Cancel culture will kill all of us. It will be the death of all human narratives. Like a loaded gun ready to take the life of any person that stands in the way of its bullet, cancel culture is pointed at any person, place or thing that offends. There are a lot of people in jail, who used a gun to take a person’s life because they triggered them (no pun intended). Without thinking, talking, or giving grace, the trigger was pulled and it was too late to take the bullet back. The person was gone and as shock and shame washed over the guilty one, the realization of the finality of taking a person’s life set in. Why didn’t they just walk away from the disagreement? Why didn’t they talk to the person first? Why didn’t they THINK before pulling the trigger?!
There are a lot of books that are receiving the bullet of cancel culture. Without thought, without a conversation, without any grace, books are being canceled left and right. If this keeps up, there will be a massacre of human thought and history and that frightens me.
Recently, I had a bit of a debate with someone who thought that Huck Finn should be removed from K12 schools. His logic made sense on the surface. As a Black woman, the N word is very triggering. I teach my own children that it is a curse word. They are not even allowed to listen to music that uses it, even as a culturally acceptable word. I will NEVER accept it. I have been called the N word by White people, and I can’t tell you how deeply it hurts me whenever it happens. I have heard of teachers including the book in their classes, without any sensitivity, even having a special joy in the license to be able to say it over and over. I have heard of students reading the book aloud and saying the N word over and over while looking and smiling at the Black students in the class. I have heard of parents complaining to school leadership about the book and the leadership dismissing the Black parents as being too sensitive. So WHY would I say that it should not be canceled?
My students read Huck Finn and other books that have a reputation of being racially or culturally insensitive, instead we face these triggers and talk about the context and our personal responses to them. We use this literature as a teachable moment, so my students learn about these triggers and how to respond to them. It is a time for White students to learn the history of the N word and why it should never be used. I see this as a time to teach about some of the pains of US History and also how the N word remains one of its most triggering aftershocks today. Young people will learn all about the N word from someone, so I figure it is best for them to learn all about it from a teacher who loves them and loves humanity. The case my friend made, was what if the school that has made Huck Finn part of their curriculum is all White and does not have the training to teach it in a meaningful way? I then asked them a question: So every single time we come across a book that has racially insensitive writing, will we cancel it? Will we cancel every anti-Semitic book, every anti-Native book, every anti-Muslim book, every anti-Asian book and so on? Will we cancel the Constitution because it had the three-fifths clause?? Will we cancel books that are hurtful to women? Will we cancel books, that are anti-Christian? Will we cancel books that are anti-creationism or anti-evolution? If we’re not careful, we will be spending more time canceling books than READING them! This world is not just White and Black! There are millions of books in the world, written from someone’s human experience that sadly is triggering for someone! How do we train the next generation how to advocate for themselves and humanity if all we do is teach them to run from the books that hurt them? Books are the most safe way to teach our children how to have civil discourse and advocate for their thoughts and feelings, by facilitating conversations that create a safe space for them to have those hard conversations.
It seems like the root of the issue is not books. Human beings will forever write books that someone in the world will find offensive, because we are human and self-centered creatures and our books are what give us the space to write our feelings. The root of the issue is the hearts of people. Instead of canceling book, what about changing hearts? Even if the school is predominately White, hire more diverse staff OR make sure the teaching staff has gone through the training on how to teach books like Huck Finn and others, so that they can be the ones to use this book to show how to talk through some of our country’s painful past. This type of training is necessary whether there are Black people or not. The book and Mark Twain are also more than the N word. In fact, once my students and I read through that trigger, some really important themes came to the surface, like the hypocrisy that often characterized the relationships between “nice” White people and oppressed Black people. The story is an allegory of how race relations in this country are often a facade of the intense dysfunction of that relationship, one marred by “niceness” that covers White supremacy and the perceived inferiority of Black people. The story should be read with this understanding.
We live in a world where people think that racism is gone because slavery ended or Jim Crow ended, but there is racist residue left here: the White supremacy that thinks degrading words and treatment are acceptable as long as no one is being lynched, sold into slavery or allowed to only be in places that say “Blacks only.” Helping children read through Huck Finn and Mark Twain’s way of illuminating this hypocrisy is a great way to teach about recognizing microaggressions. Was Twain using the N word to show us something? Was it meant to give White people the license to throw the word around the class to hurt Black students or did he use it in the book to show us something about the darkness that was still present within the heart of his own people? Does reading this book give teacher’s the opportunity to explore if anyone still needs to go through a process of rooting out that darkness within themselves once and for all?
What I love about books is that they really can be harmless. WE are the ones that give them life. Huck Finn has no power over us or our students. However, if our hearts are right, we have the power to take this book and teach our students powerful lessons about the work that still needs to be done in this country. I think more time needs to be spent preparing teacher’s hearts for doing the hard work of using books like Huck Finn as tools for healing the hearts and minds of our students. As teachers, we can be the ones to nurture the agents of change who will heal the scars that still remain from the master’s whip and the Jim Crow sign. Huck Finn was written over 100 years ago, and I can imagine when he wrote it, he himself was so new to trying to live in a world where Black people were SEEN. To write a book during his time, where a Black character is SEEN and even goes through a heroic journey is historic. It was Twain’s messy process to trying to right a wrong. It has been left here for us to continue the work he was trying to do in giving voice to the Black experience in America to a much wider audience. Canceling books like this are actually lazy. It’s easier to cancel books, than to do the work of humbling ourselves and learning how to facilitate challenging conversations all while dealing with our own inner struggle.
I will close with encouraging you to read the following articles to provide a little more background on Mark Twain and Huck Finn:
https://marktwainstudies.com/john-t-lewis-mark-twain-a-friendship/
https://www.themarginalian.org/2014/10/24/mark-twain-on-slavery-empathy-compassion/
https://english.stanford.edu/publications/was-huck-black-mark-twain-and-african-american-voices
Do more research on Mark Twain, because he was much more complex than that little N word in Huck Finn. I also want to encourage you to not be so quick to pull the cancel culture trigger on books, because this melting pot of a country has so many human narratives and they are bound to crash into one another. Instead, of canceling them show students how to navigate through them and train those teachers who struggle to steer these narratives in the right direction, how to lead their students into healthy and civil discourse about them.
Dr. Anika T. Prather 