Heart of Darkness is a book that should still be taught in the 2017 curriculum. I say this because the book has racist tendencies, but these stem from ignorance rather than pure racism. In Heart of Darkness, Marlow talks about and interacts with the African with such animalistic terms, because he was never exposed to their actual culture and doesn’t know any better. This is a significant point in the way that in current events, because racism is still a prevalent problem in our society because we allow statements and other racist types of problems to occur without repercussion. This is all caused by a lack of knowledge on both sides of the spectrum, and with this lack of knowledge being the primary problem, if not fixed this can be to reason
…show more content…
In The White Man’s Burden, Kipling states,” To veil the threat of terror And check the show of pride; By open speech and simple, An hundred times made plain” The lines that have been pulled from Kipling’s poem talk about the terror in a white man's pride in the freedom of speech that he possesses and how after the change that it has gone through, that it has also become such a plain thing in today’s society. In relevance to the book, the African’s are referred to in animalistic and racist terms that are meant to degrade them, but these terms were taught to people like Marlow out of fear. In society We have seen that in the past that people were restricted many of their rights due to oppression and a lack of knowledge to come to compromise or avoid wrongdoing. Also, post-the 13th amendment blacks were forced from one type of oppression into another one, that being segregation under Jim Crow. TAll of the problems within society as well as in Heart of Darkness all stem from a severe amount of ignorance in these people. In Heart of Darkness, Marlow allows himself to view the Africans along the Thames with the same views as the others around him instead of learning himself about what the real problems are within the communities that he isn’t familiar with. This is also a prevalent problem within our society where we have a lot of covert racism that stems from young people being taught certain beliefs and in most cases, not going out to experience things for themselves to find out the actual
In The White Man’s Burden, Kipling states,” To veil the threat of terror And check the show of pride; By open speech and simple, An hundred times made plain” The lines that have been pulled from Kipling’s poem talk about the terror in a white man's pride in the freedom of speech that he possesses and how after the change that it has gone through, that it has also become such a plain thing in today’s society. In relevance to the book, the African’s are referred to in animalistic and racist terms that are meant to degrade them, but these terms were taught to people like Marlow out of fear. In society We have seen that in the past that people were restricted many of their rights due to oppression and a lack of knowledge to come to compromise or avoid wrongdoing. Also, post-the 13th amendment blacks were forced from one type of oppression into another one, that being segregation under Jim Crow. TAll of the problems within society as well as in Heart of Darkness all stem from a severe amount of ignorance in these people. In Heart of Darkness, Marlow allows himself to view the Africans along the Thames with the same views as the others around him instead of learning himself about what the real problems are within the communities that he isn’t familiar with. This is also a prevalent problem within our society where we have a lot of covert racism that stems from young people being taught certain beliefs and in most cases, not going out to experience things for themselves to find out the actual