Back to the cause for this discussion, the pointless white washing of HUCK FINN, a good example when censorship can come from the ignorance of both factions: The hypocritical morality police and the PC vanguard.
All art dates, as time capsules for their epoch's language, grammar, politics, morality, prejudices, etc. That's inevitable and part of the charm to a degree, and HUCK FINN is no different. In 2010 eyes the book does come off as being racist, Twain using common 19th century black stereotypes for the newly named Slave Jim that Twain's contemporary whites found acceptable back then, and unacceptable today.
Which is ironic considering in today's hindsight all this almost obscure Twain's point of the book: An illiterate, runaway southern white boy growing beyond the culture's established/encouraged racism, putting aside ignorant stereotypes and view blacks as people once he meets and gets to know them in the flesh.
When we view art from outside of our epoch, we must always ask is "what can I take away from this for now?" That last paragraph is what I got from FINN, while not ignoring what I wrote in the previous paragraph before that.
Consider I'm sure a future target of PC white washing, William Shakespeare's THE MERCHANT OF VENICE. Terrific writing, memorable lines (its the Bard you know), and anti-semitic mentality which was the norm in Elizabethan England. But in the midst of a play which comes off as wretched 16th century WASP pornography in some modern quarters, You then get this famous great speech Shakespeares gives to the "villain" Shylock which throws a wrench into that argument:
Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs,
dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with
the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject
to the same diseases, heal'd by the same means,
warm'd and cool'd by the same winter and summer
as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed?
If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us,
do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?
If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that.
If a Jew wrong a Christian, what is his humility?
Revenge. If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his
sufferance be by Christian example? Why, revenge.
The villainy you teach me, I will execute,
and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction.
Thus is VENICE anti-semitic, or simply another HUCK FINN? The debate rages on, prepare the sponges!
I don't think "The Merchant of Venice" is anti-Semitic. As a Jew, I'd certainly rather have Shylock be portrayed the way he is than as, say, someone like the inhumanly perfect black doctor Sidney Poitier plays in "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner"!
