Not so Black and White

To clean up “Huckleberry Finn”
By scrubbing nigger from the book
Would put an idiotic spin
On Mark Twain’s open-minded look
At racist 1840s views
Of Huck’s and slave Jim’s river cruise.

Not once did Twain write Nigger Jim,
As even scholars sometimes say.
The characters proclaimed for him
The prejudices of their day.
If we pretend they weren’t so rank,
Our sense of past is less than frank.

There’s loss each time we sanitize.
It’s okay if it’s bathroom scum.
If strides, we want to realize
It’s hard to see how far we’ve come.
And if historically we’re lost,
Contemporaries pay the cost.

We might be closer than we know;
More marry interracially.
Though general mixing moves too slow
No longer crawls it glacially,
Which gets me back to racial terms:
Our country’s are a can of worms.

An African American,
Does this mean black folks won’t resist
Including in their social clan
An ex-Rhodesian separatist?
Apartheid segregationist?
Morocain Caucasieniste?

Does this make white guys such as me
Some sort of European Yank?
My Irish forebears crossed the sea
When English rulers sacked their bank.
Let’s hope our kids don’t give a (bleep)
About distinctions just skin deep.