Let's rewrite history.

In my top 50 authors list, I have to be honest, Mark Twain probably doesn't make it. However, there is no reason why anyone should be censoring his work. According to The New York Times, Professor Allan Gribben has decided to change every utterance of "the n-word" in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to "slave" and "Injun" to "Indian."

As a professor, Gribben should know better. In literary criticism we call this erasure. By removing these words from Twain's work, he is saying that it shouldn't be discussed or learned from, when in fact that is the opposite of what should happen. I remember reading The Adventures of Tom Sawyer in the seventh grade and not understanding why anyone would use those words, but my teacher explained to us that unfortunately this is the way people spoke in the 1830s and 1840s. We can't rewrite history because it is uncomfortable; that is exactly how we stop learning from our mistakes.