The Spotlight on Cultural Detriments Due to Society’s Benefits in Huckleberry Finn
INTRODUCTION
All around the world, cultures evolve and possess different traits. However, society likes to condemn cultures, ethnicities, and races that are different from it’s own, and place them on a lower level. Racism exists throughout the world, and is not classified merely as whites against blacks. In the recent Ferguson shooting, a white cop shot a black man, and the whole community bonded over the death of the man and called it a racial issue. For as long as humanity has walked the Earth, racism has existed. In the novel, Huckleberry Finn, racism evolves throughout the novel, just as it evolves throughout society. In the skeptical novel, Mark Twain identifies …show more content…
Cultures come into contact with each other everyday in a growing society. As Meshach Taylor says, “[Huckleberry Finn] One of the best indictments against racism in the United States.” (Koppel 151). Taylor suggests that Twain accuses the United States of cultivating racism between all races, as he does not simply say that the novel fosters racism against blacks. The United States grows every day, while more and more cultures interact with each other. The culture melting pot that the United States represents, cooks up racism and serves it to every race, not just one, and every race serves it to others. Twain identifies the issue of race by encompassing all of racism’s detriments when he dresses Jim, a black man, up as an Arab man: “it was a long curtain-calico gown, and a white horse-hair wig and whiskers; and then he took his theatre-paint and painted Jim’s face and hands and ears and neck all over a dead dull solid blue” (Twain 171). Twain uses the picture of an Arab to highlight that cultures mistreat other cultures, not just whites against blacks. Jim, a black man, insults the image of an Arabic man. Twain sends the message that racism occurs around the world and with every single culture, whether society admits to degrading each other or not. When Jim dresses as the Arab man, he allows society’s stereotypes and false perceptions to influence him and reduce him to nothing more than a racist man, exactly as the slave owners who kept him captive
INTRODUCTION
All around the world, cultures evolve and possess different traits. However, society likes to condemn cultures, ethnicities, and races that are different from it’s own, and place them on a lower level. Racism exists throughout the world, and is not classified merely as whites against blacks. In the recent Ferguson shooting, a white cop shot a black man, and the whole community bonded over the death of the man and called it a racial issue. For as long as humanity has walked the Earth, racism has existed. In the novel, Huckleberry Finn, racism evolves throughout the novel, just as it evolves throughout society. In the skeptical novel, Mark Twain identifies …show more content…
Cultures come into contact with each other everyday in a growing society. As Meshach Taylor says, “[Huckleberry Finn] One of the best indictments against racism in the United States.” (Koppel 151). Taylor suggests that Twain accuses the United States of cultivating racism between all races, as he does not simply say that the novel fosters racism against blacks. The United States grows every day, while more and more cultures interact with each other. The culture melting pot that the United States represents, cooks up racism and serves it to every race, not just one, and every race serves it to others. Twain identifies the issue of race by encompassing all of racism’s detriments when he dresses Jim, a black man, up as an Arab man: “it was a long curtain-calico gown, and a white horse-hair wig and whiskers; and then he took his theatre-paint and painted Jim’s face and hands and ears and neck all over a dead dull solid blue” (Twain 171). Twain uses the picture of an Arab to highlight that cultures mistreat other cultures, not just whites against blacks. Jim, a black man, insults the image of an Arabic man. Twain sends the message that racism occurs around the world and with every single culture, whether society admits to degrading each other or not. When Jim dresses as the Arab man, he allows society’s stereotypes and false perceptions to influence him and reduce him to nothing more than a racist man, exactly as the slave owners who kept him captive