Re: For a Change of Pace, an Angry Book Review
Lovecraft was absolutely a crazy racist. But I tend to try and take stories as stories. Indeed, one of the things I disagree with The Lovecraft Reread about is their interpretation of "The Shadow Over Innsmouth", or rather, the interpretation in the comments, some of which seems to see it as a story that's just propaganda saying "don't get together with people of other races". But it's really about these fish people who live under the sea and predate humanity and who are more advanced than us, think of possibly malevolent advanced aliens but like, right here. They want human sacrifices, and they want to interbreed with humans to make more of their own kind.
I won't ruin the end but let's just say that narrative gets ambivalent. Anyway, sure you could read it as straightforward anti-miscegenation propaganda if you want. But I don't see why the author's personal views should dominate the in-universe story, so to speak. Also, there are a lot of classic authors who turn out, on inspection, to be pretty racist, IIRC Dickens was fairly anti-Semitic, among other things.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racism_in … es_Dickens
That's not to knock Dickens, or excuse Lovecraft. Rather, what I'm saying is that I'm perfectly willing to read stories as stories, rather than dragging in outside stuff. If a character or story is racist, I take that as the character or story being racist. That having been said, I'm not slamming people for not being into problematic authors, though I will say one virtue of Lovecraft is that unlike some other racist authors, Ayn Rand for example, he's not trying to tell us how to think or live.
But especially personally, yeah, he was terrifyingly racist. The cool thing is, I don't see a lot of people who are into him trying to cover it up. Indeed, there's an introductory essay in the first collection of his I ever read, "Dagon and Other Macabre Tales", where a passage from a letter of his about people in NYC is compared with a passage in his story "The Lurking Fear", the passage from the NYC letter being horribly racist and the passage from "The Lurking Fear" being more about, well something else because again I'm not trying to spoil stuff, though TLF isn't one of his greatest stories, by any means.
The thing people forget though, and I think this speaks to Dark's point, is that the early twentieth century was just pretty weird, all round. For example, many people don't know this, but Hitler praised Henry Ford in Mein Kampf as being a huge source of his ideas about race. Eugenics was pretty huge and pretty well-regarded by a chunk of the scientific community. Again, this is not to excuse Lovecraft, so far as I know he was an uber-racist, even for his times.
But still, there was just so so much of that kind of thing around back then. Check out some minstrel recordings on old cylinder records some time, if you feel like some disturbing examples, or the category called, and I'm sorry in advance but that's what they're called, "coon songs". They were hugely popular in the late 1800s and early 1900s, they couldn't publish enough of them, and even some famous composers like Irving Berlin wrote some. I got morbidly fascinated by it all when I found out they exist as actual recordings, because you hear so much about minstrel shows and all, but we have no real idea of what they're like. The recordings, though made when they were seriously declining, give us a tangible glimpse of history we usually only read about.
http://cylinders.library.ucsb.edu/
I warn you, if you search for either category, you will hear the n-word more times in one song than you've probably heard it in your entire life. I exhagerate for effect, of course, but not necessarily by much. The sad thing is, some of them are pretty catchy, as songs go naturally, not in terms of their lyrical content.
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