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How Does Blood Diamond A Racist Representation Of West Africa?

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It is difficult to truly represent Africa because most of the representations known by mankind have risen from Western and European continents. The movie, Blood Diamond, stars Leonardo DiCaprio, who plays Danny Archer—a smuggler of conflict diamonds and Jennifer Connelly, who plays the American journalist, Maddy Bowen. Blood Diamond illustrates the political chaos that conflict diamonds caused in west Africa; a civil war broke out in Sierra Leone between the government and a group of rebels, known as the RUF (Revolutionary United Front), which resulted in the burning of villages, and in the deaths of many men, women, and children. Just as Chinua Achebe argues that Heart of Darkness is a racist representation of Africans in “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness,’” I argue that Blood Diamond offers a racist representation of Sierra Leone and Africans as well; although the Sierra Leone civil war was a real event, my argument aims to reveal how the movie depiction of the real event deems Africans as a place of warfare and corruption with the inability to rise above the problems …show more content…

It reveals more about the African people, while the conflict diamonds create a framework for the people. If this is just a story about people, then why would a director need to set it in Africa opposed to the United States? They could have made this a movie about anything; it could have been about racism in the United States, and represented the political unrest between whites and blacks during the Civil Rights Movement. Blood Diamond does nothing to change the stereotypes of Africa established by colonization, because it does not involve Sierra Leonean Africans in the production and in the movie who can account for the events that happened. Instead, it chooses to romanticize the problem instead of truly representing the

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