Should students in China be required to rewrite 'I have a dream'?

I have had to sit through so many renditions of 'I have a Dream' that I could pretty well recite it myself.

I got worried about the speech after reading this report:

US county to replace headstones bearing N-word

Supervisors in a Northern California county have voted to replace 36 gravestones that bear the N-word, giving the green light to state, county and community officials to design an alternative.

The graves hold the remains of pioneers of various races from a Gold Rush settlement called Negro Hill. The federal government moved the bodies from the mining town in 1954 to make way for a dam, and in the process, erected concrete headstones that said the settlers came from N-word Hill.

The full article can be found at:
http://www.stuff.co.nz/oddstuff/5052256/US-county-to-replace-headstones-bearing-N-word


I am against PC people of any colour or creed trying to rewrite history through playing with words.    

So, anyone going to stand up in China and demand that the speech be rewritten?

Wonder how long it will be before the word "Aussie" will be found to be politically incorrect?

The motivation isn't PC though it's consumers. If we forget our mistakes we are doomed to repeat them, but if you actually lived somewhere with an offensive address you'd be all for changing it to something positive.

The article you linked winds up obsfucating the facts in its attempts to be sensitive. The "n-word" on the headstones that people take exception to is nigger, not negro:

"EL DORADO HILLS, Calif. – Time has weathered the 36 concrete gravestones in a dusty, half-century-old cemetery tucked away in a corner of California's former gold fields. Time has not erased, however, the bigotry of a bygone era carved into the markers.
The dead, both black and white, had been moved from a Gold Rush-era hamlet known as Negro Hill in the 1950s to make way for a reservoir.
The problem is the way the markers continue to identify them almost 60 years later:
"Unknown. Moved from Nigger Hill Cemetery by U.S. Government - 1954."

Source
A group of white people, led by a Boy Scout doing his Eagle Scout project, wanted the name changed back to Negro Hill. At this point the African-American community (quite rightly) said, "Hey, don't you want to know our opinion on all this?"

Given that racist place-names ("Squaw's Tit", "Savage Island", "Nigger Hill"…a monicker that the Army Corps of Engineers imposed on the region in the 50s pretty much solely because they were a bunch of bigots) are active reminders of institutionalized bigotry and discrimination in the past, taking steps to sensitively deal with them seems to make quite a bit of sense, and has nothing to do with bowdlerizing separate and unrelated works.

 

The article you linked winds up obsfucating the facts in its attempts to be sensitive. The "n-word" on the headstones that people take exception to is nigger, not negro:

Thanks El Macho. 

Last night I wrote a diatribe in defense of Martin Luther King and his speech. You have all been spared that through EL's timely intervention.

The sensitivity of the PC world knows no bounds. I suppose if I used the 'C' word to describe them they would think I was referring to 'cats.'

PS I show the video of MLK's speech in my classes - students are spellbound by not just the words but also scenes of the people there that day.

Granny, the word "Aussie" just isn't offensive enough. That's why we all refer to Australians as "Irwins". (As in Steve.)

For a requirement to write the "Dream" speech...
Well, it is a helluva great speech. If you don't know it, you should look it up.

But no, I don't think ANY particular piece of literature should be rammed down students' throats, unless it's a Lit class perhaps, especially when the class is given in a foreign language and culture. The teacher should be free to work with the abilities and needs of their students, and find their own way to reach those students.