Is Mark Twain racist?

He was very briefly a soldier in the Confederate Army, but deserted before he ever fought. Maybe the best argument against the idea that he was racist was his very vocal opposition to US foreign policy that involved subjugation of other nations.

As this article shows, he opposed the US war against the Philippines and said that a flag for the colony could include the pirate's skull and cross-bones.

http://www.historiansagainstwar.org/blog/2008/04/m...

He opposed military action in China justified by protecting Western interests, saying that the Chinese could use that pretext to sail up the Mississippi to protect their laundries.

It's clear that the narrator of the Huck Finn book is Huck, an ignorant but likable youth.

If people say children shouldn't read Huck Finn, who said Twain wrote it for children?

Mark Twain was a product of his time and place, but he was not a racist.

No, I would not say he was racist. He wrote honestly about the world as he saw it. He was a satirist and he poked fun at the human condition. He wrote in a way as to bring attention to problems, the way many comedians do today. No, he was not a racist. Today we live in a politically correct world where people are afraid to be honest and so things do not change. Twain was honest so that things could get gradually and honestly better.

Twain grew up in Missouri, a slave holding state, in the mid-1800s. That probably meant that he was indoctrinated in the beliefs of his parents and neighbours. He could speak the language, since his characters in Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn spoke the language. But he was not racist as an adult. He showed up racism in Huckleberry Finn as a damned blight on both Jim (a black man) and on the characters of Huck and the good-souled white people in the book, such as the Grangerfords and Tom's aunt and uncle.

I think that most people look upon persons of races not their own as "different" and think, even subconsciously, that "different" people should not be entitled to everything he or she is entitled to. I don't like some of the thoughts I realize I think. I have to keep reminding myself that my Moslem or Black neighbours are just as entitled as I am. Many of them are born here, or their children are, and many have jobs and contribute to the nation. Syrian refugees who just got here and don't have much are giving to the people of Fort MacMurray who lost their homes in the fire. That's a great contribution. Twain might have had attitudes we'd call racist today. You can't entirely shake off what you learned as a child. But I think he was ashamed of them when he realized he had them.

Not i'm not American but i know that some of word used in original English text like ****** are very controversial, for good reason, but this not meant that Mark Twain was racist, he just used language that was used in his time, language change.

In the sense of whether he believed that people other than white people were somehow inferior, no he wasn't a racist. I'm guessing you're referring to the use of the N-word in Huck Finn. In that sense, he painted the reality that he saw around him. The use of that word was ubiquitous back then and it didn't always have the overtone meaning that it does now, though it often did have a diminishing connotation. We could make the argument that the fact that someone is calling out another person using that word simply because they are black is a sociological indication that the entire society -- at at least a very large part of it -- was racist. No one referred to a white guy named James as White Jim, for example. But Mark Twain was mostly interested in making fun of things -- virtually everything -- from the historical romantic novel to shakespeare, to gender identity, to government in general, to pig-headed rural America. And trying to capture the particular pattern of speech he heard around him into written English caused him to capture ALL of that speech.

At the time that Huckleberry Finn was written, it was, in essence, being banned/screamed about/etc because, well, it wasn't racist *enough*. It dared to show a black character as, well, sympathetic, and worthwhile, and so on.

It is possible that, by today's standards, if Twain was brought from his own time to now, he'd be considered kind of racist. But the same is probably true of 99% of his contemporaries. By the standards of his time, he was definitely *not* a racist, and was in fact probably pretty progressive.

He was a fantastically great and humorous writer. It's a shame today many think he was racist. In one story he told about tarring and feathering a person and people setting a dog on fire for enjoyment. This was shocking and offensive to me but I've read many of his works and I still love his writing and humor. He did include blacks and native americans in his stories so in that regard he was not racist.

He was a fantastically great and humorous writer. It's a shame today many think he was racist. In one story he told about tarring and feathering a person and people setting a dog on fire for enjoyment. This was shocking and offensive to me but I've read many of his works and I still love his writing and humor. He did include blacks and native americans in his stories so in that regard he was not racist.

His writing represents the times he lived in. By those standards NO he was not a racists. By today's standards almost anything can be construed as racists, since it is perception and not intent that is the deciding issue