When I first started reading Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness', I didn't really get the feeling that Conrad was a racist throughout his writing. A few paragraphs into it, I decided to switch over and glimpse through Achebe's essay to see it through his eyes. I now had an idea of what i should look for, more or less, and I occasionally saw what Achebe meant.
According to Achebe, "Joseph Conrad was a thoroughgoing racist" (para. 37), but he later goes on to clarify that "Conrad did not originate the image of Africa which we find in his book. It was the dominant image of Africa in the Western imagination and Conrad merely brought the peculiar gifts of his own mind to bear on it" (para. 56). If one were to back up and concur with Achebe's analysis, one could mention how Conrad repeatedly refers to these native Africans as niggers, or blacks, as opposed to just people, which they very well were. A line that struck me as a possible racist statement was: "A lot of people, mostly black and naked, moved about like ants" (para. 2); here, Conrad compares the Africans to ants, who are small, miniscule creatures of the Earth that are constantly stepped on and disregarded, for they are meaningless insects. Perhaps Conrad compared the Africans to ants because the way he, or Western civilization saw it, these people weren't worth much at all and in his novel, were just dominated or 'stepped on' by the white man.
Another instance of racism that Achebe criticizes is when Conrad describes the African race as "ugly". I was a little surprised when I read this part of 'Heart of Darkness' because Conrad was very descriptive of that statment, and it was the one statement that seemed to bother Achebe the most. I realized that Conrad constantly refers to this civilization as animals, savages, anything but human.
Although many times racism seems to be present throughout 'Heart of Darkness', it doesn't seem to be predominant. Perhaps this might be because a small amount of the novel was actually read, but the remainder of the first and second chapters to me just seem to be storyline: the sailor and his life while away from home and the lifestyle he is used to.
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I agree with how how in the story wrote by Conrad, he didn't seem as having racist thoughts, but in the essay things where different. The way Conrad, described African people as 'niggers', was how he was described as racist because he discriminated them. the other examples you wrote of describing them as 'ants', was also used as discrmination of overall their personal value, the conclusion was that Conrad had to see them and respect them as another human-being in this world.
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