Neglect

French Jewish people outside of Vel' d'Hiv
during the round up.

Over our Winter Break, one of the novels I read was Sarah's Key by the talented French writer Tatiana de Rosnay. The book is about how during the WWII the french police rounded up the Jews living in paris and ultimately sent them to their death. This event was called the Vel' d'Hiv Round up. Even more interesting to me was that today many french children are not taught about this tragic event in school. Through not teaching them about the round-up, it is almost like this part of history did not exist.


While reading this book I kept on thinking about how this would never happen in the US. I thought that we  teach our past mistakes, so that we can learn from them in the future. Boy, was I wrong.


In case you have not heard, I new edition of the Mark Twain classic, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Will sensor out the "N-word" and replace it with the world "Slave". The reason for doing this is to protect our youth from such a dirty word. I do understand that, but to me this is just covering up a bad part in the american history.


Only a few confused people who find pointy white hats still in fashion can deny that slave ownership in america was a dark time in our past. Although slavery is hard to learn about, we must  learn about it in order to not repeat our mistake. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn can teach us about the time in history when people used the "N-word" freely and, in the south at least, found very little wrong with slavery. We should not neglect our past by censoring out a word, but rather learn from our past, even when it is difficult. After all, who do we want to be like? The French?