The odious trend of school districts and colleges removing the novel Huckleberry Finn from their library shelves has encountered a perhaps inevitable wrinkle. Students at one high school want the book removed from circulation because they are not "comfortable" with the frank language and the depiction of the lives of black slaves in the antebellum south.
Setting aside the ludicrous notion that an education should be guaranteed to hurt no one's feelings, ever, it has not been at all clear to me why Huckleberry Finn has taken such flak since it is one of the most powerful anti-slavery novels ever written. It may have been eclipsed by Uncle Tom's Cabin in terms of its power to affect society, published as it was long after the Civil War ended, but Clemens' masterpiece is a stunningly adept and exquisitely written piece of literature that holds a special place of pride in American letters. Its literary worth and anti-slavery credentials are beyond reproach.
So what is going on here? In the past few years there have been a goodly number of books and moving pictures that lay out the manifold cruelties of slavery in extreme and horrific detail. With varying success they are meant to grab you by the throat and pound the evils of slavery into your punkin' haid until you are drunk and disoriented by what an overwhelming mega-crime slavery in the U.S. was.
Huckleberry Finn on the other hand strives to illustrate the details of ordinary day-to-day life in the antebellum south. It powerfully illustrates, not the gut wrenching horror of slavery, but the complete ordinariness and casual acceptance of it by people in the slave states. In Huck's and Jim's world slavery was as ordinary as rain and sunshine, and was considered by the non-black population as utterly normal and uncontroversial. It was this insidiousness, this casual banality of evil, that was one of the things Clemens so adeptly demonstrated. His genius was to make Huck think past this banality and come to appreciate how dehumanizing it was to someone who had become a friend.
The only reason I can think of why the book has been removed from shelves is that it is just not horrible enough. It depicts no vicious beatings, no rape, no wanton killing, and no vile sneering overseers hovering over slaves with whip in hand, nothing to get one's blood up to a rolling boil. Nothing but simple everyday endemic lack of justice and concern for fellow human beings. This ordinariness, this unremarkability, was the real poison of the antebellum south, and it goes a long way toward explaining the powerful inertia of southern society in regard to any change in the status quo.
People who criticize Huckleberry Finn as racist are not only incredibly wrong they are entirely missing the point of the novel. They should be pitied.
