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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Guest&nbsp; 85555" data-source="post: 9604574">Because that is usually what the topic becomes in twenty page flame wars. It is usually people debating whether they were racist, and if so, how racist were they. Were their works racist and, if so, how racist were their works. I think Lovecraft was an old fashioned Yankee England Racist. I think Howard had racist views. I don't think either were the worst examples from their era, but they certainly had views that we would call racist today. But I also think both of them had evolving views and that it is a mistake to read this into everything they wrote And to be clear my point wasn't to litigate this. I think we'd need to sit down and sift through countless letters to get a clear image. I am reading letters from Lovecraft to two women he knew and the book is hundreds of pages (and just one of many books of letters that exist). The picture I am getting is a of a very complicated person and I don't know how I would map out fully his views on race against Howards. This type of racism almost doesn't even exist anymore, but we had remnants of it when I grew up in the Boston area. It is sharply different from teh racism I encountered on the west coast (which was a lot times more intense, and oriented more around broad racial groups). Lovecraft is concerned with stuff that comes out of racialist science and ideas about breeding and bloodlines. If you are are English or Nordic, he sees you as inferior. And he is weirdly nerdy about it (I think him being a bit of a promo-geek, really amplifies a lot of his ideas in a strange way). Plus he was neurotic as hell. I think it is so specific it can be kind of hard to take seriously at times. This is what the term Yankee really refers to in New England, originally, someone who could trace their heritage to English settlers. If you were part of a subsequent wave of immigration, which most of us were by the time I was a kid, then you were not part of that elite. Again, it was mostly faded by that point. But I still remember seeing it, and my grandfather had plenty of stories about it. This is one of the reasons why I mentioned downplaying racism to build up Howard or Lovecraft as more racist for their times. Yes there were people who didn't go along with this stuff and how actively fought against it, but we are talking about a period in time that produced the Holocaust. So we shouldn't minimize the racism that was circulating in circles that reached even the highest office in the US, at this time. Some of the worst racism of that era was coming out of science and academia and that gave it a lot of mainstream creditability</blockquote>

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