is not a phenomenon exclusive to people from the lower classes alone such as

Is not a phenomenon exclusive to people from the

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is not a phenomenon exclusive to people from the lower classes alone, such as Huck’s father. Black people in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn are often accused of and associated with immoral actions. Huck’s father’s comment that blacks are a “thieving” race is one example of parallels that are drawn between blacks and immoral actions. In chapter 26, when the Huck is spying on the Duke and the King in an effort to ascertain the whereabouts of their stolen money, the two conmen demonstrate the same kind of racial prejudice as Huck’s father. They have decided to change the location of the hidden stolen money because they feel that it is not safe anymore and that there is a considerable risk that it might be taken by the slaves who clean their room. This conclusion appears to be based solely on racial prejudice, i.e. that black people cannot come across money and “not borrow”( Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, p.299) it. As already stated, Twain draws parallels between the similar conditions of black people and children. Like Jim, Huck is a slave who is subject to the whim of the novel’s white adults. When in chapter 2 Huck and Jim are putting up showbills for one of the Duke’s and the King’s many cons the following can be read at the bottom of bills: “Admission 25 cents; children and servants, 10 cents.”( Adventures of Huckleberry Finn , p.233). Black people are consistently in the novel treated as children. This is only an illusion, though, as black people were as much the subjects to the whims of white children as to the adults. The most apparent example of this in the novel is how Jim lives under constant threat of being turned in by Huck. While it may appear, from many of the examples in this chapter, that racial hypocrisy was mostly a lower class phenomenon it was not, it transcended the boundaries between all social classes. When the great American president Abraham Lincoln was accused of abolitionism he became offended and declared: “I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forbid the two races living together in terms of social and political equality…” (Race and
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5 Racism, p.79). This was the declaration made by the man who in 1863 issued his Emancipation Proclamation and in 1865 promoted the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, the amendment which in effect ended slavery. Even though the 13th Amendment officially ended slavery, this did not mean equality for black men and women either. This was something Twain despised and is the reason why Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is set thirty years prior to actual publication, a time when slavery was still practiced. By depicting a system which no longer existed, Twain sought to reveal to the unsympathetic contemporary readers who claimed that things was better now that they were wrong. Following the years of the Civil War race relations seemed to have
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