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| Hearsay: |
The Guardian has picked up the story we reported last week about the teacher in Seattle who wants to drop n-word books from the cirriculum because racism died on January 20th. Letters to the editor are generally incensed and, as usual, online comments are even worse.
His piece provoked an outpouring of enraged emails and letters to the paper. “What Foley wrote is indeed a lucid example of apostasy. Obama would be horrified if he knew this censorship was done in his name,” wrote Trudy Sundberg in a letter to the editor. “Now seems like an odd time to downplay the American tragedy of slavery and its linguistic legacy – the N-word,” agreed Molly Hackett. “There is nothing in American literature that more succinctly and directly attacks racial prejudice than Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” said one respondent.
Foley’s reasoning is that Huck Finn “contain[s] the N-word and demeaning stereotypes”, while Harper Lee’s Pulitzer prize-winning To Kill a Mockingbird sees Atticus Finch tell his daughter “not to use the N-word because it’s ‘common’” – a “hopelessly dated” attitude. Teaching Huck Finn and explaining that Twain wasn’t a racist “is a daunting challenge”, writes Foley, who teaches at a predominantly white school. Despite explaining that Jim, a black man, is the hero of the book, that Huck eventually sees the error of his ways and commits himself to helping Tom “steal that nigger out of slavery”, he says that “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 he never wants “to rationalise Huck Finn to an angry African-American mom again as long as I breathe”.
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January 26th, 2009 at 12:30 pm
This looks like it was written by Foley himself:
Well, seems I set off a bit of firestorm. Debate and dissent are good things, generally, so I have no regrets. I do, however, need to clear up some misconceptions:
1. I favor censorship and banning books. Never! I love books! Huck Finn, To Kill A Mockingbird and Of Mice and Men are among my favorites. I would simply like more options for teachers on the curriculum.
2. I am Mr. Politically Correct. Heck no! Critics noted the many politically incorrect passages in Tundra Teacher and Hoops of Steel; the latter uses the N-word, by the way, and a character in A Mighty Wall rips Martin Luther, monogamy, the Catholic Church and tells a woman at his climbing gym she has “an exquisite (butt).” Here is a passage: …when a city councilman dropped off some “literature,” Pete said, “It’s not remotely literature, there’s nothing literary about it. You want to garner some votes, you should be honest and say it’s a pamphlet full of proletarian wanker b.s.”
3. I am for “dumbing down” the curriculum. The books I proposed as worthy substitutes – Lonesome Dove, Going After Caciatto and Snow Falling on Cedars – have won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award and the Pen/Faulkner award, respectively. Such awards are a good indication of quality; they don’t hand those out randomly.
4. I want to keep students from important books. Nope. In fact, I think students should have to pass a cultural literacy test to graduate from high school, and this test should include questions about Huck, Mockingbird and Mice. There are a couple of dozen books that are important and that all students should read, including those three…I just don’t believe figuratively hitting kids over the head with these classics is the best way to go about it, and would prefer they read those books on their own rather than in the classroom. Why? Because the N-word and demeaning stereotypes do offend many students; because it’s nearly impossible to teach kids who feel alienated and offended by the material; because linking literature to a kid’s life is my aim and it’s difficult to do with those books.
That’s about all for today, class. Keep reading. Continuing debating. Go Obama.
P.S. – I’d also like to remove The Great Gatsby from the curriculum. Fitzgerald’s prose is lovely, but those spoiled characters really torque me off.
I think that most people who are attacking Foley are doing so using self-serving, abstract arguments about how this is supposedly a freedom-of-speech issue, whereas Foley is making his suggestion based on the real experience of actually having to teach the book to ninth-graders. For ninth-graders it is not as easy as it is for readers of this site to look at Huck Finn within a historical context. If the majority of students find something both uninteresting and offensive, as Foley suggests his do with Huck Finn, then the quality of their education is diminished and they don’t learn very much.
One more thought: I wonder if there are any books on the curriculum that are actually written by African-Americans. Why not James Baldwin? Toni Morrison? Edward P. Jones? Alice Walker? Dreams from My Father?
January 28th, 2009 at 1:47 am
There’s a place for Chester Himes’ in there somewhere.