Justice In Huckleberry Finn

In The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain criticizes the roles of racism, religion, and society’s system of justice in the South during the 1800’s. More specifically, he criticizes how the injustice of slavery and racism is viewed as moral, how institutional religion is used more as a charade rather than a system of faith, and how society’s system of justice has the tendency to be biased and based on reacting to crimes instead of preventing them. Racism is an ingrained part of Southern society in the 19th century and is viewed by most Southerners as just. They believe blacks are a lesser race and shouldn’t be treated the same as whites are. This way of thinking is very prominent throughout the novel and is disapproved by Twain in several different scenes. One such scene involves Pap, who denounces the worth of a successful mulatto man while in a drunken stupor. Pap states, “They said he was a p’fessor in a college, and could talk all kinds of languages, and knowed everything...Here’s a govment that calls itself a govment...and yet’s got to set stock still for six whole months befores it can take a-hold of a prowling, thieving, infernal, white-shirted free nigger” (Twain, 27). We can see from this that Pap feels jealous of the mulatto because the mulatto is more successful than he is. This ties into Twain’s disapproval of racism because a drunk, lazy bum like Pap is allowed to berate a hardworking professor such as the mulatto solely because Pap’s white and therefore “superior” to the black man. Twain’s disapproval of racism is also largely portrayed through Jim, who is shown to be somewhat comical and dim-witted in the beginning of the

He negates the discriminatory treatment of other races, blind or aimless compliance with religion, and the use of subjective judicial actions throughout communities in the