Read on Twitter
Lovecraft, racism, and "the man of his time" argument. A thread.
If you read an online argument about H. P. Lovecraft and his racism, someone at some point will point out that everybody was racist at the time, and that people need to deal with that.
For those familiar with it, the "man of his time" argument means that Lovecraft's racism is somehow excusable or acceptable because it was no different than what was common at the time.
Here's why that's bullshit.
Here's why that's bullshit.
It IS true that Lovecraft (1890-1937) lived during the nadir of race relations in the United States. Segregation was legal. Lost Cause sentiment caused a spur of revisionist takes on Reconstruction, and in the popular media The Clansman became a stage play and then a film
The Birth of a Nation (1915), which directly inspired the second incarnation of the Ku Klux Klan. Lynching was still prevalent in the United States, especially in the Deep South, and the US had colonial territories in Hawaii and the Philippines. Anti-immigrant sentiment caused
Congress to pass new legislation restricting immigration into the US, especially from Asia, and established a quota system which would remain in place for decades. The Nazi party rose to power in 1933 on policies of antisemitism...and so much more. The US was absolutely racist.
Lovecraft was not exceptional in this regard. Most of his prejudices - and they were many - were absolutely common during his lifetime. It is not a surprise that a white man that grew up in that society at that time was racist.
That's an explanation, not an excuse.
That's an explanation, not an excuse.
It is not true that at that time and in that place, that Lovecraft could not have aspired higher. That he HAD to be racist. We know this, because we have Lovecraft's letters where he discusses issues of race, equality, and prejudice with many correspondents.
Lovecraft rarely spoke about his prejudices in public. Even with his friends, he was typically circumspect, not wanting to give insult to his Jewish friends. And because the one time he did make it publicly known, he faced opposition: https://deepcuts.blog/2020/02/05/concerning-the-conservative-1915-by-charles-d-isaacson/
Among Lovecraft's friends could be counted James F. Morton, who was a proponent of racial equality and an early member of the NAACP who had authored a tract against race prejudice. J. Vernon Shea argued with HPL about the rise of the Nazis. His own wife, Sonia H. Greene,
in her memoir reminded him that she herself was a Jewish immigrant, and later claimed that Lovecraft's prejudices were a reason for the failure of their marriage.
https://deepcuts.blog/2020/06/17/the-private-life-of-h-p-lovecraft-1985-by-sonia-h-davis/
So Lovecraft was exposed to different points of view.
https://deepcuts.blog/2020/06/17/the-private-life-of-h-p-lovecraft-1985-by-sonia-h-davis/
So Lovecraft was exposed to different points of view.
Lovecraft's views were also not static throughout his life. Some of the prejudices which were tolerated when he was a young man were challenged later in life, and in response to those challenges Lovecraft changed and revised his views. Travel and experience did lessen some of
his viewpoints - so that while he admired the ultra-nationalistic element of Hitler and the Nazi party, he decried their antisemitic policies as "unscientific" and against his own personal prejudices. The Nazis, for Lovecraft, were a line too far...in that regard.
"Unscientific" is the word to focus on. Lovecraft buttressed his prejudices, and the arguments he built up to defend those prejudices in letters with his more liberal friends, using scientific racialism. Except at the time he lived, the scientific basis for racism was already
being challenged; Lovecraft was forced to pick and choose anthropologists, putting his faith in those whose views supported his own prejudices (like Sir Arthur Keith) while decrying those who were disproving the same (like Franz Boas). All of which is in his letters.
Lovecraft's prejudices DID reflect the context of his life. They were common. They are not excusable...because they don't need to be excused. Lovecraft was not a secular saint of weird fiction, he was a human being, flawed as we all are flawed. His racism needs to be acknowledged
...and more than that, to be understood. To ignore his prejudices, to say that everybody had them, is to turn a blind eye to what Lovecraft actually believed, how and why he believed it, how it affected his life and maybe more importantly how it affected his fiction.
Because while Lovecraft is long dead, we still read his fiction today. We might still be reading his fiction in a hundred years. To say that Lovecraft was just "a man of his time" misses how that time affected him, how his views changed as events unfolded, how his relationships
shaped what he wrote and how he wrote it. Lovecraft didn't just sit down one day and write "Medusa's Coil," to give one example. There is a history to that story and the racism expressed in it that goes beyond Lovecraft himself. https://deepcuts.blog/2019/03/23/medusas-coil-1939-by-zealia-bishop-h-p-lovecraft/
To too many people, saying "everyone was racist back then" is a way to end the conversation. As if there is nothing more to be said. Which is bullshit. There's a lot more to be said!
Every reader has to come to terms with historical racism in their own way. Ignorance may be bliss for those who feel that they aren't affected by Lovecraft's racism...but it does affect us, all of us, sometimes in unexpected ways.
