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Wow... I am almost speechless over your comment.
Almost.
I understand that you are trying to play devils advocate and all of that, which buys you some leniency, but everything you wrote after "Maybe they aren't trying to fool anyone" proved more and more with each passing word that you really don't get it. At all.
Of course it's not actually "restoring" the reality of the south in the mid 1880's as almost no one is actively suppressing the reality that nigger was used commonly back then as a way of describing an African slave.
It didn't have any shock value then because there wasn't over 100 years of hatred and cultural stigma behind the word then. It was a crude "slang" term for a piece of property, like calling a bluetooth headset a "bluetooth" or an iPod Touch an "iTouch". People thought nothing of it because it was more of way of describing something and less an insult.
I know you were giving an example, but 100 years from now "thee, thine and thy" will NOT be considered shocking and slanderous because they never were associated with something abhorrent to begin with. Even if I played along with that train of thought, then Shakespeare's plays should STILL be preformed with the original words even though they were never meant to be a shock because to change them wouldn't preserve the spirit of the play!
This is in stark contrast to Mark Twain's work because the entire STORY was meant to be shocking and carry a message. Granted, HOW the shock was delivered has changed over the years, back when it was written, to feature a black man as one of the main characters was unheard of! It was the equivalent of yelling your dreaded "n" word in a crowded mall today. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was designed to get attention and share a message and it does even today. Culture may have changed the angle of which the message is delivered but the message itself is the same and has just as much impact.
You talk about preserving the story... or preserving the "spirit" of the work... Pulling the word "nigger" out of the story would do nothing but distort it because unlike hurling it as an insult, the spirit of the story was to show that Jim was considered unimportant. When I read the story many years ago, I found I didn't even blink at the occurrence of the word "nigger" after the second or third time because it's not there for shock value and isn't in the context to be... so it isn't shocking! It becomes his name and influences, even encourages, you to look down upon one of the only decent people in the entire story with true virtues. It was there to constantly remind you of Jim's RACE, that he was black. Just as Mark Twain intended.
So just how can you spend time on the actual story when the actual story has been destroyed by the removal of those "offensive terms"?
The word isn't the problem. It's the meaning, the force, behind it and in the story, that negative undertone is NEEDED in order for it's message to be CORRECT.
How can you object to censorship when you are so ready to justify it? When Mark Twain wrote Huck Finn, nigger WASN'T the most vile word in English language, but it was, even then, mildly distasteful. The only reason left to find "nigger" or "injun" so distracting is that the word carries too much weight with the READER. To me, it's no more or less distracting to see "nigger" as it is to see "shit" or "damn".
Discussing the book without using "offensive" terms is easy... DON'T use them. Call Nigger Jim, JIM! He had a "real" name, use it!'' As for the "think of the child-runs angle, is it really that hard to help kids understand that not using certain words is simply being polite? It's like teaching them not to swear.
Letting yourself be distracted by the meaning behind a specific word is a very poor excuse to shit upon ANY story and the meaning behind it, especially so when it's such an important work. It'd be like censoring 1984 these days.
I'm done. I do apologize if I got a little overboard, but you could chalk it up to playing ANTI-devils advocate.
Cheers!
