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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 9604561" data-attributes="member: 18">I'm genuinely confused as to why you're saying "whether" here - they both were, there's no debate to be had. The only question is surely to what degree they were. With REH I'd say "probably slightly less than most white Americans of his era" and with Lovecraft I'd say "so insanely racist he's literally calling Scottish people subhuman, let alone other non-WASPs"). Sorry not trying to be difficult, it just made ??? appear above my head, as it were!Agree. Also agree that REH's letters show more racism (but also weirdly opposition to "too much" racism*, I seem to recall him telling Lovecraft to cool it at one point!) than most of his actual work.What's funny with Lovecraft's racism for me is that when I read the books at like 13/14 in the 1990s, it was literally incomprehensible. Like I thought he was talking about actual non-human-but-humanlike beings, not just being incredibly, radioactively racist about human beings. It wasn't until I got to the story with an Irish or Scottish guy who was being portrayed as subhuman that I finally got that this was just racism of a type and on a scale I'd never previously encountered. And it remained so bonkers and totally outdated (I think even in his era it was outdated) that it was somehow almost less offensive than some more pernicious/insidious and modern racist ideas in other, much more recent, books.* = I mean this is a classic genre of letter from the 1930s, Nietzsche's editor, who literally supported a political party called the Anti-Semites (by themselves!) and whose platform was pure anti-Semitism, thought Hitler was a bit too anti-Semitic for her liking.</blockquote>

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