THE ENDER'S GAME RACISM QUESTION: An interesting discovery ...

THE ENDER’S GAME
RACISM QUESTION:
An interesting discovery during class
discussion of Ender's Game. I had
asked a reflective question on the
study guide: "Do you think Ender and
Alai are seriously racist, or are they
just playing around?" The question
was meant to refer to page 61, where
the following exchange occurs:
"Let's freeze a few," Alai said.
"Let's have our first battle. Us against
them."
They grinned. Then Ender
said, "Better invite Bernard."
Alai cocked an eyebrow.
"Oh?"
"And Shen."
"That little slanty-eyed buttwiggler?"
Ender decided that Alai was
joking. "Hey, we can't all be niggers."
Alai grinned. "My grandpa
would've killed you for that."
"My great great grandpa
would have sold him first."
"Let's go get Bernard and Shen
and freeze these bugger-lovers."
One of my students asked what I
meant by the question, so I directed
the class's attention to that page and
read the passage. There was an
outburst when I got to the racially
charged word. It doesn't appear in
most of the kids' version of the book.
Instead, their version reads thus:
"Let's freeze a few," Alai said.
"Let's have our first battle. Us against
them."
They grinned. Then Ender
said, "Better invite Bernard."
Alai cocked an eyebrow.
"Oh?"
"And Shen."
"That little butt-wiggler?"
Ender decided that Alai was
joking. "If you didn't hold yours so
tight it would wiggle, too."
Alai grinned. "Let's go get
Bernard and Shen and freeze these
bugger-lovers."
I was shocked. When did Card decide
to change this passage? He doesn't
seem to be the type to give in to
demands from the special interest
groups.
My class is eager to find out what
happened and why...
-- Submitted by Ryk Stanton
OSC REPLIES: - September 20,
2000
About the Removal of an Offensive
Word from Ender's Game
Ah, the dread monsters Censorship
and Bowdlerization rear their ugly
heads, and all the world shudders ...
One thinks at once of the "sanitized"
version of Shakespeare's tragedies
that held the stage in England and
America for many years -- you know,
the Lear in which Cordelia is saved
just in time; the Romeo and Juliet in
which Friar Lawrence arrives (of
course) just in time; the Hamlet in
which all is revealed and Hamlet is

saved to marry Ophelia; the Macbeth
in which ... well, there was no saving
Macbeth.
The audience simply could not
bear genuine tragedy, the noble heartwrenching
deaths of those who
should not die or who could have
avoided death, had they only chosen
a different course. So the stories were
changed "just a little" to make them
acceptable. After all, times had
changed, and the plays had to change
with them.
So widespread were these new
versions that almost no one had even
heard of the original tragic endings.
Shakespeare was even criticized for
"his" implausible last-minute rescues.
When the original versions were
revived, published, and produced, it
had an invigorating effect, and from
that time on, bowdlerization -- named
for Mr. Bowdler, who presumed to
clean up indecorousness in dead
writers' work, so that a more delicate
audience might continue to enjoy
them -- has been regarded as such an
awful literary crime that there is no
other comparable to it.
But I know a worse one. That
is the sin whereby, in pursuit of one
small aim, the artist puts something
in his work that causes it to be less
effective, and then refuses to correct
the flaw because that would not be
"true" to the work.
Let me be specific. I made up
Ender's Game. It is what I made it to
be. So if, in seeing its effect on the
audience, I come to realize that a
particular scene is not working, and
that it is not working solely because
of the use of a particular word, what
kind of fool would I have to be to
allow the dead me -- the me of 1984,
who wrote that scene -- to prevail
over the living me?
Even as the old obscenities
dealing with sex and excrement were
unleashed upon the public, new
obscenities moved from the realm of
the merely indecorous to the sinful.
What f* and s* (and worse words)
had once been, now n* has become.
And, just as there were prudes who
screamed in outrage and demanded
that any work containing those old
bad words must be banned, so we
have a new group of prudes making
identical demands about works
containing the new bad word.
The prudes are always with us.
They are wrong to impart deep moral
meanings to words themselves,
regardless of context: there is no
word which does not have a context
in which it is not only the best word,
but the only word that is right and
good. But they are right to this extent:
that there are words which become
charged with meaning that sparks and
shocks the reader no matter what the
context.
Such a word, today, is n*. In
the scene just quoted, I had Ender
using the word to wake Alai up to the
fact that by calling Shen "slantyeyed,"
Alai was being racist. A sort
of tit-for-tat response: If you're going
to call my East Asian friend "slantyeyed,"
then you choose to live in the
kind of world where you would be
called "n*." Morally, this is clearly
(to me, at least) a rejection of the
kind of world where people call each

other names based on superficial
racial characteristics.
But, to show the scene and make it
work, the word n* had to be used.
Without it, there is no scene.
The trouble was, first, with the
prudes. Despite the fact that, as with
Huckleberry Finn, the word was
being used in a work that opposed
racism, the word was being treated as
if it were an absolute. Denying that
the word can ever have a context that
makes its use morally right, the
prudes would have Ender's Game
banned from reading lists for young
readers because of the mere presence
of that word.
I could ignore the prudes -- I
usually do -- but there was a worse
problem. Because the word n* has
been so thoroughly banned from
public discourse (outside of Def
Comedy Jam), almost all readers are
shocked when they see the word. It
stands out. It is as if, in the midst of
hearing a play presented with normal
speech, one word were suddenly
screamed in a way quite
inappropriate to the context. The
audience, in such a case, is jarred,
shocked, driven away from the scene
that is going on before them, and
forced to think about the one shouted
word.
In other words, the presence of
n* was causing readers to break free
from the spell of the story. And so it
had to be eliminated, for the sake of
the purity of the experience of
reading, just as surely as I also
eliminate passages of language so
pretty that it makes readers say, "Oh,
how lovely," instead of concentrating
on the onward-flowing tale.
Do you doubt that this was
happening? The very fact that you
were trying to build a class discussion
about whether Ender and Alai were
racist based solely on that word
proves that the scene was an utter
failure. The word was so potent and
absolutely bad to you that you
actually considered it to be a
potentially sustainable proposition
that Ender was racist solely because
he used that word. The word forced
itself out of the context and instead of
being an answer, it became a question
-- the opposite of the intended effect.
If I had not already changed the
passage, I would have changed it the
moment I learned that a teacher was
actually asking a class, "Do you think
Ender and Alai are seriously racist, or
are they just playing around?" In fact
the scene should be absolutely clear
that Ender is neither racist nor
playing around, but is instead
insisting that Alai not make racially
derogatory statements about his
friend Shen. If the word n* were not
absolute in your mind, you would
never have asked that question. So,
while you may be "shocked" that I
would change the passage, I can
assure you, you, and those who
would read this scene as you did, are
the main reason I have changed it.
Which is not to say that I
might not have made the same
change simply to please the prudes. I
don't care what the prudes think of
me -- prudes of left and right both
detest me and my work, and will

continue to do so. But the prudes
have the power to have my work
banned from or made less accessible
to young readers. Though I did not
intend Ender's Game for a youthful
audience, it has in fact proved to have
some value and importance for many
young readers. So, for the sake of that
one word (and the short sequence
supporting it), should I keep a portion
of those young readers who might
value the book from having a chance
to read it? How impractical. How
silly.
If this were a scene that had a
central bearing on the main threads of
the tale so that, by changing it, I
changed the moral freight carried into
the reader's heart by this book, then I
might have found it more difficult to
make the change. But it is not
important -- the meaning of this scene
is conveyed in dozens of other more
effective ways elsewhere in the book
-- and so I changed it without a
second thought, and don't regret
making the change.
If I were one of those writers
who got all mystical about writing
and thought some muse or other
divine influence gave me the words I
write, then I might regard them as
sacred and unchangeable. But I am
not one of those writers -- I am
actually a serious artist, not a mystic,
and I know that there are a hundred
right ways to do every scene and
every passage, and a thousand ways
that seem right but are not quite right.
Moreover, my training is in theatre,
where playwrights know that they
cannot know what they have wrought
until it is before an audience,
whereupon they begin serious
revisions to make the play work
properly as a tool for creating the
story in the minds of the audience.
When the problem of using n*
in Ender's Game was called to my
attention, it was as if I were standing
in the audience of my play and heard
the people laughing in the midst of a
scene where laughter was completely
wrong. Whatever is causing
inappropriate laughter, the playwright
must eliminate it at once; so in this
case, what was causing distraction,
the word n*, needed to be eliminated
for the overall scene to work
properly, and for the story to remain
accessible to its whole potential
audience.
No one has ever missed the
word or the sequence that it occurred
in. Your class would not have noticed
it, or valued the book one whit less,
had you not called their attention to
the difference. Indeed, the fact that
now there is nothing to "notice" there,
the fact that your class had no idea
what you were talking about when
you suggested Ender might be racist,
proves that the change was necessary
and effective.
Which is not to say I'll never
use n* -- or any other word -- when I
find it necessary and appropriate. In
this case, it was neither, and so it's
gone.