Huckleberry Finn: School Worthy

Nigger. Does the word offend you? Normally the answer to that may be yes and perhaps rightfully so with the general disrespect it carries today. Now say you watched a civil war film. Would it offend you if a southern character in that movie said it? The likely answer is no: it’s in character, in context, and readily expected before it happens. Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn uses this word hundreds of times, and that single word has raised more opponents and uproars than most, if not all, other books on our country’s High-School level reading list. The book was published in 1884, but takes place before the civil war, which started in 1861. Since it was placed on the reading list the book has made an uproar, mostly over claims that it is a racist book to the core. The critics of the book, that is the ones causing such uproar over the novel, seem to have either only read to the third chapter or only understood up to the third chapter. The book is as racist and pro-slavery as Abraham Lincoln was, should be found about as offensive if given the proper understanding, and has earned itself a well-deserved place in our schools. The time in which this book takes place is of paramount importance to the arguments for and against it, but seems mostly ignored in that perspective. The book, as previously said, takes place shortly prior to the Civil War and in the southern states of our country at the time. This, if nothing else, should be an early warning to all who read it to expect a certain content of racism, as if the book did not have these elements it would come off as a false and indeed watered-down story. The book was not made to be a nice happy sugar-coated presentation of a young boy’s adventure down the Mississippi River. Twain wrote the book as a sociological satire of every day life in the United