Q&A with Ken Gilbert

In December, fifty-two-year-old building-service-company owner Ken Gilbert attempted to remove The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from his daughter’s St. Louis Park High tenth-grade honors English curriculum because of its repeated use of the word “nigger.” Gilbert and wife, Sylvia, are only the latest in a long line of parents who have attempted to pull Twain’s sequel to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer out of the classroom—just months before the Gilberts’ attempt, a family had tried to remove it in the Lakeville school district. St. Louis Park ultimately refused to remove the book, but did create a process to ensure that it is taught contextually. Of course, Twain warned in Huck Finn’s preface that “Those attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted, persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished . . . .” 

How did this start?
When my daughter, Nia, was introduced to the book, her teacher approached her after class and asked would she be comfortable. When she started to read the book that evening, she said, “I am really uncomfortable with this. And it’s hard for me to read.” So I told her to keep reading the book and I would talk to her teacher about her feelings. 

Did Nia tell you why she was uncomfortable with the book specifically?
Because of all the references to the n-word. Two pages into the book it starts out. It’s not a word that we use. It’s a defaming, degrading word. There’s no lower word you can call me. The uncomfortableness she felt was perceived by the other students in the classroom. She felt that all eyes were on her.

When was the first time you read Finn?
In high school. It was an all-black school. We never talked about The Adventures of Huck Finn in our school. We talked about the language.

What were your feelings back then?
I didn’t like the writing. In fact, it was probably my third time reading it. I’ve actually gotten through Huck Finn and all of his adventures, and if you get past the language, I can understand the appeal. But the problem I have is why would I want to read the offensive language just for the boyhood adventures? If we changed a lot of those words to “slave, black, African American,” it wouldn’t change the context of the book at all.

Aren’t the characters in the book who use the word obviously racist?
But think of the children in that classroom who aren’t coming at it from your perspective. My comment to the staff was without a dialogue, what message are you sending to these children? And do they get the literary intent that you want them to get from it? And having no other context from which to gauge, coming from an all-white family and never having dialogue about race, what are they going to think? These are the very people who are going to go out into the world and make decisions. And how will they be in a position to be equitable if this is what they read? And that’s what I had a problem with.

But I think Twain is actually on your side.
He could have used the n-word less than 212 times in a 300-page book.

Jim is the moral center of the book, and Huck is a racist and a liar, but isn’t Huck a product of his environment, the culture, the era?
His father was probably the worst man in the world. But you make a valid point, that you see it from your perspective. And from my perspective, back then, Jim was uneducated and the boy was the one with the knowledge and the intelligence, to some extent, and even though he was trying to help him gain his freedom, he was the savior! And there we go again, the great white hope. I see it from a black perspective that says there are other ways to make your point. Besides, how many years ago was this book written?

125?
The other problem I have is this—how many white teachers get it? How do I know that a white teacher subliminally gets it and looks aside from the n-word and teaches the core of the book? And when you look at the St. Louis Park schools, where African-American students are failing beyond the fifth grade, how can I be confident that you can teach that book competently?

That failure rate exists in virtually every urban public school across the country.
Yes. And why is that? Why is that that everybody else is succeeding and we, as a people, are failing? You can’t hold in these problems. What happens in the classroom overflows into the world. It has to. And we have to stop that from going out into the world. Tell me another book that defames a race, a people? 

Uh, The Merchant of Venice?