Teacher wants to expel Huck Finn

latimes.com ^ | January 19, 2009 | Kim Murphy

[tired1]

Does anyone even realize that there were Blacks that owned slaves?

[AuntB]

LOL...yes, I thought that the moment I sent it. Have you read Twain’s “on the damned human race”? He states: “People don’t think, they think they think”.

[Free ThinkerNY]

LOL! You do the right thing. Keep up the good work!

[shoutingandpointing]

+1 to that.

There are two groups of such lunatics. One is an arm of the red menace, relentlessly worky to discredit, defame, and ultimately destroy all vesitiges of our culture. I think this guy is one of those. The other group , true bona fide gnumbskulls who are often unwittingly (talk about a double entendre) used to great effect by the former group, never grasp that the work is a brilliant satire of the highest order. Twain's treatment of Jim—arguably, the ONLY truly noble and and consistently just character in the entire work—is an INDICTMENT of slavery and the prevailing attitudes toward race in American at that time.

Kipling has fared even worse over the years and for the same reasons.

Give it time and Graves, Owen, Sassoon, et al., will be gone for their "glorification of the horrors of war" [sic]. In due course, I suspect Shakespeare and Homer will meet the same fate, too. Fables, parables, analogies and the like have no instructive value in the minds of such folks, because intrinsic morality and civility have no worth in their ideal of a mono-everything-matic “flat-line” society.

Meanwhile, The Color Purple, My Three Gay Dads, and all things Judy Blume are shoved into my third-grader’s mind daily.

While they're busy banning Huck, let us make sure we remind them to go after Twain's writings on jingoistic America and the subjugation via colonialism/"Empire Building" of its Spanish-American War “prizes,” too. (/rant)

[ApplegateRanch]

Did they ever read Uncle Tom’s Cabin? Why or why not is the same language/stereotypes okay in the one, but not the other?

If they have no concept of ‘where they came from’, then how are they supposed to know how to get to where they want to go?

In point of fact, Twain’s books are a very good snapshot of the prevailing attitudes and language of the times and places prtrayed.

I would be more interested in hearing those same African American mothers explaining why it is okay for their kids and thair kids’ favorite rappers to use the same terminolgy at each other.

[Savage Beast]

Gee--in my opinion, Huckleberry Finn is anti-racist as well as anti-slavery. What I find objectionable is Samuel Clement's horrible "negro dialect" and the sloppy and uninspired second half of the book. Huck is truly an epic hero in the persona of a neglected and abused waif, and the book reaches epic magnitude and beauty, e.g. "the sky looks ever so deep when you lay on you back in the moonshine", "She was deef. The po' little thing was deef.", and, especially: "Okay. So I'll go to hell," as epic hero Huck readily walks into the gates of hell rather than betray Jim--and himself. (I'm quoting from memory, as most people well readly know.) But some of the book is downright corny.

[Paleo Conservative]

For years, English teachers have been explaining away the obvious racism in Mark Twain's "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn." And for years, the book that perhaps best explains Americans' genetic predilection for hitting the road, only to later find themselves, has stayed near the top of many high school reading lists.

Twain accurately portrayed the racism of his charcters in order to mock them.

[Iron Munro]

[Clock King]

Have you ever listened to what some of them put into their children’s ears?

BOOM! Good one, MissEdie!

[conejo99]

Generally I agree with these points, however the part of the novel where Jim allows Huck and Tom to carry out ridiculous antics while breaking out from the farm lock up are a bit demeaning. Clemens ridicules almost everyone by exaggerating their characteristics, but his exaggeration of Jim has Jim endangering his escape for reasons that no adult would permit. I can see how someone could take offense at this, but considering the intent of the novel and the insight into this period of history, it is a shame to drop the book.

[VermiciousKnid]

Thank you for this accurate description of the character development in “Huckleberry Finn.”

Could you perhaps e-mail it to Mr. Foley? He seems to have graduated with some sort of advanced degree in...uh...something, but has failed to learn the lesson any 8th grader of my day would have learned in second period English class.

Regards,

[wideminded]

Reporting from Ridgefield, Wash. -- John Foley figures he has pretty much maxed out on explaining to African American mothers why it's OK to call a black man the N-word

I have very good information that this doesn't come up very often at his school. Maybe that actually makes it a more sensitive issue.

Some years ago I read Huckleberry Finn to one of my kids and I became aware of another problem with this book. In a number of parts it reads as though Twain was rushing to finish a chapter, as if he just wanted to get a certain amount of writing done so he could go do something else.