So I'm well aware this topic is a hot button one, but given my last two posts are relatively positively received, I'm going to basically gamble that good will away with a controversial subject. Fun!
I wanted to take a few minutes of your time (which will likely be much more for me in the process of writing this) to address the subject, as I'm seriously tired of people saying some version of the following sentence:
"Lovecraft was especially racist, even for the standards of his time."
This is categorically untrue, and, in fact, ignores the very historical views of people that lived in his life time. This phrase is often parroted by Americans who just like to deny the impact of their own history with race in the modern day, and is then parroted by people who want to sound smart. Typically, this is brought up in talks about Lovecraft's work, and specific parts of it, such as the name of Shub-Niggurath, depending on how you pronounce it, could sound similar to a slur that Lovecraft also named his cat. It's something people outside of the Lovecraft enjoying communities will parrot as some wHaCkY fAcT about a guy who's been dead for basically 90 years. And a lot of the time, it's stated out of ignorance to the time period of Lovecraft's time on Earth.
So let's unpack that time period, and debunk part of the talking point that is Lovecraft's racism.
To properly begin, I want to make something very clear: I am, in no way, denying the idea that Lovecraft was racist. He very much was. Reading "The Horror at Red Hook" alone (which notable Lovecraft scholar, S.T. Joshi, acknowledges is bad because of how racist it is) should tell you all you need to know about his view on racial groups that aren't of "Anglo-Saxon descent." He regularly made allusions to his racist world view in his work, and ignoring that entirely is just as ignorant as the claim he was "especially racist for his time." "Cool Air" is another immediate example that comes to mind as a place where he not-so-subtly has the narrator exposit a disdain for ethnic minorities. He often wrote the characters that were of groups he didn't like with their phonetic accents, but all of the people you were supposed to respect without said accents, even if they'd logically share one due to proximity to it, as one would in reality. Lovecraft was racist. His wife regularly had to remind him she was Jewish when he'd go on an anti-sematic rant in her presence, which she relayed in an interview where she talked about him.
Make no mistake, I am NOT defending the man on the grounds of him being misunderstood. We all know he was a racist. No, the thing I want to offer up in response to the claims is the historical context of Lovecraft's racism, because it shines a light on the history of America, and notably, doesn't cast the country in a good light, which makes Lovecraft seem less like he's sticking out like a sore thumb, and more like he's a reminder of how racist the US was prior to the Civil Rights Movement. Hell, the US, like a lot of places in the world, is still kinda racist, which we should acknowledge alongside acknowledging that we're in (or at least, were in) a time where we had improved greatly as a broader society since that time period.
Lovecraft is a reminder of the uglier period of time that we can point at as an example of how not to view the world, which is a useful tool for examining society's views on subjects like race, religion, sexuality, and gender. But I feel that too many people act like he was an overwhelming exception, rather than a pretty blatant demonstration of the rule.
A lot of people tend to forget that, during his lifetime, certain things he said that we now look back at with disgust were pretty normal. This was a time period that was dominated by biological racialism as the leading view in regards to the biological differences between "the whites" and "the colors." It was a time that, historically speaking, still had people alive who were there when the Emancipation Proclamation was drafted and put into effect. It was recent history that black people were granted some level of basic freedoms, but it was also an era where any ethnic minorities (and the Irish) were treated like dogwater, because people were just used to being bigoted. If you grow up in a society where bigoted views were commonplace, you're likely going to share those views until you are exposed to broader set of perspectives.
Lovecraft himself, especially in his twilight years, was a better person than he was when he wrote "Red Hook," having learned to be more accepting of others thanks to people broadening his horizons, bit by bit, and it's sort of a shame that he didn't live long enough to broaden them further.
To borrow a line of thought from, of all things, the Spider-Man Noir comics: this was a time where the concept of progressivism was white people reading black owned newspapers to feel more "socially aware of people with different viewpoints and backgrounds," but the minute those papers said something that made it seem like "the blacks were out of line," they'd kick up a massive stink, and it would get the papers shut down. It was an era of faux-progressivism being the broadest form of racial tolerance, and only small subsets of people were actually progressive.
This leads into the other important viewpoint to consider of the time: good ol' fashion racism. Particularly, we need to look at the Ku Klux Klan, and how they were at the time. The Klan, at least it's first iteration, was something that was, historically, formed as a result of the Civil War. This is the version of the Klan that was dying out by the time of Lovecraft's lifetime. However, there were still people who romanticized the Klan. Lovecraft himself even expressed some level of appreciation/fondness for the Klan, prior to the various acts committed by the second iteration soured his opinion of them in the 1920s.
One other key figure here was one Thomas Dixon Jr. This man may slip under the radars of some, but he is responsible for two key pieces of the second Klan's rise to power. Specifically, two books: "The Leopard's Spots: A Romance of the White Man's Burden - 1865-1900" and "The Clansman: A Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan." Dixon is a very significant White Supremacist, and his worldview was decidedly more caustic than most of what Lovecraft himself espoused in his lifetime. He even outlived Lovecraft, and saw his second book, "The Clansman," be one of the earliest examples of a literary work being adapted to film, with the infamous 1915 film, "The Birth of a Nation," being an adaptation of said novel. And if you know anything about the history of the Klan, you know that said movie was like lighting a fresh powder keg of radical racist ideology, and served as the definitive point in time when you could safely say "the Klan is back," at least until 1944. The current iteration of the Klan was founded in 1972, in case you were curious.
It can not be understated just how much of a big deal the works of Dixon, and it's film adaptation, affected people of the time. It is one of the few instances where one can unequivocally say fiction had a direct effect on real life. And this was only really possible for a single reason: because America was still, very much, deeply racist, it just got better at hiding it for a while.
This also leads into the fact that American Racism and Anti-Semitism of the time Lovecraft walked the Earth served as direct inspiration for how the Nazis handled their treatment of Jews during the Holocaust. In particular, Jim Crow Laws, which were very much in effect during said lifetime of Lovecraft, were a big source of inspiration for Hitler and the others in charge of the Third Reich. In fact, America's treatment of Jews during the time leading up to the Holocaust was only marginally better than how they viewed black people, and that isn't saying much. America only flipped into caring about Jews when it was a convenient way for them to rally their troops for WWII. It's wild to think now, given how America is currently running defense for Israel at present, but that's a whole hornet's nest I'm not gonna touch right now, thank you very much.
All of this is to say: many things that people bring up about Lovecraft in passing, like the name of his cat, for instance, would have been seen as "acceptable" at the time. The N-Word was very much still part of vernacular used by a lot of people, because use of it didn't really become seen as truly problematic until the 1960s. So while we all go "he named his cat WHAT!?" today, back then, it probably got, at best, an awkward uncomfortable chuckle. This isn't to say there weren't people who would have taken offense to it, because there were some genuine progressives... but this is also an era where racial discrimination was seeing a massive resurgence in prevalence because of things like "The Birth of a Nation."
While it is undeniable that Lovecraft was especially vocal about his views, especially amongst his peers, he was, by no means, "especially racist" for his time. Like, in a world where Dixon existed, whom I will remind you was an avowed White Supremacist, who's work sparked the resurgence of the KKK, and whom was very open bigot who couldn't have his mind changed, whom also lived nearly a decade longer than Lovecraft... yeah I think Lovecraft was pretty tame.
Even amongst his peers, Lovecraft was far from the only one who held some racist views. Robert E. Howard, for instance, wrote "The Children of the Night," which was also pretty damn racist. While Howard would improve as a person to a point, even writing characters of color in a better light than Lovecraft ever did, he still did resort to a lot of orientalist and tribalistic stereotypes to convey points about his non-white characters. This isn't to say Howard was as racist as his friend, but he was by no means a saint.
Again, the point of all of this is to address the nonsense point that Lovecraft was some turbo-racist compared to his contemporaries. Even after his death, racist authors still got their work published, and racism was still very integrated into American culture of the time. Shortly before his death, Dixon's work inspired Margaret Mitchell to write "Gone With the Wind" in 1936, which romanticizes the KKK and is a pretty racist book all things considered. The film adaptation of that movie, while a cinematic classic (I do firmly believe it's worth watching in a historical context, at the very least), and deeply flawed conceptually under a modern critical lens, it was basically as progressive as you could realistically get in the 30s without upsetting the faux progressives of the era. It made many changes to that original novel to remove the more overtly racist stuff, and the KKK worship, because the director notably was a progressive by the standards of the time. Even the fact that it was the film where the first black woman ever won an Oscar, that fact also carried with it a ton of caveats motivated by the racism of the time.
Lovecraft was, in a lot of ways, a by-product of the era he lived, which was in the midst of a reluctant shift towards racial equality, which wouldn't really get kicked into high gear until nearly 30 years after his death. He was racist, and he did hold views that I myself find abhorrent, as I'm sure many of you do. And there's no denying that his work is colored by that worldview in some capacity, and that recognizing that and being bothered by it, at least to a point, is fine. But let's stop pretending the man's worldview was somehow this anomaly even by the standards of his lifetime, because it really, really wasn't. I'm so bloody tired of the narrative that he's some bright red racist sore, when the entire country he lived in was still knee deep in the muck of racism. The Emancipation Proclamation didn't suddenly erase racial prejudices, it just gave black people (and other minority groups) an inch of progress that they used to fight for the mile they eventually took 100 years afterwards. Lovecraft's worldviews changed slowly over the course of his life, and we can see that in how he regarded Jewish people in the closing chapters of his life, thanks to interactions with Jewish people over time.
I feel, had he been able to properly have a prolonged dialogue with other minority groups, at least knowingly, he would have further opened his mind to a healthier perspective on the subject. Most actual "turbo racists" don't leave themselves open to change like that. Given that R.H. Barlow, one of his close friends, and the person he wanted to execute his literary estate, was a closeted gay man, whom would later take his own life out of fear of being outed, I do think Lovecraft would have been deeply affected by Barlow's death had he lived to see it. I think this because he showed a capacity for growth and change in ways that matter... so it always frustrates me that people act like he was this irredeemable super racist, who was somehow amongst the worst of his contemporary man. Saying things like that erases the very racist culture that Lovecraft was, like it or not, a byproduct of. The only reason we can say anything like "he was very racist, even by the standards of the time" is because too many people are willfully ignorant of the reality of the time period, because those who lived past it desperately want to pretend it "wasn't that bad" because of the innately selfish concept of American Exceptionalism that persists to this day. And before anyone says I'm somehow unpatriotic or whatever, I'm Canadian (and yes, I'm very aware of the racist parts of my own country's history, it's just not especially relevant to this post).
In short: The phrase "Lovecraft was especially racist, even by the standards of the time," or however you want it said, is deeply ignorant of the world and time period in which he lived. America was deeply racist for the time, the KKK saw a resurgence during said lifetime, and minorities of all types, such as the Jewish population, were just used as game pieces for patriotic propaganda when it was convenient. He was just a notably vocal racist, and even then, it was mostly through letters, and not every day conversation like a lot of his contemporary men and women.
With that, I'm hopeful this post is at least seen for what it is, and not what it isn't, despite how caustic the topic in question can get. Realistically, I just wanted to put this rant somewhere, because I've argued this point with people so much, and I just want a place where my thoughts could even be somewhat understood. I genuinely hope that this post was even halfway decently written, especially due to it's subject matter. All I really ask is that you remain civil and polite when discussing this in the comments with me, because I'm just gonna say I'm just going to stop responding to caustic responses to the topic. I really wish I didn't have to say that, but I want to cover my ass a little given the subject matter. So... yeah... that's about it.
EDIT: Wow, okay, so this took off pretty quickly. I'm dead fucking tired as I write this bit here, but I wanted to quickly clarify a few things, because I think some comments have misunderstood what I'm trying to accomplish, or have taken this post to be something it isn't. This is sort of off the cuff (again, super tired), so bare with me. I'll make an edit again after I sleep if I need to.
This post is in NO WAY trying to say you should excuse Lovecraft's extremely prejudicial views! I think his views suck too! The point of this post is ALSO NOT trying to say he was in no way at fault for his views. Everyone is personally accountable for their views/beliefs, and how they allow society around them to influence those views/beliefs. He was still a shitty person in this respect, and while I do believe he showed a capacity for growth and change with enough of a push from those in his life, he was still a bigot, and there's no way around that. I can't stress enough that I acknowledge this fact of his life, and am in no way trying to suggest he wasn't. Again: I am NOT trying to say it's okay for him to have these beliefs because others in his time did! It obviously doesn't excuse them.
I'm NOT trying to say you shouldn't be allowed to judge him by whatever standards. If you want to, I can't stop you. I think it's fair to look back at someone and say "yeah they sucked." I just think the "why" of his shitty beliefs is important to consider when passing said judgement. If you disagree, that's totally fine!
I want to emphasize that I'm aware that people in his life did push back against his views, and regularly challenged them. This is something that lead to change in him as a person, however small that ended up being before his death. He didn't improve a ton or anything, but I do believe that his interactions with his contemporaries and friends did help make him less vile over time. It's something that has been shown to change the minds of other bigots, so I think it applies to Lovecraft... or would have had he not died.
I can't stress enough that my mentions of racism of his time is not me saying "literally everyone else was just as bad" or whatever. Good god, NO! There were civil rights groups, and there was pushback against things like "The Birth of a Nation" during the time. However, it can't be understated that just because there were non-racist people in the time period, the silent majority of the population was complicit in the mistreatment of non-white people. Racial segregation and prejudice still existed. Jim Crow laws were still a thing. A lot of people (again: not all, but a lot of people) still would often put on the face of a civilized progressive until a person of color "went out of line." This is an undeniable fact of the time period. Racism was extremely prevalent in the early 20th Century, and to act like it wasn't is whitewashing history. Does this somehow absolve Lovecraft of his sins? NO! But he was far from the only one paving the road to hell in this instance, he was just one of the more vocal ones doing so.
I have to acknowledge that because we have THOUSANDS of letters showcasing who Lovecraft was, it does color our perception of him more so than a lot of his contemporaries. We have more access to who Lovecraft was than a lot of other people from his time, and as such, we have more ways to judge him. This is a fair and valid point. It's hard not to look at the letters and judge him for their contents. But at the same time, I think it's also fair to say that you should still look at the context of his environment and the culture he was living in, because that, undeniably, has an effect on how people think and act.
Hopefully that clears a few things up. If not, I might edit in some further clarifications or something I dunno.