Conrad, the "bloody racist"

Achebe refers to Conrad as a bloody racist and is certainly just in his problems with the "glossing over" of Conrad's apparent racism since it is something much like the idea that, "Oh, they're old, it's okay for them to be racist." In the very beginning of the text we can see very clear indicators, simply by the language used, that would allude to the racist bias of the author.

The first example would be in the very beginning of the excerpt, not the complete work, where the captain and the main character, Marlow, talk about the other passenger he had who had hung himself. It's a stretch, but someone arguing that Conrad was a racist could attribute the way he says "...or the country perhaps."

Secondly, there are several instances where he describes the mannerisms and appearances of the many Africans. There are several phrases said such as "...with that complete, deathlike indifference of unhappy savages." Savages has not just been used with Africans, as it has been used with Native Americans too, but nevertheless in a derogatory sense.

One more example that a person might use to argue for the Conrad being a bloody racist point of view could be the fact that he uses the word "nigger" though this could be argued against in that African and African-American authors have also used the word and it would be retarded to say that these authors are racist merely for the use of the word.

For those who want to argue against Conrad being a racist, there are also several examples which may be used. Firstly, when he describes the African that mistakes him for being an official and raises his rifle when they walk past one another, he says, "This was simple prudence, white men being so much alike at a distance that he could not tell who I might be." Though, a few pages later, we can see that he almost defeats this evidence by saying, "The man seemed young --almost a boy-- but you know with them it's hard to tell."

Often, when Conrad is describing things in the text, he describes them in a way that many holocaust texts describe the prisoners of the camps, such as, "They were dying slowly -- it was very clear...they were nothing earthly now-- nothing but black shadows of disease and starvation, lying confusedly in the green-ish gloom."

By the way professor, the examples I used were mainly from the beginning of the text since I did not have time to read (yeah, I waited until the last minute on this one) all of the texts before posting, I thought that as long as I had a posting done it'd satisfy the post.