Now that we have an African-American president, US schools should get rid of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, and John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men. That’s what John Foley, an English teacher at a high school in Washington state, is recommending, anyway. Foley says the books, which include the “N-word,” should no longer be required reading for students. “The time has arrived to update the literature we use in high school classrooms. Barack Obama is [president] of the United States, and novels that use the ‘N-word’ repeatedly need to go,” he wrote in a recent opinion piece for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. In place of Huck Finn, students could read Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove, Foley suggests.
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