(no subject)

Gerry Quinn · 18 Jan 2011, 21:14 · from 2011-January.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: gerryq at indigo.ie (Gerry Quinn)
Date: Tue, 18 Jan 2011 21:14:57 -0000
Subject: (urth) (no subject)
References: <SNT123-W3C396A52B2665D5199EF4CFF70 at phx.gbl>
Message-ID: <6FF3CC759BFA42578BDE49CA4828E9C0@jill>


From: "Lee Berman" <severiansola at hotmail.com>
>
>>Gwern Branwen: >> Conrad's _Heart of Darkness_  I love the book. I hate 
>>the racism. And I think
>>you can have it both ways in the realm of fiction and art. There's no 
>>contradiction there."
>
> Made me think of Huckleberry Finn and how there is a strong movement to 
> require schools to carry a
> version which finds a less offensive term than "nigger" (the N-word) which 
> is repeated over 100 times
> in the story. To me that move would suck the life out of the book. It was 
> a book about slavery written
> in a time when slavery was a living memory for most people. Nothing 
> hammers that home more than free
> and liberal use of the N-word which is exactly what Mark Twain intended.

I read about this recently.  My biggest issue with it was the publisher's 
intention of replacing "nigger" with "slave" which is hardly synonymous. 
Replacing it with "African American" would sound wrong even to the most 
tin-eared PC warrior, but what's wrong with "Black"?

- Gerry Quinn

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net