AND SO IT BEGINS . . .

I've had my first blog entry planned in my head for a few days now. Today is January 19, 2009, Martin Luther King, Jr., day, and the day before the United States of America will inaugurate the first man of African descent as its President. I was going to take this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to recognize the historic importance of the day and opine, in flowery and poetic language, on the wisdom of our forefathers, the greatness of representative government and the opportunities provided by the bounteous and fruited plain.

Once I sat down to write, however, I realized that it was all platitudinous drivel. Don’t get me wrong: I unapologetically love my country and I truly believe that I am the beneficiary of the greatest social and political legacy in the history of the world. The fact that a black man has been elected to the Presidency only half a century after the nation began to wake up to the injustices of Jim Crow is a testament to that great legacy. While I cannot celebrate the installation of Barack Obama as commander-in-chief, I am happy to celebrate the ideals that allowed him to take a seat in our highest office. In deference to the historic moment, I really don’t want to criticize Mr. Obama today. I wanted my first entry to be a celebration of the ideal that our individual merit and character means more than origins or social class.

Ironically, on the day that we’re supposed to remember the injustices of inequality, I read this article in the Los Angeles Times. Apparently now that Barack Obama will be President, we can abandon such classics of American literature as Huckleberry Finn, To Kill a Mockingbird and Of Mice and Men. Never mind that the “N word” is digitized on just about every ipod in America. According to one John Foley, pedagogue extraordinaire, literature that uses racist language must be scrubbed from the syllabus.

"The time has arrived to update the literature we use in high school classrooms," Foley wrote in a guest column this month for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. "Barack Obama is president-elect of the United States, and novels that use the 'N-word' repeatedly need to go."

Forget context. Mr. Foley gripes that it’s just too difficult to explain to high school students that Jim teaches Huck some valuable lessons about friendship and loyalty. So he concludes that we no longer need to study the artistic legacy of the times and attitudes that made Mr. Obama’s election so remarkable.


Our literature teaches us who we are and where we’ve been. Huck’s crude and colorful language makes a point about our common humanity that Mr. Foley’s pedantic political correctness could never convey. What greater illustration do we have of the perversion of justice than the trial of Tom Robinson and the futile but noble fight of Atticus Finch to do what is right? Sacrificing our literary heritage at the altar of political correctness in honor of Barack Obama would indeed be a blow to the ideals that we are supposedly celebrating.