Huck Finn essay yay or nay? huck finn and racism?

“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” Martin Luther King’s most influential address delivered in 1963 promoted peace and equality. It was the dream that was thought to have united black and whites communities. The dream that made America aware of a serious problem that is still very well alive today and practiced in illiberal discriminations.


Race, racism, discrimination – are exemplary words that connect the division of the world: blacks and whites. This essay will delineate these racial issues and argue that the “belief”, of one race, particularly whites, are naturally superior amongst other races, particularly blacks, is not a false belief. This of course does not mean that racism does not exist. Racism is not just a doctrine; it’s a part of our nature. On that account, racism is a structure of power that is widely recognized. The white American race over the black African-American race I argue, have the same civil rights but are distributed unequally. This essay will provide examples of racism from geographic isolation, education, employment, hurricane Katrina, and literature.


Historically, blacks have faced discrimination through limitless physical cruelty and abuse. Blacks have faced discrimination in varied forms to a much greater extent then other ethnic groups. Much of the discrimination African Americans have experienced is a direct result of slavery. Today blacks are considered a minority due to a long running racial tension dominated by the white race in the United States. As a concept, the white race has become significant in relation to other groups. Thus, white supremacy evolved and is often associated with anti-black racism contains varying degrees of racism which differentiates blacks in a significant isolationism. These factors include geographic isolation, employment and education in which deprives a black American and other minorities of opportunities opposed to a white American. Blacks and other minorities populate many of the nations economically poor urban centers predominantly.


The education African Americans lags behind those of U.S. ethic groups are reflected by test scores, grades, urban high school graduation rates, rates of disciplinary action, and rates of conferral of undergraduate degrees. Blacks lag behind whites in 2000 by nearly a factor of two. Black and Hispanic high school students enrolled in Advanced Placement (AP) courses at approximately half the rate of white students. U.S. Cenus surveys showed that by 1999, eighty-nine percent of African Americans had completed high school, lagging only slightly behind ninety-four percent of whites. The ratio of white Americans to completed four years of college in 1998 was twenty-nine percent, while African Americans at about half the rate of whites at just fourteen percent. Inner city public schools and other centers of poverty have failed to produce literate learners. This achievement gap proves the issue of low-income/minority education in the United States. Thus, Blacks and Hispanic students from poor families perform worse in school then their well of white and Asian peers.


Blacks in the United States face a far dire situation that is portrayed by common employment. According to 1999 U.S. Department of Labor statistics blacks are almost twice as likely as whites to be unemployed. In 1999, the median income of African Americans families was $33,255 compared to $53,356 of whites. Blacks suffer disproportionately from job loss and underemployment. Why? Academic failure is the outcome of unemployment. Nationwide, the September 2004 unemployment rate for blacks was 10.3 percent while whites were unemployed at the rate of 4.7 percent.


There are various factors lying behind the low-test scores and low income in African American communities. One of the factors is that the whole region is poor. Also employee discrimination from racist thinkers affects a minority. A poll commissioned by the national conference, a workplace diversity organization, found that sixty-three percent of whites thought blacks have equal opportunity to work anywhere, whereas eighty percent of African Americans felt they do not. African Americans endure many struggles and although inequalities still exist, many blacks have risen up to the middle classes fighting for equality. Not so long ago, racism was the explicit ideology. Today, on the other hand, it is eschewed by almost every prominent figure of note. Today virtually no one wants to be known as a white supremacist.


Yet, when a category five hurricane hit New Orleans in August 2005, Katrina, unleashed a devastation and criticism that split racial lines. The government response to Hurricane Katrina relief efforts to the storms aftermath were delayed and focused as race as a factor in problems with the federal response. Those remained behind were trapped in the rising waters in New Orleans were overwhelmingly black and visibly poor. A poll found that six in ten blacks interviewed said the federal government was slow in rescuing victims after Katrina because many of the people were black. But only about one in eight white respondents shared that view.


“What Katrina Teaches About the Meaning of Racism” an essay by Nils Gilman argues that white and blacks disagree about the role of race in Hurricane Katrina’s impact due to “a public disagreement in the United States about the meaning of racism itself. The Fundamental divide in the debate over racism in the United States today is between those who regard racism as essentially a question of individual psychology versus those were consider it a social structural phenomenon” Gilman believes that most whites, and the political right, define racism as an equivalent to racial prejudice. For example, prejudice against others because of their “supposed racial characteristics.” Blacks disagree with whites about whether race influenced the failure to adequately plan for and those left behind in New Orleans because blacks view the issue from the perspective of structural racism. This form of racial discrimination is perpetuated through unconscious social habits that originate from intentional conscious discrimination. Social patterns persist in this country that stem from old conscious racial discrimination and determine factors including where people live, as evidenced by the racial segregation present in New Orleans’s neighborhoods pre-Katrina. Gilman uses the example of all-white country club to illustrate the operation of this more subversive type of racism. Moreover, the scandal-plagued down to former senator of Illinois, Carol Mosley Braun, mentions in the International Herald Tribune, “Those who survive [Katrina] will have stories no less chilling then the stories passed down the generations from survivors who fled the night riders in the late 1800s”- Braun compared the government response to Katrina to anti-black lynching riots during Reconstruction. The human sufferings from Hurricane Katrina symbolized that race is an issue.


Redressing the injustices caused by our nation’s historic discrimination against people of color and for leveling what has been an unequal playing field, the blacks, have always been subjugated to slavery. Centuries long legacy of racism has not been eradicated despite the gains made during the civil rights era and federal laws there is still much hatred between whites and blacks.


Mark Twain attacked these issues of racism and slavery in the novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Twain wrote the novel after slavery was abolished and set the novel when slavery was still considered a fact of life, to illustrate that by Twain’s time things had not necessarily gotten much better for blacks. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn sent a message to many Americans and the rest of the world that slavery should not be continued in the United States. Twain used historical facts and data to make this story realistic. There are many points in the novel where Twain through his character Huck, voices his extreme opposition to slavery and racism.


The racist and hateful contempt which existed at the time and presented in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is in many ways present. But, it is vital for the reader and a person to recognize these ideas as society’s and to recognize that Twain throughout the novel disputes these ideas. Twain writes and brings out in the open the ugliness of society and causes the reader to challenge the original description of a black, enslaved being. In this subtle manner, he creates not an apology for slavery but a challenge to it. “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn”, American author Ernest Hemingway is said that the book Adventures of Huckleberry Finn offers insights into American society and into people in general. An expert from the New York Times in 1982, "The people whom Huck and Jim encounter on the Mississippi" Russell Baker said, "are drunkards, murderers, bullies, swindlers, lynchers, thieves, liars, frauds, child abusers, numskulls, hypocrites, windbags and traders in human flesh. All are white. The one man of honor in this phantasmagoria is '****** Jim,' as Twain called him to emphasize the irony of a society in which the only true gentleman was held beneath contempt."

Huck Finn essay yay or nay? huck finn and racism?
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