In recent years, Mark Twain’s celebrated novel The Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn has become pretty infamous for its characters’ frequent use of the N-word as they converse with one another in the 19th-century American South. While this has occasionally caused controversy when the book was taught in classrooms, one incredible woman might have just solved the problem once and for all: An English teacher in Ohio has removed all the N-words from Huckleberry Finn and put them into Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.
Amazing. This badass teacher really knows how to get things done!
Before assigning Huck Finn to her 10th-grade class, English teacher Sarah Williams painstakingly identified all 219 appearances of the N-word in the book, cut them out by hand, and reinserted them into Mary Shelley’s gothic horror novel Frankenstein. While Frankenstein is now a veritable minefield of racism, thanks to Williams’ fearless initiative, Twain’s novel is now completely epithet-free, and she can assign it to her students without any fear of complications.
“When the kids in my class read Huck Finn, they won’t find a single instance of the N-word, though on the other hand, if a student were to open up to any random page of Frankenstein, they’d find pretty much a ceaseless barrage of racial slurs, which are made all the more offensive by their lack of justification or context,” Williams explained proudly. “Also, Frankenstein is a much shorter book than Huck Finn, so the concentration of N-words is way higher, and there are several points in the book where Dr. Frankenstein says the N-word 48 times in a row for two pages without reprieve. Still, that’s a small price to pay, since Huck Finn doesn’t even say the N-word once.”
Truly inspiring. It’s amazing to see that there are teachers out there who are willing to take a stand for what they believe in. Nice job, Ms. Williams! The world needs more proactive teachers like you!
