Huckleberry Finn Banned From Schools

In John Alberti’s 1995 article, “The Nigger Huck: Race, Identity, and the Teaching of Huckleberry Finn,” Alberti addresses whether Mark Twain’s novel should be banned from school’s required reading list due to its racist content. Since the article was written, Huckleberry Finn has been banned from certain districts because of Twain’s repeated use of the term “nigger” referring to the African-American character, Jim.
In his article, “Sentimental Liberalism and the Problem of Race in Huckleberry Finn,” Gregg Camfield writes, “While Twain’s very use of vernacular has been considered a liberating… innovation, at least one aspect of that vernacular, the way it describes Jim, has fueled the most important and long-lived debate about the book,
Why, me… my conscience up and says… ‘you knowed he was running for his freedom, and you could a paddled ashore and told somebody.’… It was according to the old saying, ‘Give a nigger an inch and he’ll take an ell.’
Twain’s perception of conscience was that it corresponded with society, and was therefore an unreliable guide. As Leo Levy explains in his article “Society and Conscience in Huckleberry Finn,” Twain believed conscience to be “an expression of social restrictions that are inherently evil.” If conscience represented evil in society, then the racist epithet “nigger” was excoriated by Huck’s constant usage.
Jim’s character takes a stand against the stereotypical term. Twain based Jim from a slave he knew as “Uncle Dan’l,” and in his autobiography Twain wrote, “[my friends and I] had a faithful and affectionate good friend, ally and advisor in ‘Uncle Dan’l,’… whose sympathies were wide and warm, and whose heart was honest and simple and knew no guile…” Twain continues to say that he staged Uncle Dan’l as Jim, making Jim a role model, and defying racist ideals at the same
In his article, “The Ending of Huckleberry Finn,” Robert Ornstein writes,
So long as Miss Watson can ‘use’ Jim either by working him or by selling him down the river… she has no qualms about the institution of slavery... Here is perhaps the crowning act of selfishness and pious greed… Because Miss Watson cannot take Jim with her, she finds it easy to listen to the faint inner voice of decency. Twain, of course, does not pry into Miss Watson’s motives…
Without taking any other perspective, reading Ornstein’s concerns may make Twain appear like he made no moral analysis on slavery, and simply left it as it to the corrupt discretion of characters in historical context. However, Ornstein also points out that “rather than a sign of regeneration, Miss Watson’s death-bed decision… can be interpreted as the final revelation of the morality of the respectable slave-owner… we are now sure that the ‘principle’ of slave-owning is only