Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn depicts the racial hierarchy and embedded racist attitudes towards African-Americans in the antebellum South. When exploring the issue of Whiteness in Huckleberry Finn, the reader need only look towards Twain's representation of the character Jim, a runaway slave who is portrayed as the stereotype of the ignorant Southern “negro.” Racism cannot accurately be examined in this novel without considering the way Whiteness becomes personified through Huckleberry Finn because he occupies the greatest space white privilege. Although it may appear that the two runaways are willingly each other’s accomplice, in actuality, Huck manipulates Jim’s otherness to free himself from his undesirable situation. His treatment of Jim should be considered negative, not only because his behavior is insensitive in the way he continuously insults and plays jokes on Jim, but also because it asserts the binaries of race in the novel. Although Huck’s initial actions reflect the prejudice of the South towards Blacks, I argue that Huck’s racist attitudes have been embedded by his upbringing, which makes him completely unaware that his attitude towards Jim is demeaning and wrong. Furthermore, after spending so much time in the presence of Jim, Huck seems to struggle to perpetuate his oppressive practices, becoming what will later be defined as a “crisis of his Whiteness,” which ultimately becomes an agent for his change.
Examining the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn’s socially constructed makeup of Whiteness requires an examination of the power structure in a sense of who is being oppressed and who benefits from the structure. Certainly, given the racist attitudes of the South, Huck has been conditioned to act within the guidelines of the master/slave relationship, which inadvertently allows his Whiteness to unfold. In her monograph, Playing in the Dark, Toni Morrison refers to this construction in terms...