Why is huck finn not racist

Riding the current of this novel, we are back in that happy time when the love affair was new and all seemed possible. My own experience of that love affair has necessarily been a very narrow one — we live only the one life. The neighbourhood I grew up in had a founding map that specified that no one of African descent could live there, except in the capacity of servant.

No black family lived on our street, and I doubt I saw many black kids in the local park. My parents bought our house from an old Texas woman whose African American servant lived in the hut at the bottom of the garden. It was tiny; we later called it the playhouse, and used it as a base for the kind of cute Tom Sawyer-like escapades that spoil the ending of Huckleberry Finn. The junior high I got bussed to was a specialist school in east Austin, one of those neighbourhoods urban planners had managed to separate by highway from the rest of the city because black people lived in it.

This is not the kind of phrase a year-old makes up. He must have heard it somewhere. He did very good Bill Cosby impersonations. And yet it was a love-affair, too, though unreciprocated. The ballplayers I liked were all black. But I read Langston Hughes , too, in the same way I read Heinrich Heine — because I was a nerd with a jones for intellectual folk-simplicity.

Every day, the school bus drove through the run-down streets surrounding the school: cars in the grass, peeling paint, sagging roofs, people sitting on the porch. Mailer, in his NYT piece, describes it playfully as a wonderfully precocious first novel, full of talent and energy. Part of what impressed Mailer is the fact that Huck Finn is the kind of novel that could still launch a career today — that would still seem fresh and promising. Now it is banned to protect them from being offended, or confused.

Even if his language is hard for contemporary teenagers to penetrate, they get Huck. They understand keeping secrets. They understand that your friends expect you to protect them even if it gets you in trouble. They understand that their moral instincts are not always shared by society.

They understand that the worlds they create, either modern subcultures or a raft on the Mississippi, are more real and intelligible to themselves than the hypocrisy and corruption of adult society. They know that they will need to light out to the territories themselves someday.

I wish we could do a better job of celebrating him, and not banning him—and by celebrating him we can celebrate all the teenage Hucks in our world.

Perhaps if we keep reading his story, we will. Search for:. Home Site Map Flashpoints Menu. Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was called vulgar in the 19th century and racist in the 20th. Read excerpts? He has been at work for eight years on the story of an outcast white boy, Huck, and his adult friend Jim, a runaway slave, who together flee Missouri on a raft down the Mississippi River in the s.

The book's free-spirited and not always truthful hero as well as its lack of respect for religion or adult authority draw immediate fire from newspaper critics. Black Perspectives of Huckleberry Finn. Durham, N. Gilly, Casey. Kakutani, Michiko. Elizabeth R. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn [electronic resource]. Other articles in Controversial Works. Want to support the Free Speech Center? Donate Now.