the song "Walk on the Wild Side". The radio station bleeped out the line "...She never lost her head, even when she was giving good head." I heard the same song on the radio a few years ago and the "giving head" lyric was not bleeped out. Instead they bleeped out the line "And the colored girls go..."

It's funny the way our sensibilities change.

[Parrot Head]

I heard this discussed on the radio a couple of nights ago and an old Italian American called in and said that they used to be called lots of derogatory names, but as a group, they got tired of it and stopped using those terms amongst themselves. He said he hadn't heard a lot of them used since the 70s / early 80s until the Sopranos came on, but he was glad that didn't catch on.

(Not in line with the literary element of the discussion, but I thought it was an interesting take and something that could be productive in current society and media.)

[SoCalCoug]

I agree with this. It's a single edition, going to a limited number of schools/districts that already banned the book because of the n-word. There aren't going to be book-burning rallies or recalls of all previous editions with the original text.

With that context in mind, that this edition is for a very limited audience while the original text can be found everywhere, is the relevance/effect of "Huck Finn" negated by the removal of the word? I would argue no. It's lessened, certainly.

A much more pressing and dire concern should be that this book (along with dozens, maybe hundreds) was banned in many places in the first place.

Just because it's not as bad as the alternative doesn't make it right.

[NorthwestUteFan]

Next week it will be 20 years since that episode first aired. Unreal. On a related note should Fox go back and make Smithers not black in his first appearance?

I still want to watch Song of the South again. My kids are befuddled by Splash Mountain, and I kinda want to share the back story with them...