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Essay / Research Paper Abstract
A 4 page essay that argues that Huck Finn is not a racist book. It has become a perennial issue that books, even classics, that contain “’racially offensive’” words should be banned from high school curricula and Mark Twain’s classic Huckleberry Finn is always a target of such campaigns (Bertin 18). The irony in this situation is the idea that Mark Twain’s novel could be viewed as anything other than a humanistic classic that stands up for the rights of individuals, particularly blacks, in the face of a societal context that legitimized and tolerated gross racial injustice. Examination of Twain’s classic shows that it is most definitively not racist, but is rather a manifesto against racism, injustice and the glorification of the past. Bibliography lists 5 sources.
Page Count:
4 pages (~225 words per page)
File: D0_khhfnot.rtf
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Unformatted sample text from the term paper:
Mark Twains classic Huckleberry Finn is always a target of such campaigns (Bertin 18). The irony in this situation is the idea that Mark Twains novel could be viewed as
anything other than a humanistic classic that stands up for the rights of individuals, particularly blacks, in the face of a societal context that legitimized and tolerated gross racial injustice.
Examination of Twains classic shows that it is most definitively not racist, but is rather a manifesto against racism, injustice and the glorification of the past. This point becomes
clear when Huck is viewed with the cultural context of the time in mind. Samuel Clemens (1835-1910, who wrote under the penname of Mark Twain, published Huck Finn in 1885.
In Texas in 1885, it is estimated that lynch mobs killed 19 blacks and Texas was not the most prevalent state in regards to lynch mob murders; it only
ranked third, as it was behind Mississippi and Georgia (Ross). Mainstream society did not see blacks as people. Rather, the trend was to romanticize KKK lynch mobs as white
knights and glorify the past. By setting his novel in the antebellum South, Twain plays into this trend, but very subtly, and, in so doing, shows how the hypocritical
and wrong the past was, as he also introduces what were still subversive ideas concerning race. For example, take the way that Christianity is portrayed in the novel. While the
Grangerford family is depicted as staunchly Christian and slave-owners, they are never shown being cruel to their slaves; however, the family of Silas Phelps is shown as not only
putting a slave in chains but restricting him to a diet of bread and water and, of course, prayer, as Silas Phelps is a minister (Cozy 51). When the slave
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