Editing Twain

Yesterday afternoon, I was listening to NPR and I heard a very interesting conversation.  It has to do with this new edition of Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, by New South Books,where the N-word is replaced with the word, "slave."  (If you've followed the link I attached to "NPR" it's down towards the bottom of the transcript after the discussion about the Health Care bill.)  I know this is the Hot-Topic in literature right now, but the NPR article really raised a lot of questions I felt were interesting. 

1) Is it better to change one aspect of the book so that it will be read or to keep it as written and risk the message being lost?

2) Does changing offensive language allow us, as a culture, to forget the mistakes in our history? And do we run the risk of leaving ourselves open to future problems?  Or is it a way to eradicate that type of prejudice from society?

I am personally concerned that we run the risk of over-sanitizing our lives, just like with germs and bacteria in our physical world.  If we do not build up a natural immunity to certain illnesses, there is a chance we will always being at risk for infection.  Or as with certain medications, the viruses and bacteria evolve to a point that the old remedies don't work anymore.  Is this change in Huckleberry Finn merely a temporary remedy for a much larger problem?

On the other hand, in college, there was a girl who could not get through Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness.  Not because the language was difficult to navigate, but because the language choice personally offended her.  She had suffered a lot at the hands and words of others during high school.  So much so that reading Heart of Darkness made her physically ill and she could not continue reading.  I remember her tears in our discussion and I felt so sad that someone had had to endure that kind of torment; that this level of hate existed in our current society.  So I can definitely understand how a message can be lost because of a few words.

But had those words not been there, the opportunity to discuss that specific issue would not have happened.  She would not have been able to share her story and let the rest of us see how thoughtless words and actions will affect someone negatively.  If these words are removed from a classroom textbook, where is the opportunity to talk about it and safely instruct the next generation on the history and connotations.  Can we hope that parents will have this discussion with their children outside of the classroom?  If we remove these words from our life altogether, will they lose their power?  Words only have the power that we, as a society, give them.  By removing them from a text, do you think that gives them more, or less power?