Blufftown Barbarian <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>From: "Rusty Burke" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>To: "REH Fans" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>Subject: Re: [rehfans] Howard and racism
>Date: Thu, 03 Jan 2002 13:40:55 -0500
>
>[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>
>Funny, I agree with this part....your conclusion...so how do you go to such
>a logical end but HAVE to make a snide snotty remark about "us" not having
>experienced racism???
>
>Because virtually no white person I have ever met has ever been truly a
>"victim" of racism (and virtually every Howard fan I have met or
>corresponded with has been white -- Charles Saunders, a notable exception,
>saw the racism in Howard's work but accepted it for what it was, a product
>of the time and place). At worst we may have been in fear for our personal
>safety a time or two, but we can beat a hasty retreat back to "our" kind.
>I have a good frien! d who was the son of missionaries, and who grew up
>literally fighting for his survival in godforsaken places around northern
>Africa. *He* experienced real racism (or more properly, ethnic hatred).
>People who have been treated rudely by African-American clerks at the DMV
>have not. Mind you, I am not about to get into a pissing match with you
>over how *real* your own experience of racism has been, since I do not know
>anything about it. If you have truly experienced racism on the same
>everyday level that blacks, Hispanics, Asians, Native Americans, and other
>non-whites do, then you have every right to include yourself out of my
>"us". But I have been around Howard fandom for a while, met a lot of folks
>around the country, and there are precious damned few who can claim any
>kind of "victimization" on the basis of race or ethnicity.
>
>Rusty
Ask someone that lives in Memphis, Tennessee. T! here is an unbelievable
level of reverse racism in this crappy little town. God, what a boring
subject.
Dennis
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Send and receive Hotmail on your mobile device: http://mobile.msn.comAye, i second that, I am not white, and yet i can still appreciate REH's work for what it is: Good Storytelling, If Shadows In Zamboula had pitted Conan against a group of 'fat, buck-toothed, yellow-skinned chinks' would i have liked it as much? Maybe, maybe not Would I have liked REH if he believed that i should be dead? Hell no, THEN would i like his story Shadows in Zamboula with the fact that REH himself didn't want me reading it? Probably not. But i doubt it would truly affect my thoughts on his stories, which is that they are good yarns, and good reads and i'd read them anyway. When it boils down to it, that's what matters, i was on a 'Catcher in the Rye' website not too long ago, and there was a problem with JD Salinger being a recluse and his stories being less likeable because of it, well, as someone said 'Pay no attention to the guy behind the curtain' I think the less we look at these details about REH, the mor! e we can find ourselves appreciating his work for the qualities it offers. The poor man is under six feet of dirt and there you can't get farther from society than that. So lets just leave him alone. I know it's an REHfans list, but if we're his fans, that's mainly cuz we're fans of his work, thus we should look less at his personal life. I understand that we should acknowledge where he was coming from, i do, but it shouldn't be all we're doing, nor should we try to force ourselves into believing he was a man of our time. If we were this nitpicky about all the good works, and people who wrote them, then we wouldn't have classics from Mark Twain, Homer, Charles Dickens, JD Salinger, Ernest Hemmingway, hell if we were this tight with who wrote the books and what they did or what their characters did, then we could just as easily take apart the BIBLE. What i'm basically saying is let's analyse the man's work, not th! e worker. I hope i haven't offended anyone, i know a lot of you out there feel that we must understand the author and who he was before understanding his books, and by all means go ahead, that was my 2 cents worth and i'm not taking it back.
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