The Day They Came to Arrest the Book - Banned Books Novel for Teens & Young Adults | Laurel-Leaf Books | School Reading List & Book Club Discussion

The book "they came to arrest" was Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, which some black parents objected to because of its frequent use of a term which has become a racial pejorative; never mind that it was the only term commonly used to refer to blacks in Missouri during the time period Mark Twain was writing about, and never mind that Twain's story was clearly anti-slavery. While this particular incident is fictional, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has been attacked on exactly those grounds, with demands that it be removed from school libraries and class reading lists.I suspect that some victims of bigotry become so sensitized to it that their minds snap closed at the first hint of anything that even mentions the existence of bigotry against them. For example, I found on Amazon a review attacking John Moore's hilarious The Unhandsome Prince as anti-semitic, when in fact it was ridiculing anti-semitism and explicitly supporting expression of soidarity with Jewish citizens. (Prince Hal's rumination on knighting a Jew is priceless.) I also found a review attacking Eric Flint's excellent novel 1632 as anti-Catholic, which it most certainly isn't; rather it makes it clear that most Catholics, like most Protestants and most Jews, are decent people, albeit some of each aren't.I read Adventures of Huckleberry Finn when I was 5 or 6 years old, and decided then and there that I was opposed to racism and didn't want to be a racist, and I have never seen fit to revise that opinion, even 10 or 11 years later when my mother tried to teach me, as Thandeka put it, "to be white." (Learning to Be White: Money, Race, and God in America) Can my reaction to Mark Twain's book be a unique? I think not.The Day They Came to Arrest the Book should be required reading for every schoolchild, preferably in conjunction with Adventures of Huckleberry [email protected]