Racism In Joseph Conrad's Heart Of Darkness

Chains Of Racism
Racism is something you learn, not something you born with. Through the time, many writers have implemented their books with the racism that the mankind has seen along it’s history. Joseph Conrad implements a heavy sense of racism in his masterpiece, Heart of Darkness, through the use of symbolism, setting and various other literary devices.
“Things are not always as they seem; the first appearance deceives many”(Plato). The symbolism plays a vital role in the development of the racism, the colors white and black, or the words light and dark are the main columns of symbolism in Heart of Darkness. “Conrad introduces the significance of "light/dark" and "white/black" indicating that "light/white" and "dark/black" are symbols of good and evil”(Source Nofal).
In one side the color white and the word light represent the goodness, the civilized, the progress, while on the other side the color black and the word dark represent the barbaric,the ignorant, the perdition; the contrast between these two words is very strongly represented through the story by phrases or situations related to Marlow, the ivory and the natives.
First, Conrad used the ivory as the biggest representation of of the symbolism applied to the white-light things,

It had known and served all the men of whom the nation is proud”, stating the greatness and goodness of it,while in the river in the Congo “whose banks were rotting into mud, whose waters, thickened into slime, invaded the contorted mangroves, that seemed to writhe at us in the extremity of an impotent despair”, the representation states a different mood, a darker and disparaged view of the environment, by the use o f imagery