Metal Reviews

It wouldn't have the same impact as the word itself, though, would it?

First of all the writer was a female. The word should've been addressed by the professor in a way which comforted this student rather than just letting them have to suffer through listening to white people say the word that has been used to denote people of her color for several centuries in order to dehumanize them. As a person of color in a class of white people, when the course description mentioned the Harlem Renaissance, and the only character her who represents her in the works they were reading was an ignorant slave it's disheartening and made her uncomfortable. Censorship may not be the best answer but when no one is willing to address it in the way Zad cited or simply give blacks a respectable character to outweigh the ignorant slave then you're going to be stuck with the basic liberal tolerance of censoring what is offensive. Blacks shouldn't have to take Africaana literature courses in order to read about characters which represent them.

But what impact would that be? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1Ccest-F9w Does it really get to the point of anything by saying that word? Read about the lashing of the slaves or the emotional trauma caused by slavery like in the novel, Beloved by Toni Morrison, or the constant self-critical limbo Africans are put in like in The Bluest Eye, rather than seeking to reduce the pains of blacks to just a slur.

I listened to an interview with the censor in question tonight on CBC radio.

The reality is that many schools boards have banned Huckleberry Finn as well as Tom Sawyer. This guy was simply trying to get these classics of American literature back into the curriculum by removing the offensive parts. Slave, BTW, is still an offensive word.

I'm sure many have tried to get the books reinstated, but have obviously failed in their attempts. You can rail against censorship all you want, but the world has moved on.

What's hilarious about this lunacy is that those same little dears that are traumatized by Huck Finn probably have the word drilled into their heads daily via whatever current crop of gangsta rap they are listening to.

PC idiocy run amuk.

Because all black people listen to hip-hop, especially the rappers who always use the n-word.

Did I say that? No, that's right I didn't.
Don't roll your eyes at me, if anyone shouild be rolling there eyes it is everybody else at you.
Don't you ever get tired of acting self righteous and smug?
Your constnat self proclaimed moral superiority bit is wearing thin.

You kinda did when you said everybody who is offended by Huck Finn hear the word daily in their gangsta rap. I guess I'm just assuming that no black person really likes to hear the word.

Then they should censor rap as well.
You really didn't get my point?

'Nigger' is acceptable within a black cultural context, but not a white one, I guess. Fair enough, but it's a bit of a red herring.

Rappers use it in the exact same context as white supremacists do so it just goes to show how the colonized internalize the methods of their oppressor. Creating a subclass of "house niggas" as I.T. calls them is a way of seeking power since they are stripped of agency. The same people who oppose white people saying nigger do not defend the use of black people saying nigger.

I am not interested in all that "how the colonized internalize the methods of their oppressor" horsedrip.
It's Two Thousand and fucking Eleven, let's move on, shall we?

The point is: where does it end?
Do we censor Blazing Saddles, Pulp Fiction and any other peice of film (for instance) with the dreaded word-that-must-not-be-said in it?
Then what? Which new word will be found offensive?
Why stop there? The ace of spades will be henceforth known as the ace of shovels?

It's ridiculous and an indicator of how emasculated society is becoming that this is even being considered.

Fuck censorship, it's one of the main pillars of tyranny.

Never mind guys, it's just Trapt going off about how much he loathes himself.

If either of those movies has been shown on TV, then this has probably already happened.



Personally I don't think this is a big deal. It's not censorship; it's an edited version of the book being released. In high school, my teacher showed us the movie Elizabeth but skipped the sex scene(s?). That doesn't really bother me. At a university level, it kind of bugs me because my ideal university classroom wouldn't censor the art we're studying, but I can understand the motivation behind it.

Are you saying you are for censorship, then?
Those movies (and many others) should either not be shown on public television or relegated to late-night (I've always considered the screening on network television of movies such as Scarface etc that are butchered to be pointless) ; the content should not be tampered with to satisfy the frail sensibilties of a few.
Same with literature; rather than censoring books, maybe they should be left to personal discretion towards consumption.

Call me crazy, but that sounds an awful lot like censorship to me.

Let me tell you a story about niggers and political correctness. A few years back when I was studying modern Dutch expression, we had this translated speech of Martin Luther King we had to recite expressively. The speech, even though written by a black man, had - shock and horror - the word 'nigger' in it once in a while. Some not-so-bright girl from my class reckoned she could score some P-C points with my teacher by remarking that 'niggers' (Dutch: 'negers') was an inappropriate word and that the 'modern' word 'blacks' ('zwarten') should be used for it. To which the teacher, paragon of the Dutch language as he ought to be, replied: "'Blacks is actually a very inappropriate word; the word you should now use is 'otherwise tinted' ('andersgetinte')".

I quit those studies. There were other, more important reasons for me making that decision, but I guess I could no longer respect the guy and that contributed to said decision. If we, in the spirit of ever-increasing literary political correctness, progressively ban each so-called offensive word from our vocabulary, what will we end up with? A castrated dictionary filled only with the vaguest generalisations. I'd like to refer to the writings of Tomislav Sunic in this regard.

As a closing remark: tampering with the works of one of the most famous writers in the literary history of your nation is one of the vilest and most despicable things you could do. There is truly no end to the self-hatred of some (questionably) human beings.

Also, Noodles: I think you'll find censorship to be a form of editing. As a spin doctor you'd be close to:

Curiously enough, even Ebert's talking about this.

http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2011/01 ... versy.html

if it's a form of editing that doesn't mean all editing is censorship!

i dun goofed



Not really sure how I feel about censorship. I think being hung up on a word, independent of its use, is silly. At the same time I'm not black/gay/etc so there's nothing analogous to nigger/faggot/etc for me, so I'd feel callous calling them cunts for not adopting the same opinion. I am guessing they feel very differently based on the anecdote trapt posted, and I don't feel qualified to speak to whether those feelings are justified or not.

Agree that it should come down to personal discretion, but in a classroom the students aren't the ones making the choice of what books to read.