Here’s Why I Celebrate Banned Books

Clarence Page, Tribune Content Agency on Sep 22, 2022

“The unprecedented number of challenges we’re seeing already this year reflects coordinated, national efforts to silence marginalized or historically underrepresented voices,” ALA President Lessa Kananiʻopua Pelayo-Lozada said in a news release, “and deprive all of us — young people, in particular — of the chance to explore a world beyond the confines of personal experience.”

Some things don’t change, just the names and authors do. I was not surprised to see another of my favorite perennially banned books, Mark Twain’s “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” missing from the latest list. I guess the classic’s use of the N-word more than a hundred times finally is doing it in.

As I’ve written before, I’m a Black man who defends “Huckleberry Finn” precisely because it is brave enough to use the N-word as freely as a lot of white folks used it back then — and not only in the South.

More important, Twain used the language of those times to put us into Huck’s head as his heart leads him to help his Black enslaved friend Jim run away from his masters, an act that Huck has been painfully taught will send him straight to hell.

In a momentous coming of age decision, shedding all that he has been taught by his conservative elders, he decides his loyalty to Jim is worth that fate.

Not surprisingly, not everyone shares my love for Twain’s work, especially Black folks and liberal intellectuals who accuse Twain of stereotyping. But the book touched me years ago when I was a kid coming of age in an even less racially tolerant world than we have today. If Huck could look past skin color to the conduct of his friend’s character, to paraphrase Martin Luther King’s famous quote, so could I.

Conservatives these days like to take that King quote out of context and make it an argument for pretending racism no longer exists. I think they need to read more.

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(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@chicagotribune.com.)