Screening "Huck Finn" in 1993: National Debts, Cultural Amnesia, and the Dismantling of the civil Rights Agenda

Because "the penny" of affirmative action was all that was offered, it became a discursive site loaded with simultaneous constructions and disavowals of race in the United States. Yet, as Sommers makes change after change to Twain's story to avoid all charges of racism, Adventures of Huck Finn obscures the fact that it labors within the same highly racialized discursive field as the right, a field that in the late 1980s and early 1990s irrationally linked national debts, social entitlements, and African Americans.