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Friday, January 17, 2014

So Academic White People have Figured out the Problem: White People. Maybe they'll kill themselves and stop writing papers.

Margaret Wright specifically.
How could anyone argue that Huck Finn is the Great American Novel? That racist propaganda? Repeatedly banned ever since it was written for all manner of “inappropriate” actions, attitudes, and name-calling? Yet it is precisely the novel’s tale of racism and its history of censorship that make it a Great American Novel contender. A land defined and challenged by racism, America struggles with how to understand and move beyond its history. Censor it? Deny it? Rewrite it? Ignore it? Twain confronts American history head-on and tells us this: White people are the problem. 
Hemingway was right when he said, “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.” Hemingway was wrong when he continued, “If you read it you must stop where the Nigger Jim is stolen from the boys. That is the real end. The rest is just cheating.” For if we stop where Hemingway instructs, we may read the actual wish of many whites – that someone else would take their “black problem” or their “Indian problem” or their “immigrant problem” away – but we miss Twain’s most important critique: White men like Tom Sawyer will forever manipulate the Huck Finns of the world.
I don't think that's what Twain was saying. Maybe that racism is the problem makes more sense. But Margaret trades in one form of racism for another. People are the problem for the color of their skin. Also, I'm not certain but it reads as if she thinks Huck is black.  Whatever, the point is that being white is not a problem. Acting like a self-important douchebag is.
If the Great American Novel both perceptively reflects its time and challenges Americans to do better, Huck Finn deserves the title. Rendering trenchant critiques on every manifestation of whiteness, Twain reminds us that solving racism requires whites to change.
Oh ok. Let me let you in on something Maggie, blacks had no real power to enact change in this country. Protest and march, sure. But little real political power. It was whites who did change their attitudes. Few are racist today and I would dare say in 2014, there are more anti-whites than anti-blacks. The civil-rights laws and anti-slavery laws were passed by whites. White fundamentally changed the country, whites came to the realization that we were wrong for so long and made real change to become far more color blind than ever before.

Except for leftists like you who only see skin color.

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