Some time in the past two years, in my Language and Literacy Development in Young Children class, the prof passed a Caldecott honor book and asked us to read it.

It was the story of the seven blind mice. The mice encounter something next to their pond and try figuring out what the object is. On Monday the red mouse touches a part of the object and says that it is nothing but a giant column of enormous girth. On Tuesday the next colored mouse touches a part of the object and says that it is just a fan. Monday through Saturday, the different colored mice touch only one part of the object and come to different conclusions. Finally on Sunday, the white mouse runs from one end of the object to the other end, pieces together the entire information and declares that the object in fact is an elephant.

This is a story we have all heard growing up. I love the moral behind the story, ‘by looking at just a part of the bigger picture, you distort the whole picture’. The reason this particular book was discussed in class is because the book was a controversial book and many classrooms do not use it.

Any guesses why? Well… I advice you to sit down while I give you the reason, because the mouse that comes out on Sunday and solves the riddle is a ‘white’ mouse. If you read between the lines, ignore the moral of the story, focus on a singular detail and decide based on one snippet of the whole big picture…. the books claims that white is superior to other colors, which can be further extended to people with white skin are superior. Ironic indeed.

Well, this unfortunately is not the only example. The most recent person caught in controversy is Mark Twain. You ain’t free even if you are dead Mr.Twain. The future will come back to get you.  Just be thankful that it is not a Terminator coming back in time, but just a publishing company deciding to replace the word ‘nigger’ with the word ‘slave’.

The bigger questions are:

What exactly are people trying to accomplish here?

Does Mark Twain’s use of the word nigger make him a racist?

Should one look at the bigger picture, namely the story of friendship between Huck and Jim and the period the story was set in, or should be bogged down by just one word and shun away from the book?

If one word defines a book, the author, what about the fate of books like ‘To kill a mocking bird’, that have the same offensive word?

A book is the intellectual property of its author. In many ways, it the author’s baby. Can some one, without the author’s permission, decide to change the book, even if it is just one word?

By replacing one word, by rewriting old literature, can history be rewritten too?

Doesn’t the new generation deserve the actual history?  Or do we give them a politically correct, glossed over version because it is easy for us to deal with demons from past history, because it removes a certain level of awkwardness in our current social life?

What do you think peeps?