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United States News Title: Teacher proclaims Twain, Lee and Steinbeck irrelevant in Obama age An American English teacher has called for novels which use the word "nigger" to be removed from the high school curriculum now that Barack Obama has been elected president. John Foley, who teaches at Ridgefield High School in southern Washington, believes classics of American literature such as The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, To Kill a Mockingbird and Of Mice and Men should no longer be required reading for students. "The time has arrived to update the literature we use in high school classrooms. Barack Obama is [president] of the United States, and novels that use the 'N-word' repeatedly need to go," he wrote in an opinion piece for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. "Some might call this apostasy; I call it common sense. Obama's victory signals that Americans are ready for change. Let's follow his lead and make a change that removes the N-word from the high school curriculum." His piece provoked an outpouring of enraged emails and letters to the paper. "What Foley wrote is indeed a lucid example of apostasy. Obama would be horrified if he knew this censorship was done in his name," wrote Trudy Sundberg in a letter to the editor. "Now seems like an odd time to downplay the American tragedy of slavery and its linguistic legacy - the N-word," agreed Molly Hackett. "There is nothing in American literature that more succinctly and directly attacks racial prejudice than Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn," said one respondent. Foley's reasoning is that Huck Finn "contain[s] the N-word and demeaning stereotypes", while Harper Lee's Pulitzer prize-winning To Kill a Mockingbird sees Atticus Finch tell his daughter "not to use the N-word because it's 'common'" - a "hopelessly dated" attitude. Teaching Huck Finn and explaining that Twain wasn't a racist "is a daunting challenge", writes Foley, who teaches at a predominantly white school. Despite explaining that Jim, a black man, is the hero of the book, that Huck eventually sees the error of his ways and commits himself to helping Tom "steal that nigger out of slavery", he says that "with few exceptions, all the black students in my classes over the years have appeared very uncomfortable when I've discussed these matters at the beginning of the unit". And he never wants "to rationalise Huck Finn to an angry African-American mom again as long as I breathe". He suggests replacing To Kill a Mockingbird with David Guterson's Snow Falling on Cedars, Of Mice and Men with Tim O'Brien's Vietnam novel Going After Cacciato, and Huck Finn with Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove. "Like Huck, Dove involves an epic journey of discovery and loss and addresses an important social issue - the terrible treatment of women in the Old West. That issue does not rank as high as slavery on our national list of shame, but it definitely makes the list," he writes. The three books - Huck Finn, Of Mice and Men and To Kill a Mockingbird - regularly make the American Library Association's list of titles the American public has objected to most frequently.
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#1. To: dont eat that (#0)
Huck Finn walls on both sides of the line but Harper Lee wrote THE definitive work calling out racists for what they are in Mockingbird
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