Huck Finn Book Trial

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Huck Finn Book Trial Opponents of the book are correct to say that, the word “nigger” is used 219 times in the book. However, how do the opponents reconcile this? In The case of MONTEIRO v. THE TEMPE UNION HIGH SCHOOL DISTRICT (1998)- “Words can hurt, particularly racist epithets,” Stephen Reinhardt wrote, “but a necessary component of any education is learning to think critically about offensive ideas. Without this ability, one can do little to respond to them.” Part of learning to think critically about offensive speech is to understand the context in which it is used. In a 3-0 ruling, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals refused to reinstate a black woman’s lawsuit seeking to remove the Mark Twain classic and a William Faulkner story…show more content…
• His book emphasized that males paired in these wilderness adventures tend to be of different races, and that their relationships include issues of masculinity and touch on intimacy, sensuality, and suppressed sexuality between men. In the case of Board of Education v. Pico (1982) the United States Supreme Court held that the First Amendment limits the power of local school boards to remove library books from junior high schools and high schools. Justice Blackmun, concurring, concluded that a proper balance between the limited constitutional restriction imposed on school officials by the First Amendment and the broad state authority to regulate education, would be struck by holding that school officials may not remove books from school libraries for the purpose of restricting access to the political ideas or social perspectives discussed in the books, when that action is motivated simply by the officials’ disapproval of the ideas…show more content…
Du Bois were right that the problem of the twentieth century is racism, one would never know it from the average secondary-school syllabus, which often avoids issues of race almost completely. However, Huck Finn can slip into the American literature classroom as a "classic," only to engulf students in heated debates about prejudice and racism, conformity, autonomy, authority, slavery and freedom. It is a book that puts on the table the very questions the culture so often tries to bury, a book that opens out into the complex history that shaped it; the history of the ante-bellum era in which the story is set, and the history of the post-war period in which the book was written. It also requires us to address that history. Much of that history is painful. Indeed, it is to avoid confronting the pain of that history that black parents sometimes mobilize to ban the novel. Pushing history aside, however, is no solution to the larger challenge of dealing with its legacy. Neither is placing the task of dealing with it on one book. Therefore, to say “ignorance is bliss” would be a seditious act against the educational system in

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