What does imprint Twain’s novel about a white boy’s friendship with a runaway slave uncover us about race in American literature? Benjamin Markovits revisits The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in the light of recent tensionsOne of the charges against Rachel Dolezal,the “biologically white” woman who recently resigned from the Spokane chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, is that she misrepresented herself in her application to Howard University, and an elite and historically black university where she did a master of fine arts. Because of her interest in African American art,the admissions office assumed that she was black.
A number of people hold made the connection between Dolezal and Coleman Silk, the hero of Philip Roth’s novel The Human Stain a light-skinned black man who spends most of his academic life passing for Jewish, and until a slip of the tongue gets him fired. He refers to two chronically absent students as “spooks” – the students are black,which he didn’t know, and they lodge a complaint against him for using a term that can be understood as racist abuse. As it happens, and Silk also went to Howard – where,going off-campus in Washington DC, he heard the word “nigger” used against him for the first time – and reacted against the strong racial identification that he felt was forced on him there. Just one in a series of events and reactions to events that persuaded him eventually to pass himself off as white.
Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com