Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness

I fully believe that there is a lack or what we, today, conventionally refer to as racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness.  I was entirely convinced by the essay by Firchow and his points.  His most convincing bit was when he was talking about the classification of, for lack of a better word, racism at the turn of the century.  It was stacked on 3 tiers, the first being a recognition of a difference between races, the second being the belief that one race is superior to another, and the third is acting on that belief in a destructive manner.  Nowhere in Conrad's novella are Europeans referred to as superior to the Africans they are around.  It is stated that they are different, in many many ways.  The Africans are called ugly, they are said to dance and scream, and this is a source of fear for many of the Europeans.

Another, and much more strongly stated fact, is the difference in the surroundings as compared to European lifestyle.  The "wilderness" is what is questioned here, wilderness that could easily have been placed in any other setting, but Africa was, at the time, a strongly recognized political backdrop.  Simply put, Africa was a convenient location to put a wilderness that would drive men insane and to do things they normally would not have done, such as murder.

I believe that the strongest argument against racism in the novella is one of the focuses of the story, Kurtz himself.  Kurtz is just as savage as those around him, and for Conrad to reduce a "superior" race to the savagery of the "inferior" races proves just enough that he has contempt for the actions of all men, not simply blacks.  This is a novel about the devolution of a human's mind, not of the inferiority of a race.