Set in the antebellum south, Huckleberry Finn is a very realistic critique of the minds of people growing up in racist societies. Mark Twain expertly portrays the reality of living in this sort of experience. Although, we most likely will never know if his critique was done on purpose or if he just portrayed Huck's world so vividly he did it by accident, it does an incredible job at helping us understand the life of children who are unfortunately a product of their environment.  

this was honestly a fun book to read for school. so many random things happened but I had a great time. I couldn’t understand the book without an audio recording, and if he said the n word less I would’ve given it a higher rating. still had fun with it though. 4/5 stars

I somehow managed to avoid this in my American high school education but I'm glad that I'm able to encounter this book for the first time with a fairly critical and practiced eye. 

I have a lot of respect for Twain's almost-anthropological approach to depicting dialect (though Jim's was way too over the top sometimes) and the odd little ins and outs of a rapidly shifting American society/understanding of childhood. I think this novel is a serious benchmark in ushering in of a new mode of American prose distinct from the high Romanticism of the books which came earlier. 

Twain's attempt at being not racist towards Jim provides an incredibly illustrative example (intentional or otherwise) of how Blackness is (mis)represented through the narrative force of white writing. I'd be interested to see a novel written from Jim's perspective.