That's exactly right Einstein. 1st valid point you've made all night. A little advise if you are ignorant on a topic shut up. And if your digging yourself into a ditch stop digging.
LOL!
Your post get first prize!
You actually believe that children should read racial slurs in order to teach them not to make racial slurs.
Are you trying to make me laugh on purpose or what?
You wrote, "Your post get first prize!"
All your base are belong to us.
(snicker, chortle)
Yes. But only in the right context. Huck Finn is such a context. Gangsta Rap isn't.
Shoot, everybody else has tried to get through, I may as well try.
The use of this word then by Clemens was indeed meant to frame the characters and there was no better way to make the point that what you see is not always what you get; our current problem with slurs is that we pretend they don't exist and by not using them the feelings and nuances of their use will simply disappear.
So yes, one must read Huckleberry Finn to fully understand that it wasn't a simple laziness of speech that led to the popular use for that word in those darker times (Darker, will that get me in trouble?), but an intentional wake-up call that society was becoming too redivided in that postwar era fought bravely and hard to reunify a country so recently torn apart.
We don't judge books by their covers and we can't just tear off the flyleaf and lay them facedown, either.