Posted by
Andrews on Thursday, July 03, 2008 7:35:02 PM
I was just informed that the book I knew as Ten Little Indians is now And Then There Were None. I was going to write a piece mocking this sudden PC name change, until I discovered that even the title I knew was a PC change from a past generation as the original was called Ten Little N*ggers.
So, apparently the US name change came about in the 1940's, which is why I was unaware that I was already reading an ethnically-bowlderized title. Apparently, the British version kept the original title until the mid-eighties, when it became And Then There Were None, for fairly obvious reasons. I am not sure when the US title changed, but I suspect it was more recently, as "Indian" only became a dirty word sometime in the 90's, at least in mainstream America.
What is interesting is that the same people who would argue in defense of the P*ss Christ are probably content with this name change. While offending Christians is fine, offending certain other groups is not. Of course, I can't prove that with any certainty, but I certainly have never heard anyone up in arms over this change in title, while any effort at cutting NEA grants, erroneously called "censorship", meets with vocal protest.
Well, I suppose I can live with this new title, whatever the reason it changed. As long as they don't mess with Mark Twain and rename Native American Joe or African-American Jim, I'll be fine. And I would certainly be horrified to find them forcing a name change to Dostoyevsky's The Individual Living With Cognitive Impairments.
POSTSCRIPT
Apparently this change took place some time ago, and I just failed to notice. Then again, how often do you buy books you already own? So it took me some time to spot it. I still think it is a senseless change. Books are historical artifacts, as well as art, and to change them is to falsify the past. Are we next going to edit Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire to excise speculations that moderns may consider racist? After all, they are only in footnotes, so it isn't as if it is real censorship. No more important than a title, right?