View context, nuance vital in art and politics – The Morning Call

I got myself in trouble one time for satirically agreeing with a publisher’s plan to make “Huckleberry Finn” more palatable for modern audiences. The new version was going to change Mark Twain’s n-words and Injuns to “slaves” and “Indians,” respectively.

In my column, I took some more giant steps down that slippery slope, mock arguing that they also should clean the bad grammar up and soften a lot of the other rough edges, including references to slavery, and insert some other outrageously politically correct touches. My revised version had Huck and Jim talking as if they were sipping from brandy snifters in their London club.

The whole thing was so ridiculous that I couldn’t imagine anyone taking me seriously. But when I began reading some of my email and online comments, I realized I had overestimated some of our readership, which in this case included online readers from around the country.

They torched me as everything from a socialist to a Nazi, which suggests I offended people of all political persuasions. One guy wrote in part: “Who decides what is offensive? Well Bill White of course. While he’s at it, Bill should re-write all of those uncomfortable publications like Frankenstein, Sons and Daughters, Anna Karenina, and Hard Times. It would be crazy to just NOT READ something that offends you. No, instead you should impose your idea of ‘offensive’ on the rest of us. Cause that’s American, Bill. No way did the Nazi’s have the same idea in 1944. Let’s burn all offensive material!”

I thought back to that 2011 column the other day when Turner Classic Movies aired “You Can’t Cheat an Honest Man,” starring W.C. Fields and ventriloquist Edgar Bergen and his dummy, Charlie McCarthy. The movie is hilarious. But it’s also appalling in some of the dialogue between Fields and Eddie Anderson — best known as Rochester, associate of Jack Benny — and in a blackface scene involving McCarthy.

This doesn’t mean the movie should never be shown anymore or that it should be censored. But it’s why a TCM host addresses those issues as he introduces the movie and to wrap up afterward. It was a product of its time, when these things were considered normal, as they aren’t today. There are countless other examples, in art, in politics, in every aspect of life.

Context is everything. With it, people’s actions past and present are better understood. Without it, they often become baffling, if not horrifying.

Context is why Huckleberry Finn is a masterpiece, not an embarrassment. It’s why compelling literature with problematic language or themes should be analyzed and explained, not banned, burned or rewritten.

I could give you a long list of examples in which context and nuance have been lost or ignored, starting with most of the wildly misleading TV political ads that will be inflicted on us until Election Day.

Context is why a constitutional amendment written about militias and muzzleloaders shouldn’t justify people today owning AK-47s and high-capacity magazines. Context is why it’s so frightening to see crowds at Donald Trump and Doug Mastriano rallies thrusting their right arms in the air. Context is why it’s so misleading and dangerous to cherry-pick the Bible as an excuse for hatred and bigotry.

Context is why teachers should be encouraged to teach children our country’s real history, not a sanitized one, if we want our kids to learn from the mistakes of the past. And it’s why efforts to cleanse school reading lists — and even math curricula — of anything remotely offensive or “woke” are so misguided.

Pflugerville Public Library in Texas posted Facebook photos last year to dramatize the point. “This is a before and after shot of what a single shelving unit in the library’s Teen Space would look like if we removed every book with content that could offend someone,” the caption read. “Out of 159 books, there are 10 left on the shelves. We removed books that contained profanity, teen drinking, religious content, racism, magic, abuse, sexual content, and more. But in taking away those books, we also removed examples of friendship, love, courage, creativity, faith, forgiveness, reality, resilience, humor, and history.”

Context.

This is not to suggest that families can’t decide for themselves which books they want their child to read or not read. But I will suggest this: We need to trust our teachers to help our children put literature, history and other important subjects in context. We need to trust our children, with help, to process difficult subjects in a healthy way. We need to stop injecting our political paranoia and dysfunction into our school districts.

Our world is really complicated. As much as some of us might like to narrow our perspective to shallow black and white so we don’t have to think too much or because it plays well with the political base, it’s no way to live, and certainly no way to govern. We need to dig deeper. We need to let our children dig deeper. It reminds me of an exchange between Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy.

Bergen: “I’ve got a good mind to …”

McCarthy: “Why don’t you use it?”

Bill White can be reached at whitebil1974@gmail.com His Twitter handle is

whitebil.