Huckleberry Finn Social Commentary

Alik Shahadah once explained that “the legacy of slavery has promoted and nursed the direct association between being African and being inferior, being African and being unequal, incapable and less worthy. It also promotes ways of thinking which continue to impede growth and development”(www.africanholocaust.net). Even though there were changes on paper, and new laws made people “equal,” the racism that separated the white man from the black persisted. The changes that were the most important were the ones that remained unchanged. Almost twenty years after, every black man, woman, and child had been legally freed, but not exactly in practice, from the atrocity of slavery. Twain shows that many of those stereotypes that the whites believed about slaves had not been broken. In Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain utilizes Jim to make social commentary on the oppression of colored people in the nation. Mark Twain comments on the racism in the country by exposing the language used by Jim differently, the racist words used towards Jim, and challenging America’s societal norms by making Huck and Jim friends.
Particularly how educated and intelligent a person is. Social rank can usually be determined by how educated one is, with the people on top typically being the most intelligent. Education was inaccessible for slaves, making them seem mindless and dull-witted, because of their improper grammar. Twain noticeably makes Jim’s language different from the speech of the white characters to comment on society’s beliefs about slaves. There are many different stereotypical styles of speech used by characters in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, but one difference that is noticed with frequency is that of “the Missouri negro” (Twain) which reflects the speech patterns of Jim and the other slaves in the book, compared to Huck and the other white characters. Carkeet supports this by explaining Jim’s speech