Chinua Achebe, the author or the novel; Things Fall Apart goes into great detail in this self-written article about how Conrad's viewpoints in his work The Heart of Darkness is racist. Even though I believe Achebe has a great arguement in this article, I believe that he is taking it from a bias perspective.
In today's socratic seminar, we discussed where the line is drawn between "labeling" a group and being racist against them. But in reality, you think about those limits, and are people really being racist? Conrad is just going based on what he sees on the outside of the tribe. He doesn't actually know what it is like to be them. It goes back to the concept of "don't judge a book by its cover". It may be assumed that you are judging someone based on your first assumption of them. That is the exact problem Joseph Conrad got himself into when he was writing this novel. Basically, he saw what the tribe was acting like from an outside perspective. So it wouldn't have been racist in Achebe's mind if Conrad used a different lense in the looking glass. It is very possible that Conrad had racist remarks in the novel, and Achebe writes that it was degrading that Conrad wrote the "natives" conversations in a different language. It is remarkable to me that Achebe wrote his novel in one language (except for religious or cultural purposes), to show that we all really are united, and there isn't much difference between all of us if we look past the surface. I absolutely love where Achebe is coming from in this section of the article. It is almost like Conrad was "dumming the natives down" when he decided to make them speak a different language. How are we as readers supposed to understand their viewpoint if we don't know what they are saying? Unlike Conrad, Achebe made sure we knew both sides; the Christians and the Umuofia tribe. That's why I appreciated his work a lot more compared to Conrad's.
Overall, this article was very insightful to read. I wished that maybe Achebe wasn't the author because of the fact that this whole thing was about not being racist. But from an outsiders perspective, it can be labled as racist against Conrad and his work. I enjoyed reading it, but I think that if it was from a different author, I would have agreed with their viewpoint a little more.
