Mark Twain knew how to spell "(the n-word)" and demonstrated this repeatedly throughout his famous work "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn". We, today, like to act dyslexic in that regard, as if we weren't thinking the word when we substitute it by "the n-word" whenever the use of the word is brought up. But the word didn't die with Mark Twain, and racism didn't with segregation. Mark Twain wasn't even a product of his time, because racism has existed before and after him, and so has action against it. There is no such thing as "their time" and "our time". We don't shut the door to room 1884 with its lynchings and srtange fruit, and end up in room 2021 where everything is cottage core and chubby cats and rainbw flags. Black Lives Matter is a modern response to an ongoing issue. The war on women is an event as current as it is ancient.
Why is it, then, that we excuse his work and others, as being "products of their time"? None other than Agatha Christie, a woman depicted as fun and quirky in a very modern, wholesome series Doctor Who, created a children's book called "Ten little N-words", but spelled out, hard R. Translations of it are still in circulation, even on somewhat moderated platforms like Amazon. It wouldn't surprise me if German kindergarteners still sang that counting rhyme unaltered. But keep telling yourself that racism is dead just because JK Rowling unwittingly shifted the focus to transphobia, which in and of itself is proof that nothing is dead at all.
Keep telling yourself that times have changed. Keep telling yourself that the Taliban or the Texas abortion ban are "medieval" when we're 600 years past that time period. The Taliban know it's 2021 and so does Texas. Many Taliban men may be illiterate, but literacy is not innate to the average of our species, unlike empathy, curiosity, and the desire to connect socially.
We have always known better. We have always been capable of being better. We were capable of abhorring slavery when we practiced it; we were capable of abhorring genocide when six million Jews were gassed, and we teach about that genocide, "never forget", while Israel is committing another with impunity. Jews were gassed secretly precisely because everyone knew that almost everyone knew better. Israel practices "Hasbarah" precisely because it knows the world knows right from wrong and needs to be fed propaganda, lots of it. Black people, "witches", "the Jew", Muslims, "the gay agenda", and the "cross-dressing bathroom predator" (read: transwoman), were all artificially vilified because we have always known better and needed to be fooled into making exceptions based on what more influential people wanted us to believe. We have always known better, because some of us have always resisted, sometimes successfully so.
At no point did anyone not have the chance to recognize that black people are fully-fledged human beings, or that women are not cattle, and that the dehumanization of either has been fabricated from the start because it's useful to the powerful to have a designated group of dehumanizables.
Hitler's ghost isn't beheading Jews in the streets of France. Mark Twain isn't shouting the n-word from the grave as American cops murder Black people in the streets. It's not Columbus who gave the order to bomb Iraq. It's our society, right now. There can be no more complacency and contenting oneself with chanting "This isn't us". As long as we do not collectively DO better, this is exactly us. "Those times" aren't over, they just got a new paint job. We have always been capable of being bigots, and we continue to be, and when we're not, we limit our activism to those people situated within the same artificial borders as ourselves. We're all guilty of that. I'm guilty of that.
We can trace a collective desire and capacity for kindness and equality all the way back to the stories of Jesus, and the desire to learn and grow and get along has been recorded in cave paintings. The capacity for justice has always been in us. Gen Z's Tiktok slacktivists didn't invent accountability.
While it's to be expected that someone writes from a perspective of their environment, anyone in any time period should be held accountable for what side of progress they ended up on and how big an effort they made to grow beyond their environment. At no point did anyone not have the chance to recognize that black people are fully-fledged human beings, or that women are not cattle, and that the dehumanization of either has been fabricated from the start because it's useful to the powerful to have a designated group of dehumanizables.
Incels and neo-Nazis do not happen in a vacuum. They're a caricature of an omnipresent and ongoing cultural reality, and we get hung up on their flippancy rather than recognize that they're the product of OUR times that WE ALL shape, be it by complacency or activism.
In 2012-13, I worked in processing articles from old documents such as 17th-19th century newspapers and travel accounts written by European and American "explorers". They were oozing with laboured denial of the obviously recognized humanity of other ethnicities; their "methods" of this dehumanization were very similar to today's descriptions of women by incels. And incels, too, know better. They just act like they don't, because otherwise, how to justify dehumanizing women to a point of worshipping our murderers? 1700, 2000, the same mindsets exist and have more power than we want to admit, even if perhaps, the focus shifts between various offending and victimized groups. Incels and neo-Nazis do not happen in a vacuum. They're a caricature of an omnipresent and ongoing cultural reality, and we get hung up on their flippancy rather than recognize that they're the product of OUR times that WE ALL shape, be it by complacency or activism. It's too convenient, and too dangerous, to dismiss those threats as a "loud minority". The "loud minority" is a myth when we can easily look up the statistics on femicide and sexual or physical violence against women, and how often the perpetrators get off lightly or blame is shifted to the victims. In 2021.
So can we really draw a line between "their time" and "our time"? The Twilight saga is very much a product of what we call "our time" and glorifies the very current issues of male predatory behaviour, domestic violence, and the denial of female agency. Huckleberry Finn's problem may be racism, but racism is not dead just because the n-word became socially unacceptable, so are the times Twain was a product of really dead? Misogyny sure isn't dead; it continues to be normalized through accepted works of fiction, and the war on women is very real. It's easy for us to dismiss "products of their time" when we weren't alive then, but our times are no better for some groups, especially globally speaking. We love to call certain oppressive foreign systems "medieval" to detach ourselves from the realness of them, but they're not, they're happening in 2021, and we act like just because we live in the West and have rights on paper, the world has magically moved on from serving up various groups of human beings to oppression and slow genocide. Slavery is going on in the prison industrial complex; Jews are being beheaded in European streets; women get raped and even murdered with impunity in the so-called civilized West; transwomen of colour are being murdered disproportionately, and don't get me started on the disproportionate deaths among poor and BIPOC during the pandemic, but fear not: at least we're criticizing a dead writer for using the n-word in a book...
But wait. In many languages, it's still normal to call the Indigenous peoples of today's America the respective language's version of "Indian" and shrug off those very people's valid demand to not be called that, because, well, they're not Indians; an idiot who proceeded to butchering them called them that because, well, he was an entitled idiot who thought he got to name nations who had already named themselves, and, well, people from India are Indians. The survival of terms many minorities associate with violence and oppression, and with it, the subconscious, but often (unintentionally) practiced bigotry, can partly be blamed on the survival and glorification of literature from those times, but while the No Nuance squad of Gen Z is all but calling for the burning of such works, modern fiction is no better, even if it no longer uses words or depictions deemed socially unacceptable. I guess misogyny and rape remain socially acceptable, as do Arab and Muslim stereotypes and their pigeonholing into villains and savages who need to be tamed, enlightened, or rescued, by white protagonists. The dehumanization is still there, between the lines.
The works of long-dead authors may be products of slightly different times, we could somehow excuse their lack of trying to be progressive, but if we really want those times to be over, we need to 1. stop necromancing them by normalizing their products and keeping them in merry circulation, and 2. recognize that those times are not over for a great lot of people in our own cultures and across the globe. If equality really matters to us, then we can't speak of slavery as a thing of the past just because it may be in the US, when it's still happening in Lebanon or in Uyghur gulags. The implementation of same-sex marriage and protections of sexual minorities in some countries doesn't mean homophobia is over if we truly aren't racist or nationalist, because then, we have to think of a problem in global terms. What's there to celebrate during Pride month, when gay Iranians are still being hung? Are they less important than the people next door? Why? Distance? Skin colour? Or perhaps, did very modern media finess you into mistaking your world for the world and accept borders as a law of nature that determine who does or doesn't deserve humanity?
So what to do with old literary classics that perpetuate problematic language and views but are otherwise valuable? First of all, what's "valuable" when it comes to fiction? Life lessons? Values? Entertainment? There is no lesson and no joy that can't be conveyed through a new, more culturally sensitive story. And we should perhaps be more open to adaptation. If a book can be adapted from Japanese to English, sacrificing all the wonderful subtleties of Japanese language, surely, it won't lose its overall value if modern adaptations replaced some terms or reimagined problematic content to fit the plot without throwing any struggling demographic under the bus, be it the glamourized disregard for female consent or ethnic/queer/ableist slurs. If an unproblematic adaptation isn't possible, then what good are they, except perhaps to serve as examples of how to poison minds, like "Mein Kampf"? We go Marie Kondo on perfectly good clothing while refugees are freezing in camps, so why can't we Marie Kondo literature that perpetuates the notion that cruelty was at any point a non-issue? We live in a world where cruelty still is treated as a non-issue. Women are raped and murdered daily for existing while female. Our modern literature normalizes the insiduous beginnings of such violence, through the dismissal of female agency or the romanticizing of coerced consent, and of course, the beloved, excused-as-art, across-the-board objectification of women that somehow doesn't know a male equal.
We have not made a clear cut from the past. These books are history, and history is taught to shape the future. We need to be more mindful of how we teach it and what we deem worth preserving, and why. And we need to be a lot more mindful of how history is repeating itself, albeit more subtly. Sometimes.