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Racism in Huckleberry Finn

Racism means "the belief that race accounts for differences in human character or ability and the belief of one specific race 's superiority This word plays a major role in history and in the novel `The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn . Many people and many facts lead you to believe Huckleberry Finn represents racism . I , on the other hand , believe Huckleberry Finn does not represent racism . Throughout history critics have criticized Mark Twain about Huckleberry Finn being a racist novel and Twain himself being a racist . Mark Twain , through

his writings in Huckleberry Finn makes it clear he does not support racism in any way For example , Mark Twain portrayed Pap Finn , a racist , as an uneducated alcoholic who beats his child . On the other hand , he portrays Jim , a slave , as a caring , loving father and a trustworthy companion to Huck In the nineteenth century , Twain 's work was significant in that it brought the ideas of African Americans , ideas shared by such as Anna Cooper , to a wide audience they could not hope to reach

Huckleberry Finn was written by Mark Twain nearly two decades after the Emancipation Proclamation and the end of the Civil War in America Though this novel was written after slavery was abolished , Mark Twain set it several decades earlier , when slavery was still a fact of life The novel is set in the South where the blacks were still slaves with no legal rights and were faced with high degrees of discrimination . Their status was lower than that of a white person , and Huck grows up debating that reality . It is a barrier at first between himself and Jim , which they eventually realize and overcome

But even by Twain 's time , things were not much better for blacks in the South and in this light we might read his novel as a depiction of slavery , an allegorical representation of the condition of blacks in the United States even after the abolition of slavery . Just as slavery placed the noble and moral Jim under the control of white society , no matter how degraded that white society may be , so too did the insidious racism that arose near the end of reconstruction oppress black men for illogical and hypocritical reasons . In Huckleberry Finn , Mark Twain , by exposing the hypocrisy of slavery , demonstrates how racism distorts the oppressors as much as it does those who are oppressed . The result is a world of moral confusion , in which seemingly `good ' white people such as Miss Watson and Sally Phelps express no concern about the injustice of slavery or the cruelty of separating Jim from his family

Huck a poor , uneducated boy and for all purposes an orphan is treated as an outcast by society . This society fails to protect him from abuse and thus he distrusts the morals and precepts of this society . Thus Huck questions many of the teachings which he has received and in his growing relationship with Jim he questions...

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