Huckleberry Finn and Why Post-Racialists Get The Race Thing Wrong Again
Huckleberry Finn and Jim, Legos
“They’re doing that thing again,” racially underrepresented people in this country must have whispered to themselves (and tweeted). When news broke out that the more than 200 instances of the word “nigger” would be substituted by the word “slave” in Huckleberry Finn, most of us said, “Of the 100 things on our list that need improvement in this country for racial relations, you chose THAT?!”
Erasing the n-word from one of the literary canon’s biggest children’s books is akin to erasing the “3/5ths” in the US Constitution as it pertains to slaves. Books, whether biographical or fictional in nature, serve as documentation of a history. Because Mark Twain decided to use that language in the book, he too shone a light to the customs and history of the time, no matter how deplorable we consider it. Once we try and erase a
