A while back, I wanted to publish a new audiobook version of a classic title from the public domain. The story was great, the author was beloved by many and considered to be an equal rights advocate from her time. The only problem was, there was one instance in the book where she used an outdated (and now considered derogatory) term to describe a person from a particular ethnic group. 

Having literature accessible has always been extremely important to me, having been raised by progressive parents, and also remembering clearly an episode of Family Ties, a sitcom from the 80s, where the youngest child, “Jennifer”  risked suspension by choosing to do a book report on “Huckleberry Finn”, a banned book at her school. The two part episode was noteworthy enough that the Washington Post editors posted an opinion piece about it.

“Huckleberry Finn” has been on many lists of banned books in U.S. schools and libraries over the years partially due to the language in the book, even though the merit of the book’s theme arguably outweighs the harshness of the language. 

The same can be said about many books written over a hundred years ago, and banning them due to the author using the language of their time would undoubtedly be unfortunate. After all, if we don’t learn from history, we are destined to repeat it. 

“Huckleberry Finn” notoriously has many instances of offensive language, but what about books with just an occasional instance of what is now considered outdated language, or even a slur? Can’t we just change the word to something more acceptable? 

This is the question that came to mind when I was thinking about publishing a classic title as an audiobook a few years ago. It had one instance of one word, which was commonly used at the time to refer to a particular ethnic group, but is considered to be highly offensive today. My first thought was that most likely, nobody would notice if I replaced the word with something more acceptable. But something told me I should get another opinion.

So I reached out to a couple of groups on social media. One was on Reddit, which is somewhat anonymous, and the other was a group of local friends in my progressive city of Seattle, who tend to consider themselves to be “social justice warriors”. Although some commenters said they wouldn’t have any issues with changing the word, quite a few took the time to write a long comment about it being a bad idea. The main consensus was that censoring even one word is still censorship. After reading these comments, I started thinking a bit deeper about the topic, and came up with the following:  

#1- If the word is offensive enough for me to want to change it, book groups may consider it important enough to have a discussion about it. Those who listened to the audiobook rather than reading the original text will be left out of the conversation. 

#2-Linguists and scholars use text from historic books to learn about etymology and history. By providing a more modern word in place of the words that were actually used at the time, it is providing a false narrative about the language and the way certain ethnic groups were treated. 

#3 The new audiobook being published has the same title and is attributed to the same author as the original text. Crediting the author for words they didn’t write is dishonest and confusing. If we leave the language as-is, we may have a different opinion of the author than we would if their slurs or outdated words are censored. I think there is enough “glorifying of the olden days” in history classes. We don’t need to do it in literature as well! 

I ended up not doing an audiobook version of that particular book, but I did decide that if I were to publish any other public domain titles that had problematic language,  I would not change the text to make it less harsh, but instead would include a disclaimer in the audiobook blurb. Disney has been including similar disclaimers about some of their older movies: and Whoopie Goldberg gave one in the introduction of the Tom and Jerry Spotlight Collection.

Thanks for reading!

Rebecca H. Lee- Audiobook Narrator

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