The American Library Association regularly publishes a list of the 10 most frequently challenged or banned books. A book is "challenged" when someone at a local school or library or in a community thinks the book should be banned. I'm going to specifically address a single banned book; the fifth on the list for 2007; Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which is usually banned for "racism."

It's not the first time Huckleberry Finn has been banned; that happened in 1885, the year the novel was first published, when the library committee of Concord, Massachusetts, the library of Emerson and Thoreau, banned it for "coarse language." Louisa May Alcott, a member of the committee, wrote that "If Mr. Clemens cannot think of something better to tell our pure-minded lads and lasses he had best stop writing for them." Subsequent committees have banned Huckleberry Finn several times since at a variety of public schools and libraries.

I know this book. I first read it when I was ten. I've taught it, and think it's one of the most brilliant—and enjoyable—novels in any language, ever. Yes, it's "racist," in that Twain uses the word "nigger." (He uses it some 213 times, for those of you without a concordance program.) But Twain uses the word for a reason; first, note the words in Twain's Preface:

NOTICE
PERSONS attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.

BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR, Per G.G., Chief of Ordnance. EXPLANATORY IN this book a number of dialects are used, to wit: the Missouri negro dialect; the extremest form of the backwoods Southwestern dialect; the ordinary "Pike County" dialect; and four modified varieties of this last. The shadings have not been done in a haphazard fashion, or by guesswork; but painstakingly, and with the trustworthy guidance and support of personal familiarity with these several forms of speech.

I make this explanation for the reason that without it many readers would suppose that all these characters were trying to talk alike and not succeeding.

Twain is writing in dialect, specifically a dialect of Missouri, one carefully dated to before the civil war. He is using the language—including the word "nigger"—that would have been used at the time, by the people who use it. And he's making a point, or trying to, despite his disclaimer, about the nature of racisim.

Here's one of the most telling passages in the novel. It's from chapter XXXII, when Huck explains the reason for their late arrival to his Aunt Sally:

"We blowed a cylinder-head."

"Good gracious! Anybody hurt?"

"No'm. Killed nigger."

"Well, it's lucky; because sometimes people do get hurt."

Notice that Huck responds to the question of "Anybody hurt" with the laconic "No'm. Killed a nigger."

Aunt Sally, relieved, is gratified that only a "nigger" got killed, because "sometimes people" get hurt.

Right there, Twain manages to crystalize the heart of racisim, in a particularly horrific way, with the seemingly benign Aunt Sally, and Our Hero, Huck, whom we've come to like, and who we know loves Jim. And it's very much tied to the language they use, including "that word," as it's so often euphemistically put. The distinction made between "nigger" and "people" in that passage is crucial, and telling. By this time we know Jim, we know Huck, and we know the kind of loyalty and love and no-matter-what friendship they have for each other, and all of a sudden, "that word" changes everything we know. And that's exactly why Twain uses the word, and wrote that scene.

So yes, there are racist characters in the novel—pretty much all of them, in fact, are racist, but by seeing racisim in a novel, we can in fact learn to identify it in our own lives—and we can possibly learn the lessons of history. It's one of the reasons we should read and teach Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice, even though it's grotesquely anti-Semitic; we can, by seeing the anti-Semitism in a literary work, learn to identify it in life, in contexts that we might not even realize are anti-Semitic. I can understand why Beatrice Clark and her 16-year-old granddaughter, Calista Phair objected strenuously to the novel being taught on the grounds that it uses objectionable language. As Beatrice Clark says:

It's not just a word," said Clark, the guardian for her granddaughter. Both are African American.

"It carries with it the blood of our ancestors. They were called this word while they were lynched; they were called this word while they were hung from the big magnolia tree.

"That word, in the history of America, has always been a degrading word toward African Americans. When they were brought to America, they were never thought of as human beings in the first place, and this word was something to call a thing that wasn't human.

That's exactly why the novel should be taught; to make sure that we never ever forget our sins of the past, to make sure we acknowledge them, and never ever, repeat them. If we don't acknowledge them, if we don't bring them into the light, we may find ourselves in a society where people insist that history didn't happen. Banning our history, censoring our past, isn't going to stop us from repeating our past idiocies; only by studying where we went wrong, and how, can we learn.

Plus Huckleberry Finn is a great book. You should read it, whether for the first time, or the nth.