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Huckleberry Finn Should Be Banned Essay

Decent Essays

“A country that denies its own history is destined to fall.” Toshio Tamogami This excerpt extracted from an essay written by Toshio Tamogami, a former head of Japanese air force, expresses the importance of embracing the corrupt phenomenons of the past. While these occurrences tend to be unsettling to most, does not mean that they shall be neglected and ignored. Even in this day and age, Japanese textbooks continue to utilize euphemism in portraying their own country’s obscenity in war. Allowing for these textbooks to be censored leaves the possibility for these past occurrences to reoccur because the younger population will never learn the true horror of these atrocities. The censorship of these textbooks in Japan closely relates to the banning of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain in specific schools across the United States of America. The quote from Toshio Tamogami perfectly encapsulates why it is important for works like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which although unsettling to some, should be celebrated and remembered. There are arguments made by some over the use of the word “nigger,” the negative portrayal of African Americans, and …show more content…

He had the whitest shirt on you ever see, too, and the shiniest hat… They said he was a p'fessor in a college, and could talk all kinds of languages, and knowed everything. And that ain't the wust. They said he could VOTE (Twain 27).
Twain is ridiculing the white’s ignorance by portraying Pap’s outrage that a black man possessed so much freedom. Pap believes that he is intrinsically better than black people just for being white. Twain is trying to portray how absurd the beliefs of the white people were and point out how they were entitled to nothing. Mark Twain basically put up a racist disguise in writing this book in order to exploit white people from the inside out, not the

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