PC

Sensitive Censorship

We have been discussing censorship primarily based on issues of repression throughout this class. The blacklist was created in order to suppress communist and leftist views in America, and sexuality has been repressed in literature. All of the texts we have looked at take a view of censorship that intends to eliminate a certain worldview or social option for young people. However, it seems that there are also pervasive forms of censorship that are enforced due to sensitivity to groups or individuals. I am intrigued by this as an aspect of censorship that is really much more problematic than eliminating The Catcher in the Rye from a sophomore English reading list.

I was struck by this in the film adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird, especially in how they treated the n word. While the film does use the term, it is used much more carefully and infrequently than in Harper Lee's novel. I think this is a laudable way to treat the source material as well the audience. While the adapters kept the term in in order to shock audiences with the hateful ideals present in Harper Lee's American South, it does not subject audiences to unnecessary hate speech. While I would have preferred a script in which the characters explicitly addressed the term differently from the novel, there is only so much room in a screenplay, and eliminating some of the uses of the n word are a laudable place to start cutting material from the novel.

In class, we have not used the n word either, perhaps due to discomfort, but also (hopefully) to positively assert that we do not condone or support the use of the word and its history. Censorship in this way can show respect to other people or social norms. No one in the class is advocating teaching Catcher in the Rye to a class of first graders, in part because of the explicit language. But this does not mean that we wish to censor first graders' reading. There is a time and a place for everything, even if we believe in the freedom of speech. Navigating between the appropriate and the censorial is tricky business that requires sensitivity and intelligence on both sides of the issue.