The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. It is NOT a racial book.

Miss, Closser
English II
CJ Obermaier
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: Racist or Realistic?
For decades, Mark Twain’s novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has been the subject of many debates. After careful consideration, I believe that Mark Twain’s novel is a realist work that represents its pre-Civil War setting. By examining how Twain portrays the friendship between Huck and Jim as well as how blacks are represented and how the races interact, we can see that this novel is a brilliant work of literature.
The friendship between Huck and Jim reveals a great deal about the nature of this novel. Twain shows how Huck, a white person who befriends a black, and breaks the common law of the time for Jim. Huck starts to treat Jim more like a human than a human object. At the point of the novel were Huck was writing the letter to the widow he relies that he truly thinks of Jim as a friend and as a human being, not an object.
Twain portrays blacks in this novel by the way he feels the most common term for blacks back then. His use of the word ****** is used a lot in the book. Twain doesn’t use this word ****** to put black down in real life today, but to represent what white folk would call black back in pre-Civil War times. (They still did after, but some stopped because of the black freedom) I don’t think he tries to show how cruel people were to blacks, but some things really did happen back in the time of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. To educate people of these events he puts dialogs of these things in his work. When the steamboat exploded and Huck said, “nobody was killed, but a ****** did die.” He show’s that people truly did think of black people as object, and not as a human being.
In pre-Civil Wartime, blacks were treated like dogs. These two races didn’t interact in harmony…. well… for the most part. Huck and Jim, two people of different races, prove that people of different ethnic backgrounds can interact, cope with one another, and become friends. That is one of the biggest parts, I think, of why Twain wrote The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. He wants to show that even the most different people can live in harmony amongst themselves.
So, in conclusion of my paper I think without a doubt that Twain did not write this book to man black feel bad, but to educate people about how the pre-Civil War culture of America was. He writes how black and whites could live together, and that black felt just as much pain as white people. They had families they cared for, they had dreams, but the white man was taking that away. Basically Jim got to like the black mans American dream of being free, having money, but most of all he was able to buy his family.

Having not read the book, or even heard anyone say it was a racial book, I don't know what to say. XD
I think it's important though, when reading books like this, to remember that back in the time in which the book was written, people in western culture generally had a very different opinion on blacks.

Like Anubis, I haven't read the book either, or heard anyone talk about it. My Friends aren't the most intellectual people. But what you write is persuasive, in that, were I ever to read the book, I probably would be more inclined to think of it as non-racial, as I read this first.

It's good.