Was HPL really a racist?

[Mors Profundis]

Lovecraft did name a cat Nigger-man, but it was a black cat, and he was fond of it, in fact it was a pretty good kitty.
He also tended to make the minions and disiples of the GOO non-white, as did many other writers who were active at this time(Sax Rohmer did a lot to foster the Yellow Peril myth).
But HPL was never really vicious about it, and at the time he wrote, this was a common attitude.
Using non-whites, and especially the more obscure ethnic types added to the mystery for the audience he was reaching.
Today, this would be unacceptable, and if HPL was writing now, doubtless he'd have been more PC.
He also cast rural whites as minions and disciples in many stories.
The Whateleys,et al, were old Yankee stock, and easily could have been touched with the tar brush(as they said it back then), had it been desired.
No, we are guilty of what Diana Gabaldon calls presentism, applying our attitudes to people who lived in the past.
HPL as no more racist than the times he lived in, when tacit racism was the norm.
I enjoy the tales, I avoid the tomes, I mark the Elder Sign and I don't sweat the small stuff- I don't use ethnic perjoritives, either, because I'm a man of my times.
As HPL was a man of his.

[steve12553]

Originally Posted by Mors Profundis

No, we are guilty of what Diana Gabaldon calls presentism, applying our attitudes to people who lived in the past.

I've seen other versions of this thread here and on other forums. Depending on how you define Racism, people in earlier cultures were all basically racist or they were all ignorant and it requires our modern understanding of equality to be a racist. It would be very hard to prove to an intelligent person in today's world the one race is superior or inferior to another. I'm not sure you can really define a race. I firmly believe what we refer to as race is more acurately defined as a culture. 100 years ago things were different. There was less scientific understanding (anthopologically along with biologically) Most people follow the attitudes of their cultures.

[Mors Profundis]

A good reply to this might be yes, but we'll forgive him.
This time.

[GOLLUM]

Having read Lovecratft's work and performed my own research into his background I believe HPL was a product of his time and therefore am always hesistant to label someone like him as a racist looking back through a modern prism. By modern standrads he could be labeled as racist but I don't view it that way.

[Nesacat]

Having grown up in the far east and having been educated between India and England and after many years of reading all of Lovecraft I can get my hands on I'd have to say he was very much a man of his times. The idea of him possibly being racist comes from judging the stories based on our times and who can say about cats.

[Mors Profundis]

HPL liked cats.
No one can apply the standards of one time and place to another-it doesn't work.
We can all agree that fungi and things with tentacles(look up the Colossal Squid!) are not good, at least when they start pulling out people's brains and sending them off to interstellar destinations, or trying to wipe out all life on earth.
Can't we?

[Nesacat]

Yes, he did like cats very much. The first story of his I ever read was The Cats of Ulthar and it made me go hunt up the rest of them. It was very much like discovering a treasure trove.
I'd agree that getting limbs yanked off is not awfully desirable but you must admit that there is something darkly seductive about a god who slumbers in a titanic city under the ocean and comes to people in dreams. I'd like to see R'lyeh with it's walls set at angles that are not quite right.

[Mors Profundis]

There's a saying,"See R'lyeh and die-if you're lucky."

[I, Brian]

"Nigger" was a common word for black - really dark wool used to be sold as "nigger-black". There was also an Agatha Christie book originally titled "Ten Little Niggers". I'm not sure about the history of the word, but somehow I'm given the impression that nigger was simply a word used for black, was applied in a cultural way to other cultures, and because of that, grew out of favour.

As for judging HPL as a racist - well, we'd really need to see him aggressively promote ideas to really deserve that title.

As another point - to elevate ourselves to a position of moral authority and judgement over different cultures, is to be honest part of the root of "racism" itself. It diesn't matter whether we are making judgements over time or space - it is the same attitude of self-superiority repeated.

2c.

[Randolph]

Unfortunately, Lovecraft was a racist, plain and simple. Even a casaul perusal of his work shows this (skim through "The Horror at Red Hook" or "Call of Cthulhu" for instance.) The idea that he was just "a product of his times" is also false. True, racism was much more common then than it is today, but Lovecraft goes way beyond what was the norm of the time (which was based more on ignorance and stereotypes) by classing immigrants, African-Americans, and people of mixed-race as basically subhuman. Read through a lot of his correspondence and essays and you'll find that this is true. I don't say this to try to make old Ech Pi look bad - he's my favorite author - I just want to dispell any misconception that he was not something which he very plainly was. The important thing is that he wrote well enough that his work shines through this flaw.

[j. d. worthington]

Hi, Randolph, and welcome to the Chronicles!

I'd qualify your post somewhat... I'd say that he was a product of his times and his environment (a very conservative, Old Yankee background) in this, as in other ways... the problem is that, unlike most of those other ways, this is one in which he showed very little (though not no) change, despite constant challenges from his correspondents, friends, and the changing views of the sciences. He did modify it somewhat with some ethnic types, but when it came to the indigenous people of Australia, or blacks ... he continued to see them as subhuman all his life. (Though he moved slightly more toward a sort of paternalism in his final years with blacks -- see the letter he wrote on one of his trips through the South ... I'll try to find the exact reference later; still, that's not much of an improvement.....)

This is probably the one area in which he can truly be censured; not for holding those views in the beginning, but for simply not challenging them with the scientific evidence, as he did so many others. I find it interesting, though, that one hears more censuring of Lovecraft for his racism than one does of Eliot or Pound, who were at least as virulent in their beliefs.

Also, as someone who did a lot of typesetting (and, therefore, reading) of reprints of articles on the subject for various books examining this part of American culture -- there really was an intense and pervasive amount of such views, even among the scientific community, that didn't really begin to fade until well into the 1950s. It was challenged more and more, but quite a few highly respected figures held to these beliefs nonetheless, long after the point when it would seem ridiculous to us. This by no means excuses HPL, but it really is the case that he wasn't that much out of step with even some of the best and brightest of his time; though, as stated, such views were being seriously challenged from the turn of the century on.

Still, when all's said and done... yes, he was a racist; it's just that his work is so very good that it outshines that shadow on his reputation....

[that old guy]

He was actually more than racist, since he considered inferior everyone he didn't consider "Nordic." He wrote several letters expressing contempt for the French, the Irish and I believe the Italians.

Then again, his wife was Jewish, so go figure.

[Mors Profundis]

Seems he was, and I was wrong.
His wife, Sonia, was a Russian Jew, and she often had to remind him of it during his anti-Semite rants.
Could be why they split up?
He was no worse than most of his contemporaries(nigger, as a word for black, was a sladerous ethnic slur so common it was used to describe dark articles, as was 'dinge', as in dingy, meaning dark or discolored, and the word may well come from 'negar' a variation of negro, Spanish for black, and a root of the white trash 'nigra'.
As an aside, black people often referred to whites as "The Buckra", in those days.
Shub-niggurath?
Sure, nig prefixes many words with the connotation of dark, but two gees?
I still say he was no worse than most, and being dead, he's unlikely to change.

[j. d. worthington]

On the subject of why Sonia and HPL separated... no, that (if one is to believe any of the accounts from either of them or of friends) had nothing to do with it, though in later years she did complain about some of those statements. After all, after they were separated, Sonia kept inviting him to stay when he would be in the New York area at a time when she was, and also had him do revision work on a travelogue she'd written, as well as sending him copious letters and postcards on her trip to Europe (and buying him a copy of Dr. Johnson's beer stein). But each of them was rather set in their ways, and then the financial difficulties that caused Sonia to have to move to the midwest for employment, which HPL could not contemplate without complete revulsion, added to his own increasing psychological problems because of nearly two years' worth of fruitless job searching in New York.... Altogether, a pile of different things landed on them from very early on, and just proved too much. Whether they would have made it or not otherwise... who knows? But some who knew them thought it was possible; and that there was genuine affection there I see no reason to doubt.

[Simon Kind]

I'm glad that I came across this is the story that I'm writing involves the underlying racial fear behind HPL mythos.

It's pretty obvious that HPL was racist which, as other posts have made clear, was pretty par for the course then, jesus even eugenics was regarded as legit. However, I'm always wary of using that as an excuse, no matter the time or place, good people always rises above ignorance.

For myself I don't get offended reading HPL, it's like getting into a conversation with an old batty next door neighbour. I find it quite bemusing and besides without the racist elements then old HPL stories wouldn't have half the dark power that it does.