Huck Finn’s ‘Hidden’ Lessons: Teaching and Learning Across the Color Line

This controversial book will enter the debate over the proper place of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in―or, better, out―of the classroom. For years, middle and high school students across the U.S. have been required to read Twain’s work because the dominant white community has revered it as an antiracist classic. Sharon Rush claims that, for the black community, its imposition in the curricula remains a stark emblem of the persistent racism of American society. Huck Finn’s ‘Hidden’ Lessons challenges the more typical understanding of Twain’s classic and guides readers through an analysis that demonstrates how racism functions in the book and the classroom. Rush explains how Huck Finn creates emotional segregation in classrooms and concludes that taking Huck out of the secondary curricula will mark a significant step towards cultivating healthy race relations by admitting that the American classic reflects the racism of its times.