I’m writing this argument as a minority who found the study of Huckleberry Finn to be useful and educational. I’m also writing this from the point of view of a private school student who believes that private schools should still require it. Public schools however, I don’t know enough to argue for that.
Ever since this classic American novel was released to society, Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has been writhing in controversy, due to the way that a black slave is portrayed and also due to the seemingly relaxed use of the highly offensive racial slang, “n****r”, and because of this, critics often state that this novel should not be a required reading in American schools due to the worry that the novel might offend students and parents. This is an understandable concern, due to the offensive language, a black slave being portrayed as stupid, superstitious, and doing whatever it is that Huckleberry, a young white child, tells him to do, and four practical jokes played by young white boys on a black slave. Although the language was difficult for me to read as a minority student, I never once regretted reading the novel. I am glad that this work of literature was required; instead of judging it by the first few pages, I was given a chance to see that the novel is not offensive, nor is it racist, because Twain shows us through his writing that racism is a bad thing. While it is true that the novel contains offensive language, it does not necessarily follow that Twain’s work is too inappropriate to be read in schools, and this statement is formed because Twain was an anti-racist, the real problem is not the language as much as the people reading it, and racism is not created through racial differences, but capitalism and elitism.
Mark Twain was an anti-racism novelist, writing an anti-racist novel after the end of the Civil War. A few good examples proving him to be anti-racism fall in the practical jokes of the novel. After one practical joke, according to Alan and Carol Hunt, Twain writes that Huck “feels guilty, apologizes, and swears to himself that he will play no more tricks” (Hunt, Hunt 200), showing the shame that comes with performing the practical joke that forces Huckleberry to start “to see Jim as an individual, as a sensitive man whose feelings must be considered, not as a slave who can be mistreated on a whim” (Hunt, Hunt 200). The joke is portrayed in a way that degrades Huckleberry and, according to Alan Hunt and Carol Hunt: “Twain lets the humor fail in Huck’s pranks in order to show what the jokes disguise: cruelty, prejudice, [and] subhuman treatment of blacks” (Hunt, Hunt 201). Mark Twain is against racism, and this is obvious as readers get into the novel. If he was a racist, he would not have shown the whites feeling guilty for their actions; instead he would have let Jim writhe in comical (from a white perspective) agony, and have the whites take humor in his pain. The critics argue that portrayed in a negative manner, and an example is when Twain writes that “Jim said the witches bewitched him and put him in a trance, and rode him all over the State” (Twain 5), making Jim seem superstitious and unintelligent. Critics argue that Twain also goes as far as to let on that not just Jim, but all blacks were stupid, citing the part where he writes that blacks “would come miles to hear Jim talk about it” (Twain 5) and that they would “stand with their mouths open and look him all over, same as if he was a wonder” (Twain 5). During these passages, it can definitely be argued that Mark Twain portrays blacks as stupid, superstitious, and able to believe anything told to them, but there are also those who believe differently. Robert Chrisman, a critic who believes in the idea that Jim was portrayed positively, states that “Jim, despite his enslaved condition, remains devoted to Huck Finn as his helpmate in the great river adventure saving his life and sustaining him in every way, instead of [...] escaping to the North” (Chrisman 816), and through this, Twain sheds positive light on Jim, featuring him to readers as a moral man who does not commit any acts of deceit. Mark Twain, as a writer, writes a novel showing America how ugly racism is.
The content of the novel is not the problem because the true problem is us. Readers have trouble discussing the novel “without hyperboles of either outrage or defensiveness” (Arc 123), as quoted from Jonathan Arc’s article “Putting the River on New Maps: Nation, Race, and Beyond in Reading Huckleberry Finn”. Arc gives a very valid point here, noting that readers are so sensitive that they cannot hold an open mind and play devil’s advocate to see if perhaps there is a deeper point beneath Twain’s admittedly offensive racial slurs. Readers are holding onto the past, and “America’s historical racism is what provokes [...] students and their parents to protest the classroom prestige of Huckleberry Finn” (Arc 124), but the prestige of the work cannot be doubted, for “prestige” implies much more than elegance of literary quality (after all, the book is narrated by a young boy with poor grammar), but literary quality in the terms of symbolism, theme, and argument. There is a reason why, today, people are still reading this novel, and there is a reason why, today, there is an ongoing debate about whether or not Huckleberry Finn beats J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye as the great American novel. There is only an issue with the novel because the readers and critics create an issue and although many critics write about the “negative portrayal” of Jim, it can be argued that Jim is portrayed as a kind and thoughtful figure because, as the previously mentioned quote stated, he “remains devoted to Huck Finn as his helpmate in the great river adventure, saving his life and sustaining him in every way, instead of bashing in his stringy little head and escaping to the North” (816 Chrisman). Jim is not portrayed in a negative light, as a matter of fact, the other characters, in their treatment of him, are the ones who seem to be more negative. After Huckleberry Finn plays a prank, he always looks cruel, selfish, and childish, even more than Jim looks stupid. It can even be argued that Mark Twain is portraying Huckleberry in a way that is degrading for young white Southern boys of a poorer background, and that Twain is portraying them as rude, trouble-making pranksters who use poor grammar, but no one ever does accuse the author of this crime, because Jim is black and Huckleberry is white. There is only a problem in this novel because we make it a problem.
Another thing that should be looked at is the idea that racism is not truly about race, a very simplistic idea, but that the problem lies not within skin color, but within capitalism, elitism, and its control of the media. The wealthy would only desire to mingle with those of the same social standing, and at the time of the novel, the wealthy also happened to be white. Robert Chrisman argues in his article “Blacks, Racism, and Bourgeois Culture” that the capitalist system is the real monster in racism and prejudice. He references a “modern petit bourgeois” and “their profitable manipulation of the capitalist system that was developing” (814 Chrisma), describing the way that the media is influenced by the bourgeois. It is a fair statement to make that elitism, capitalism, and its control of the media, are what truly drive racism. The media has often portrayed blacks in a negative manner and the elite class, therefore the whites, have always had more control over the media, literature especially, and “the working classes and the petite bourgeoisie beg[an] themselves to be writers and editors and publishers, and their literature became the voice of this striving, capitalistic oriented class” (Chrisman 814). With the media in the firm hands of white elitists, racism flourished all over the country. A very distinct problem was that at the time, blacks were uneducated, so they could not hold good paying jobs in order to gain a higher social status, and that stereotype seemed to stick when it came to the media, because “myths maintained that blacks simply lacked the basic intelligence [...] in the white man’s world” (Chrisman 819), and so from that, stemmed “the heroic Western gunfighter, who subdues dissident Mexicans and Indians, frequently with the assistance of a colored companion” (Chrisman 818). The white elite starting a stereotype about blacks, especially ones about education and intelligence, catches on in the media, because “literacy has always held supreme strategic value, one need only browse through the autobiographies of Frederick Douglas, Richard Wright, and Malcolm X, who each spend chapters upon their development of reading and writing skills, to see how much political and imaginative power this skill unleashed [...] and which they harnessed [...] And how bitterly white culture still opposes [their] literacy” (Chrisman 822). After making a reference in his article to how much the white culture tries to stop the blacks from gaining an education, especially he states “how bitterly the white culture still opposes [their] literacy” (Chrisman 822), Chrisman urges his readers to educate themselves, learning to read and write, referencing to how it is the path out of the ghetto, so to speak.
Perhaps teachers discussing this novel with their students should find ways to discuss how racism influences current culture and society, finding ways to tie it back into the novel, too. In conclusion, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn should be read in classroom settings in America, because the novel is a fight against racism, the real problem with reading Huckleberry Finn lies within the reader, and racism is not created through race as much as it is fostered through capitalism and elitism.
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Nina S is a student, freelance journalist, museum worker, and blogger. She lives in the D.C. area. You can find more of her work, concentrating on lifestyle, society, and culture, at http://pagefortheculturefreak.blogspot.com/