The passage I had written about was about the African mistress and how she was depicted as very primal in Conrad's book. Why did I get a B? Because what I wrote was "racist" towards black women. It wasn't that perhaps Conrad's viewpoint was "racist," but MINE apparently was, even though the entire paper focused on Conrad's depiction of the woman and was illustrated with quote after quote from the actual work.
After 30 minutes of back and forth argument, she could not point to a single phrase I had written where I had interjected my personal feelings towards black women. She couldn't have, because I hadn't written any. My entire paper focused on Conrad's description of the woman, not my feelings about her. She still refused to bump the grade up. Not only could she not point to an instance of my "racism," but I realized as we were discussing the book that she didn't even know the freaking book. At all. My guess was she'd never been able to bring herself to even read it.
That was probably the point that I started to become a conservative.
You were already way over the line by that time. Welcome to “the heart of darkness”!
One of my students in the online English course I teach reacted vehemently to the “racism” in Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily.” She derided Faulkner as a racist because the “n” word appears in that story. Despite my best efforts, I was never able to convince her to evaluate fictional characters apart from the author. She indicated that the appearance of that one word in the story resurrected the pain she felt growing up in the South in the Civil Rights Movement. I even altered the paper assignment by suggesting that she write about racism in the story if it bothered her so much. Her unwillingness to read this “disturbing” author was a convenient excuse to not have to look beyond one offensive word in the story. She had been programmed to have sensitive antennae and to vocally, dramatically object. Finally, some of the other students basically told her to shut up!