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How Is Mark Twain Racist

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When taking a look at Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, racism is a large theme that seems to be reoccurring. What some may think to be racism in Twain's words, can also be explained as, good story telling appropriate to the era the story takes place in. Twain himself has been suggested as a racist based on the fact that he uses the word "nigger" in his book. However, Twain was an avid abolitionist. For those who claim that Twain was a racist must have only been looking out for themselves and not those who are willing to learn about the past whether it be ugly or perfect. Racism was and forever will be a dark part of the American past, and no one can change that, no matter how many books one may alter.
In this book a number of dialects …show more content…

The main focus is to replace the 219 times the word "nigger" is used with "slave." One would doubt that Twain would input the N-word into his book without having a good reason to do so. At the time of writing this book, the Civil War was over and the general thought was that slavery and racism was over. The thought then leads to the fact that Twain wanted to make a point of letting readers know that, just because you have abolished slavery does not mean that the racism and bigotry has gone with it. The repel of slavery made no difference to the racism card, and he wanted his Northern readers to know it. When the argument of replacing the word "nigger" with "slave" one sees the issue with that. The issue being that "nigger" in that time meant African-American, not necessarily a slave. So looking at a high school or college student in the future reading Huckleberry Finn for the first time and reading is with the word "slave" the story loses its effect on the reader. It does not give a sense of the time, it would only give a vibe that something is not right in the story. When reading this story for the first time, one must have an open mind and not pay attention to little things like racism in this book. The main plot is not, lets raft down a river and see how racist we can be. As one reads the story flows, and part of that flow is to allow discrepancy in racial slurs. It is okay to have the

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