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The Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn By Mark Twain

Decent Essays

People possess an inherent urge to surround themselves with those most like them. As a result, the desire creates separation into different social groups or classes which, in some cases, only serve to cause a deeper divide among the individuals in the community. People today experience the divide between social classes on a daily basis. To counteract the separation, people have formed many groups to fight social inequality: the Black Lives Matter movement, feminism, the flourishing LGBTQ community. However, people still face implicit bias from others on a day-to-day basis. Furthermore, in Mark Twain’s, nineteenth century novel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Twain reveals how social classes affect racism which, thereby, creates social divergence that continues to build implicit bias.
Scholars define implicit bias as a judgement that happens in the subconscious mind of an individual; an unintended, automatic racist attitude. Implicit bias reflects “traces of past experience” as Mahzarin Banaji and Anthony Greenwald explain “that mediate favorable or unfavorable feeling, thought, or action toward social objects” (Banaji & Greenwald 8). The desire to see themselves as better than others leads people to assume the worst of others to make themselves seem better in comparison. Consequently, the process drives and encourages implicit bias. Justin Levinson, a Harvard professor of law, states that “implicit biases affect the way judges and jurors encode, store, and recall

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