Bumping this back to the top. 

Note to all:  My daughter is sincerely gratified and slightly overwhelmed at all the positive sentiments expressed here.  This blog and her poem has found its way into numerous forums and blogs, and she wishes to say thank you to everyone.

My daughter had an unsettling experience today.  Her class is preparing to read Huck Finn, the Mark Twain classic. 

As is common these days, the subject of its racially offensive elements came up, in her case in the form of a PBS Documentary involving efforts in other places to remove the book as racist. 

It may have been one of these:

http://www.twainweb.net/reviews/hfcoursepack.html
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/cultureshock/teachers/huck/section1_1.html

(it was the second one)

They need not have looked so far, Renton Schools dealt with this in 2003.

Well my daughter is a very open minded, and sensible girl.  In the discussion she stated that she felt the protests went too far, and that the book should be read because it contains our history and the reality of what slavery was, and that "we should look in the eye and face it".  That only by facing it can we make sure we don’t repeat it.  I agree.

The response from her peers was shock.  One girl of mixed race noted "Well that’s because you are white" implying the famous "it’s a black thing, you wouldn’t understand" defense.

My daughter was called a racist because she wants to look racism in the eye and denounce it.

Huck Finn is offensive, but not because of the "N" word.  It is offensive because slavery is offensive as a moral concept.  It deals with it openly using the ignorance of the day to show how ignorant and wrong it was.

The irony was that Twain was intending to satirize racism, not induldge it, as anyone who has studied the book should know.

http://www.salwen.com/mtrace.html

But what is the book really about? It’s about nothing less than freedom and the quest for freedom. It’s about a slave who breaks the law and risks his life to win his freedom and be reunited with his family, and a white boy who becomes his friend and helps him escape.