Peer Review Essay 5

After reading Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: A Case Study in Critical Controversy, for me, the book is just another piece about the slavery in American history. Until I read Peaches Henry’s article, “The Struggle for Tolerance: Race and Censorship in Huckleberry Finn”, I realize that this book carries more purposes than just a story. It has been the center of the controversies about race. In her essay, Peach Henry argues that the book, despite its intensive use of the N-word, still shouldn’t be banned from the school system at all. I definitely disagree with Peach Henry’s argument. For me, the N-word is just so intense even just to whisper it. I strongly feel that this book should be banned from the school system due to the using of the N-word because this racist word really affects young students in many negative ways.

The use of the N-word in the book has given most readers the obvious shocking and offensive feelings, especially if the reader is a person of color race and young. People criticize this book because it uses a word that serves no good purpose except to “insult” and “humiliate” “black children” in school. Henry writes,
Critics vilify Twain most often and most vehemently for his aggressive use of the pejorative term ‘nigger.’ Detractors, refusing to accept the good intentions of a text that places the insulting epithet so often in the mouths of characters, black and white, ague that no amount of intended irony or satire can erase the humiliation experienced by black children. Reading Huck Finn aloud adds deliberate insult to insensitive injury, complain some. (386)
Henry proves that the N-word really makes people turn against each other, especially between races. Even one might argues that Mark Twain uses the N-word to give readers a picture of how African American people were treated, especially those southern people who lived along the Mississippi River at the time being. Well, there are many ways to describe people’s lives without dehumanizing them such as using the N-word against them. It would be questionable if this N-word wouldn’t cause a stir in a classroom where there is a diversity of races. People send children to school to learn knowledge, not to learn a racist word against one’s race. Even though the book is a piece of America historical literatures, people still get upset whenever they hear the N-word. This word reminds people of their ancestors’ lives, especially African American people who were treated unfairly and inhumane at that time. The N-word is a serious racist word which should be avoided totally. That is one of the reasons I believe that the book should be banned from the school system.

A racist word has brought up the controversy about human race. The N-word stands for the blacken memories of a specific time line in American history, which people are trying to avoid by all means. Henry asserts,
To dismiss the word’s recurrence in the work as an accurate rendition of nineteenth-century American linguistic conventions denies what every black person knows: Far more than a synonym for slave, ‘nigger’ signifies a concept. It conjures centuries of specifically black degradation and humiliation during which the family was disintegrated, education was denied, manhood was trapped within a forced perpetual puerilism, and womanhood was destroyed by concubinage. If one grants that Twain substituted ‘nigger’ for ‘slave,’ the implications of the word do not improve; ‘nigger’ denotes the black man as a commodity, as chattel. (389)
Even many decades have passed; people still haven’t forgotten their origins. This book has done more harmful stuffs than as its intentions have because of its use of the N-word. Young students are not fully mature enough. They know the history but they might not understand it. They learn things from school. And if we use this book in school, they would learn the words in the book as well. The obvious language used in the book would be practiced as a normal concept. How would people react to the situation when a black kid goes home and calls his father “n*****”? Have the scholars who defend for the use of the book in the school system ever thought about this event yet? The word was used not only against a particular person but the whole human race. Education doesn’t mean to separate people based on their color. Education should bring people close to each other. Therefore the school shouldn’t use this book in its curricular system to maintain its main purpose of only focusing on knowledge.