Racisim In Literature Essay
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Racism in American Literature
Many readers assume that novels such as The Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn, To Kill a Mockingbird, Light in August, and also Of Mice and Men have a strong racially discriminating nature. These are great novels in American Literature but they strike great controversy even years after their publication. In fact, they pose more of an argument in this era than in the racially discriminative era the authors lived in. Samuel Clemens, also known as Mark Twain, is considered one of the greatest writers of not only America but of all time, yet his books contain racial slurs and stereotypes. In the John Steinbecks novel, Of Mice and Men, the white ranch hands discriminate against the black ranch hand Crooks continually throughout the book. Harper Lee wrote the book To Kill a Mockingbird about what happens to a southern town when a black man stands trial for a crime he did not perpetrate. Also, in William Faulkner's Light In August, the Negro character Joe Christmas is constantly insulted and oppressed. In addition, many people in the time period that these great books were written in were convinced that black people were not as good as white people and were not derogatory toward them to be racist or hateful, that was just the way things were in that time period.
The Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn, is an excellent example of racism in literature, because it uses degrading language describing African Americans which goes beyond satire. It treats them as objects, and sustains a stereotype of ignorance that still pervades our society more than one hundred years after it's writing. Every character in this book is racist even Huck himself. With such lines as "No, ma'am, just a nigger," he illustrates this. Mark Twain uses these racial terms because as he said in his autobiography that in his school boy days he was not aware that anything was wrong with slavery or being racist and that the local church pulpit taught him that God approved it.
Huck uses this word "nigger" because he is a child of his time. Nigger would be the only term for an African American that a child such as Huck would know in his place and time... From Twain's use of the word "nigger" in The Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn, it implies that it was an acceptable term without derogatory implications. Although widely used then, it is today pejorative, and it's purpose was to demean the black person. Following the American Civil War, the term came into increasingly frequent use, as one way to constrain free slaves (Karolides 66).
Also, the character of Jim is a memorable masterpiece by Twain, but he is portrayed as ignorant and superstitious like an uncivilized native. He is portrayed this way in the excerpt with his ox hairball that could tell the future and his common allusions toward good and bad luck.
Joe Christmas does not know whether he is black or white, William Faulkner writes of Joe's tragedy in a powerful accusation of racism in his story Light in August. The central fact in this story is the suffering servant Joe's belief that he bears an elusive strain of Negro blood, which is an ineradicable touch of evil in the eyes of the society he is a part of. Hightower conveys that this Negro blood makes Joe "poor mankind" (Holman 154). For him the worst thing he can be is black, the thought of being just part black drives him insane. He sees the blood as a condition in which lies predetermined darkness and sin. This, expresses the way...
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