Heart of darkness

The Non-Racial Side of Heart of Darkness

The seemingly racist language of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness criticizes the hypocrisy of European attitudes towards Africa and deliberately labels theEuropean behavior as evil; thus, the book cannot be considered racist because its language means to expose/eliminate such behavior. Many examples throughout the text show the book as non-racist. Conradwrote the book to accurately depict what was going on in Africa at that time, there was an entirely different view of racism during the time period in which the book was written, and Conrad balancedboth sides in the book with positive and negative denotations. Although to many, Heart of Darkness may seem like a racist story, it actually exposed true Africa and the issues of European ignorancetowards Africans.
Conrad projected African life exactly as he wanted to, and got people to realize the horror of what actually went on in Africa. Since Conrad wrote this book ten years after hevisited Africa, he chose what to put in the book and what to exclude. His intentions when writing this book were to depict Africa exactly as it was and not dress it up as more than what it was. Hewanted to show what was actually happening in Africa, and this was an effective representation of how he felt when he was in Africa. “They were not enemies, they were not criminals, they were nothingearthly now, nothing but black shadows of disease and starvation lying confusedly in the greenish gloom” (Conrad 17). Conrad described some Africans he saw not even as “earthly”, but he did this to showhow they were treated as at this time and what Europeans actually thought of them. “Marlow often uses frankly derogatory language in describing them… Thus the image Conrad projects of African lifecan hardly be called flattering” (Hawkins 366). Which that was the point of Conrad’s story. He was not trying to flatter anyone with the African lifestyle, but merely project it as it was; in this...