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Edited on Tue Mar-29-11 01:40 PM by Boojatta
Anybody who has read and understood the book will recognize that it is a superbly written attack on traditional anti-black racism. The most obvious source of opposition to the book would be racists who hate African-Americans. Now, isn't it possible that some racists are clever enough to find a pretext for claiming that Huckleberry Finn is itself racist rather than anti-racist? Specifically, they can get people to focus attention on the book (but not too much attention), and they can claim that, because the dialog in it includes vocabulary realistic for the time and place where it was written, it is hostile to African Americans.
Two approaches are possible:
1. A racist can pretend to be an unsophisticated anti-racist, and pretend to be offended by Huckleberry Finn.
2. By selectively quoting short passages of the novel in the media, racists can provoke anti-racist members of the general public (who haven't read the book) to voice actual outrage. Such members of the general public cast themselves in a role that Lenin might have called "useful idiot."
Note: when I used the word "recently" in the title of this thread, I didn't intend to refer to events that occurred in 1885 or 1902.
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