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Message: <blockquote data-quote="MGibster" data-source="post: 8241250" data-attributes="member: 4534">The Lovecraft works that are overtly racist are pretty darned easy to spot even if you're not reading with a critical eye. When reading "Herbert West-Reanimator" the racism stands up and announces itself with the name of the black cat and Lovecraft's description of the black boxer.  Even in high school, when I had a decidedly less critical eye, I couldn't help but notice the racism in "Reanimator" as well as "The Horror at Red Hook."  Some of his other works are a bit more subtle.  The first time I read The Shadow Over Innsmouth it wasn't obvious to me that it was about miscegenation largely because the concept wasn't on my radar at the time.  At the time, I interpreted the story to be about the fear of insanity running down generational lines.  And part of the problem is that most modern readers aren't afraid of the same things Lovecraft was so it's very easy to interpret some of his stories differently than they might have been interpreted back in 1925.  Bram Stoker's Dracula has the same problem. How many of us were horrified by the wanton behavior of Lucy once she became the Bloofur Lady? Very few because we tend to look at old stories through our own modern lens.In 1927, John Carter was lynched on the outskirts of Little Rock, Arkansas, his body was dragged behind a vehicle past city hall to the corner of 9th and Broadway, the center of African American business, where he was hanged from a light pole, and immolated with the fuel being provided by the pews the mob, an estimated 5,000 people strong, took from the nearby Bethel AME church.  For the next three hours the mob controlled the area until Governor Martineau called up the Arkansas National Guard to drive them away.  The next day a boy was detained by police on Main Street for selling photos of Mr. Carter's corpse for 15 cents.  Spoiler alert:  Nobody was ever convicted of or even brought to trial for murdering Mr. Carter.  Rather than fantasizing about gassing minorities, white Americans were actually killing them.  In 1921, whites leveled 35 blocks of Tulsa, Oklahoma and while the official death count at the time was only 36, a 2001 commission estimated anywhere between 75-300 people were killed.  I think the police chief was charged with failure to stop a riot and something else but nobody was imprisoned for murder or arson.  Many Americans participated in, approved of, or were indifferent to the lynching of African Americans.  To put it another way, you don't lynch an average of one person a week for more than 30 years without widespread approval.  But how does this all relate to gaming?  We tend to take material from the past and interpret it in a manner that makes us comfortable today.  When I run Call of Cthulhu I borrow elements from Lovecraft to be sure but it's not like my adventures revolve around fears of miscegenation because, well, even if it wasn't offensive, I'm not horrified by it.  I'm with you on that one.  I read Dracula for the first time about ten years ago and it was an annotated version.  It was useful for a variety of reasons helping me better understand what I was reading.  I know they have annotated versions of Lovecraft's work, but since so much of what he wrote is in the public domain it can be difficult sorting through all the versions that are currently available either online or in dead tree form.  But I think it's well worth the effort.</blockquote>

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