(Probably because they judge Joseph Conrad by the outdated language he used, rather than by the ideas and values he presented. Because they are shallow fools.)
> A certain enormous buck n*** encountered in Haiti fixed my conception of blind, furious, unreasoning rage, as manifested in the human animal to the end of my days. Of the n*** I used to dream for years afterwards.
Nowhere in it do I find any sort criticism of the harms that were done. He describes the awful conditions in the Congo, but does not necessarily oppose them
The language he uses to describe the Africans is hostile at best. A poignant example is the part about the "insolent black head" peaking through the doorway while Kurtz lay dying
Not saying that Penguin should've removed his name because that's a different argument, but I have no idea how/where you're getting anticolonialism out of Conrad and I'd genuinely like to know
Edit: what did I get out of HOD? The death of God. Kurtz goes out to a corner of the Earth that was yet to be corrupted by capitalism. Marlow goes on a journey with no message in particular, he's a witness to the historical event
Have a look at the later criticism and counter criticism. Chinua Achebe and then Cedric Watts in particular. It turns out to be complicated.
Wikipedia editors dedicate an entire article to one persons essay on racist themes in Conrad's book. While Karl Marx racism is ignored, dismissed as anachronism or rebuked as irrelevant. Even worthy of forgiveness, in light of the greater good his work bestowed on the world.
People say, “You claim to be Marxists, but did you know that Marx was a racist?” We say, “He probably was a racist: he made a statement once about the marriage of a white woman and a black man, and he called the black man a gorilla or something like that.” The Marxists claim he was only kidding and that the statement shows Marx’s closeness to the man, but of course that is nonsense. So it does seem that Marx was a racist.
Now if you are a Marxist, then Marx’s racism affects your own judgment because a Marxist is someone who worships Marx and the thought of Marx. Remember, though, that Marx himself said, “I am not a Marxist.” Such Marxists cherish the conclusions which Marx arrived at through his method, but they throw away the method itself—leaving themselves in a totally static posture. That is why most Marxists really are historical materialists: they look to the past to get answers for the future, and that does not work.
If you are a dialectical materialist, however, Marx’s racism does not matter. You do not believe in the conclusions of one person but in the validity of a mode of thought; and we in the Party, as dialectical materialists, recognize Karl Marx as one of the great contributors to that mode of thought. Whether or not Marx was a racist is irrelevant and immaterial to whether or not the system of thinking he helped to develop delivers truths about processes in the material world. And this is true in all disciplines. In every discipline you find people who have distorted visions and are at a low state of consciousness who nonetheless have flashes of insight and produce ideas worth considering. For instance, John B. Watson once stated that his favorite pastime was hunting and hanging n*****s, yet he made great forward strides in the analysis and investigations of conditioned responses.
Huey P Newton