District, activists settle 'Huck Finn' dispute

HALTOM CITY -- The Birdville school district superintendent will apologize in writing to a student offended by a lesson on The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and teachers will get cultural sensitivity training.

Those were the agreements reached Wednesday after a 90-minute meeting between school officials, 17-year-old Ibrahim Mohamed, his parents and a coalition of activists offended by the teacher's repeated use of a racial slur that is in the text of the classic 1884 Mark Twain novel.

The school district has removed the book from the Richland High School student's class and has allowed him to enroll in a different English class, but his parents say they will now go though a process of requesting that the book be removed from the district's curriculum.

"We are here today to say we will not tolerate the n-word being used by any educators anywhere in any school district throughout our region or the state of Texas," said Ron Price, a Dallas school district trustee. "It's critical that we examine all of our textbooks to ensure that the language is proper and that the language is not being used to abuse any child in any public school."

The concern centered on a lesson that prepared students to read the book, about a mischievous white boy who travels down the Mississippi River on a raft with Jim, a runaway slave. Jim is referred to as a n----- throughout the book.

The Mohamed family is still deciding whether the eleventh-grade student will stay at Richland High School or return to Trinity High School in Euless, where he attended last year.

On Wednesday, members of a new group, the Coalition to Stop the N-Word, met at the Birdville Administration Building with several administrators, including Superintendent Stephen Waddell, Associate Superintendent for curriculum and instruction Ellen Bell and Richland High School Principal Randy Cobb. The English teacher, who neither the district nor the group would name, did not attend the meeting.

The group issued five demands to the district, including eliminating the book from district classes. At a news conference after the meeting, the group announced that Waddell would issue a written apology to the student and his family and arrange future training sessions for Birdville faculty about cultural sensitivity, said Thomas Muhammad, coalition spokesman.

The teacher has verbally apologized, said Mark Thomas, district spokesman. The group also wanted her to apologize in writing but the school district cannot require her to do so.

And while the group wanted the teacher to be required to do community outreach work with black and Muslim communities, school district officials cannot comment on what, if any, disciplinary measures might have been implemented, Thomas said.

The district has a procedure to formally object to instructional materials by filing a complaint with the campus principal, who appoints a committee to study the material and decide whether the items should be used. Any decision can be appealed to the district superintendent and then the school board.

"I'm pretty comfortable about the whole situation," Ibrahim Mohamed said. "I feel good about the meeting."

Complainants fill out a Request for Reconsideration of Instructional Materials form with information about the material in question and recommendations for other material that could be used to teach the subject.

The requester can ask that the material be removed from the curriculum, used only as a resource or restricted from use by their own children.

The instructional material can include books, textbooks, video, displays, magazines, library programs, audio recordings, newspapers and electronic information.

Step 1: Before students enter the classroom, have certain words written on the chalkboard. Examples include cancer, pregnant, n-----, peace, Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills test.

Step 3: Personalize the words by showing sentences on the chalkboard. You are pregnant/Your girlfriend is pregnant. You are a n----. You have peace. You failed your TAKS test. Explain a scenario to help students understand meanings of words used in context. "You are in the doctor's office for a follow-up visit. The doctor steps out of the room, and you see the word 'cancer' written on your chart."

Step 4: Ask students to respond to the change in meaning of words because of context.

Step 5: Discuss the power of words. Why did Twain use the word n-----? Was it personal for Twain? Is this word personal today?

Step 6: Decide as a class how to handle the word n----- when it appears in the book. Skip it? Replace it? Say it? Should each person have a choice of what to do?

Some observations:

The concern centered on a lesson that prepared students to read the book, about a mischievous white boy who travels down the Mississippi River on a raft with Jim, a runaway slave. Jim is referred to as a n----- throughout the book.

Perhaps this is nitpicking, but the character is called "N----- Jim" throughout the book, just like an antagonist character is called "Injun Joe" throughout the book. The fact that Huck and Tom refer to the characters with these names is a reflection of the times in which the novel was written and a reflection of the characters' immaturity and lack of education. In the context of the novel, and linguistically, this is somewhat different from simply saying that the character "is referred to as a n----- throughout the book".

"We are here today to say we will not tolerate the n-word being used by any educators anywhere in any school district throughout our region or the state of Texas," said Ron Price, a Dallas school district trustee. "It's critical that we examine all of our textbooks to ensure that the language is proper and that the language is not being used to abuse any child in any public school."

In other words, Mr. Ron Price (democrat) from Dallas favors censorship and book banning when it involves words he deems offensive.

While I think the teacher probably handled this situation incorrectly and probably did not follow the lesson plan as it was intended, this seems to be an overreaction on the part of the school district.

“A little learning is a dangerous thing; drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring: there shallow draughts intoxicate the brain, and drinking largely sobers us again.” — Alexander Pope

It’s ironic that some critics condemn HUCK FINN as a racist novel, when, in fact, it is a masterful condemnation of slavery. At the end of the story, Huck decides he will not turn Jim into authorities, even though Huck’s culture has convinced him that he will go to hell for freeing a slave. After their river journey, Huck realizes that Jim is a human being too, and Huck decides to risk hell rather than turn in his friend. Read passage below.

I thought till I wore my head sore, but I couldn’t see no way out of the trouble. After all this long journey, and after all we’d done for them scoundrels, here it was all come to nothing, everything all busted up and ruined, because they could have the heart to serve Jim such a trick as that, and make him

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a slave again all his life, and amongst strangers, too, for forty dirty dollars.

Once I said to myself it would be a thousand times better for Jim to be a slave at home where his family was, as long as he’d got to be a slave, and so I’d better write a letter to Tom Sawyer and tell him to tell Miss Watson where he was. But I soon give up that notion for two things: she’d be mad and disgusted at his rascality and ungratefulness for leaving her, and so she’d sell him straight down the river again; and if she didn’t, everybody naturally despises an ungrateful nigger, and they’d make Jim feel it all the time, and so he’d feel ornery and disgraced. And then think of me! It would get all around that Huck Finn helped a nigger to get his freedom; and if I was ever to see anybody from that town again I’d be ready to get down and lick his boots for shame. That’s just the way: a person does a low-down thing, and then he don’t want to take no consequences of it. Thinks as long as he can hide, it ain’t no disgrace. That was my fix exactly. The more I studied about this the more my conscience went to grinding me, and the more wicked and low-down and ornery I got to feeling. And at last, when it hit me all of a sudden that here was the plain hand of Providence slapping me in the face and letting me know my wickedness was being watched all the time from up there in heaven,whilst I was stealing a poor old woman’s nigger that hadn’t ever done me no harm, and now was showing me there’s One that’s always on the lookout, and ain’t a-going to allow no such miserable doings to go only just so fur and no further, I most dropped in my tracks I was so scared. Well, I tried the best I

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could to kinder soften it up somehow for myself by saying I was brung up wicked, and so I warn’t so much to blame; but something inside of me kept saying, “There was the Sunday-school, you could a gone to it; and if you’d a done it they’d a learnt you there that people that acts as I’d been acting about that nigger goes to everlasting fire.”

It made me shiver. And I about made up my mind to pray, and see if I couldn’t try to quit being the kind of a boy I was and be better. So I kneeled down. But the words wouldn’t come. Why wouldn’t they? It warn’t no use to try and hide it from Him. Nor from me, neither. I knowed very well why they wouldn’t come. It was because my heart warn’t right; it was because I warn’t square; it was because I was playing double. I was letting on to give up sin, but away inside of me I was holding on to the biggest one of all. I was trying to make my mouth say I would do the right thing and the clean thing, and go and write to that nigger’s owner and tell where he was; but deep down in me I knowed it was a lie, and He knowed it. You can’t pray a lie — I found that out.

So I was full of trouble, full as I could be; and didn’t know what to do. At last I had an idea; and I says, I’ll go and write the letter — and then see if I can pray. Why, it was astonishing, the way I felt as light as a feather right straight off, and my troubles all gone. So I got a piece of paper and a pencil, all glad and excited, and set down and wrote:

Miss Watson, your runaway nigger Jim is down here two mile below Pikesville, and Mr. Phelps has got him and he will give him up for the reward if you send.

HUCK FINN.

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I felt good and all washed clean of sin for the first time I had ever felt so in my life, and I knowed I could pray now. But I didn’t do it straight off, but laid the paper down and set there thinking — thinking how good it was all this happened so, and how near I come to being lost and going to hell. And went on thinking.

And got to thinking

over our trip down the river; and I see Jim before me all the time: in the day and in the night-time, sometimes moonlight, sometimes storms, and we a-floating along, talking and singing and laughing. But somehow I couldn’t seem to strike no places to harden me against him, but only the other kind. I’d see him standing my watch on top of his’n, ‘stead of calling me, so I could go on sleeping; and see him how glad he was when I come back out of the fog; and when I come to him again in the swamp, up there where the feud was; and such-like times; and would always call me honey, and pet me and do everything he could think of for me, and how good he always was; and at last I struck the time I saved him by telling the men we had small-pox aboard, and he was so grateful, and said I was the best friend old Jim ever had in the world, and the only one he’s got now; and then I happened to look around and see that paper.

It was a close place. I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a-trembling, because I’d got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself:

“All right, then, I’ll go to hell” — and tore it up.

It was awful thoughts and awful words, but they was said. And I let them stay said; and never

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thought no more about reforming. I shoved the whole thing out of my head, and said I would take up wickedness again, which was in my line, being brung up to it, and the other warn’t. And for a starter I would go to work and steal Jim out of slavery again; and if I could think up anything worse, I would do that, too; because as long as I was in, and in for good, I might as well go the whole hog.

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