In the mock trial, the question asked was, whether or not Mark Twain was racist. In my opinion, Twain was not guilty of being a racist.
The first reason why I concluded Twain as being not guilty was his use of satire in the novel. In the first pages of the novel Huck says that Twain exaggerated a lot. Twain may have exaggerated how people acted in the South, but those exaggerations had no reflection on the kind of person he was. The literary expert on the Defense side said that the satirical references were misread as racist, and I also believe that to be true. Twain used the word “nigger” about 200 times in the novel, each time for a specific reason. That reason as Twain said in the trial, was to emphasize how blacks were treated. He was satirizing the people of the south, and Twain also said that he wanted people to realize that they were wrong. Some people may not have noticed the underlying satire within the novel, because they wanted to immediately point fingers at Twain and say he was racist. Twain knew that people would take things differently than how he meant them, but that did not stop him from sending the message.
Just because Twain wrote a book, that could have been seen as racist, does not make him a racist person. I saw Twain as a reliable source in the trial so I believed him when he said that he was not racist, and was not prejudice towards blacks. By saying those two things, I was swayed to vote him not guilty. The main reason why I did vote Twain not guilty, was the argument he gave. The Prosecution was unable to squeeze any evidence of racism out of him, and so I could not say that Twain was racist because I would have been making up reasons why he was. There was nothing that jumped out to me in the trial that directly stated that Twain was racist or not racist, besides Twain’s argument for himself.
Through the novel, Twain was trying to show how life was back in the South when slavery still existed. He was portraying events how they really were, as he also explained in the trial. Blacks were not treated the same as whites during that time period. Living in that time and telling readers how life was does not make him racist, like the Defense said. Sure he exaggerated, but that was to make a lasting effect. We are still discussing the controversy of this hundred-year-old book today. The words in the novel, really did not have a reflection on Twain’s racist ideals, it was a book of fiction as he said in the trial. He also said that he intended to make the novel not racist. Both the Prosecution and the Defense teams made excellent points in their questionings, but the Defense got my vote as a result of Twain’s argument.
