Essays /
Starting Huckleberry Finn! [12]
The problem of race in America is so enduring because of the legacy of slavery. Blacks start out primarily as slaves, especially in the South. They are freed after the Civil War. However, they are not freed on principle. On the contrary, the man who frees them, Abraham Lincoln, is convinced that blacks are inferior to whites, and probably shouldn't be allowed to govern themselves. He frees them mainly to punish the Southern states for their attempt at secession, hoping to break their economic system so badly they will never again be able to try to break away from the Union. This leaves the blacks technically free, but with no land, education, or capital of any sort. They are despised in the South, and widely held in contempt in the North. Racist laws are passed that ensure blacks, especially in South, will not be able to work their way out of their second class status no matter how hard they try. Though the North is much better in this regard, racist attitudes there operate to have much the same effect as the South's Jim Crow laws. This lasts for a hundred years, almost exactly, before Martin Luther King Jr's civil rights campaign succeeds in putting an end to legalized racism. However, the black population continues to suffer from endemic levels of poverty and low education. Poverty, of course, breeds crime. Blacks living in inner city ghettos therefore tend to be overrepresented in the criminal system. Whites living in nearby areas begin to associate blacks with violence and crime. So too do many blacks. This problem is made worse by the fact that a black counter-culture arises that explicitly rejects middle class values. These are the values that allow people to succeed economically and socially. So, the white middle class is unaffected, but the poor black communities become mired in a never-ending cycle of poverty. There are exceptions to the rule, though. Some blacks do become successful, and these begin to form a black middle-class whose members are often view as not being really black by inner city blacks, who have defined their identity in the most negative possible terms.
This brings us pretty much up to where America stands now. Blacks can and do vote in American elections. Obama is black, and comes from a low-income background. But he is in fact only half-black, and not descended in any way from African slaves. His values are those of a Harvard-educated liberal, and as such are not particularly "black." While the black community naturally supports and welcomes the election of a black president, it does not by-and-large view his election as solving any of its problems or addressing any of its grievances. A great many blacks in America still believe that racism holds them back, and that they are still suffering from the legacy of slavery. This is entirely reasonable.
The white population, in the mean time, does not by and large think of themselves in racial terms, because they don't have to. The vast majority of whites in America do not actively engage in racism, and would claim, quite honestly, that race does not consciously factor into their decisions about who to hire, who to be friends with, etc. They often resent being made to feel guilty for something previous generations did, and cannot understand why the black community continues to present itself as a victim in an Obama era. They believe in the concept of merit, regardless of race, and ask themselves, entirely reasonably, why blacks can't just accept that America has become what they wanted it to be, which, from a white perspective, it more or less has.
So, racial issues are alive and well in America today, and Huck Finn is a great book that explores the roots of those issues. You might ask yourself if any of the ways in which the characters overcome their racial differences might be useful methods of tackling today's racial issues.