Setting aside the idea that intellectuals and artists ought to be free to state even ugly and mistaken sentiments, it is downright odd to presume that any idea conveyed within a work of art benefits from its endorsement. These cases demonstrate a fundamental misunderstanding not only of what is unjustifiably offensive but of the very purpose of art.Ĭlint Smith: What a racist slur does to the bodyĬreative expression of any quality, which is to say efforts that go beyond the merely propagandistic or ideologically motivated, must perform several important functions that are not reducible to advocacy-even and perhaps especially when it comes to groups that have been mistreated. In February, the Roald Dahl estate unleashed hundreds of clumsy alterations to his classic works of children’s literature, effacing words such as fat and ugly. Yet does anyone doubt a New York City police officer might speak like that in 1971? Does anyone doubt one might speak like that today? Instances of such cleansing are becoming more frequent and blatant. The back-and-forth is crass and demeaning, no question. Russo: “How the hell did I know he had a knife?” Someone had deleted a six-second exchange between the detectives Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle (Gene Hackman) and Buddy “Cloudy” Russo (Roy Scheider), which contains an actual racial slur, not a descriptor: I thought of this jarring shift in sensibility this week as perceptive audiences noticed stealth edits made to the 1971 classic The French Connection, which is owned by Disney and being streamed by the Criterion Channel and Apple TV+. ![]() The students were not merely reflecting an admirable expansion of sensitivity to markers of past brutality, but an impulse to retroactively change the past instead of merely learning from it. ![]() (I should have added: Treating Negro and the actual N-word as equally unsayable diminishes the severity of the slur that so offends us.) “Stanley was dissatisfied with terms like Black or African American because he believed they lacked the specificity to capture the historical circumstances and achievements of the people in America who had called themselves Negroes.” When we resumed reading, the very next student paused for a moment and said, in a hushed tone, “N-word.” At that moment I knew that Stanley and even his mentor Ralph Ellison would be powerless to dissuade them. “It is not an insult,” I stressed to them. Most of the authors on our syllabus, I continued, preferred to conceive of themselves as Negroes, some well into the 21st century, including my dear friend the essayist and jazz critic Stanley Crouch, who insisted on the nomenclature until his death in 2020. “You know,” I said at last, “no one will be forced to say anything they are uncomfortable saying in this classroom, but you need to understand that Negro is not a slur or term of disparagement.” The students stared at me blankly. Read: ‘A treacherous president stood in the way’ “Fortunate, most fortunate occurrence!-fortunate for the millions of his manacled brethren, yet panting for deliverance from their awful thraldom!-fortunate for the cause of negro emancipation, and of universal liberty!-fortunate for the land of his birth, which he has already done so much to save and bless!” These proud words, carefully selected by their author and capable of transporting us in that 21st-century classroom to another social reality, were being reformatted on the spot without explanation. Once this precedent had been set, each subsequent student to encounter the ethnic descriptor Douglass applied to himself without shame made the same adjustment. When it was time to pronounce out loud the word Negro, which arises frequently in a piece of writing from 1845, the student hesitated with visible discomfort and then said, almost in relief, “N-word,” before proceeding to the next sentence. We were taking turns reading from Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. ![]() After the third, fourth, and fifth time, I realized that something had shifted since I had last-prior to the summer of 2020 and the racial reckoning-faced a group of undergraduate students, making sense together of a text from a previous era. The first time it happened, I assumed it was a misunderstanding.
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