Why 'Little Women' Endures

The characters are obviously racist, but the question is whether the author and/or the book are racist, and if so that needs to be called out explicitly and discussed in the classroom. Here's a good essay on it: https://www.vqronline.org/essay/jim-and-mark-twain-what-do-d...

> In the middle of Huck Finn, Mark Twain let Jim step out from behind the racist stereotype that has proven a lot harder to destroy than slavery. The effect of the ending, though, is to put him back in blackface so the whites of his eyes will show more conspicuously when they roll. The ending of Huck Finn has been recognized as a problem for more than 50 years, although almost no one has emphasized how it changes Jim’s status within the novel. Charles Neider, in a new edition that Doubleday published for the centennial, grandly chose to cut 8300 words from this Tom Sawyer section. It does go on and on, becoming the longest episode in the novel—but that is the first thing that must be noted about it. The second is how hard Twain works in it to make his reader laugh, piling up witches, rats, mashed teeth, pouring melting butter over the whole. When he went back on the lecture circuit in the winter of 1884—85, he used the Evasion chapters as the basis for his new program, and in his letters home he brags about their effectiveness as a comic tour de force, a continuous series of snappers. That, especially in view of our modern unhappiness with the ending, should be the third thing to note: Twain used the 1884—85 tour to promote his forthcoming novel, and this was the part of it he chose to represent the whole.

> [...]

> We obviously cannot say what might have happened, either in the book or to the book’s reception, if Twain had not decided to turn Huck into Tom, and Jim into a comic stereotype. We must, however, reckon the price Twain paid for that decision. Huck can’t free Jim. Jim can’t free Huck. Between them, Huck and Jim could not free Mark Twain from the pact his need for popularity forced him to make with his public’s self-protective prejudices. Twain’s own sense of remorse is only a partial compensation for his betrayal of Jim. By Jim’s definition, which is surely entitled to be definitive, the ending of Huck Finn is “trash.” It is trash, though, that we cannot afford to throw away until we have finished learning what it has to teach us about our culture’s appetites.

For me (white, non-American) the racial slurs come across as self-indulgent and detract from the movies.