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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 8499087" data-attributes="member: 18">Yeah, I mean when I first read Lovecraft aged like 11-12, I didn't even recognise some of it as racism, because it was so extreme, and kinda sci-fi that I assumed he wasn't describing actual human, but some sort of proto-humans or nonhumans, which errr, later (13-14-ish) I realized was kind of what he was saying, but by then I'd read one where a Scottish person was described in very similar terms, very clearly intended to be subhuman and I was just like "Oooooh okay I see..." and I realized fully at that point he was truly nuts about race.It's still harmful (esp. to people routinely exposed to that kind of racism - for me it was merely educational - I'd never had it implied that my being Scottish made me "an inferior race" before and to know some people had thought that was interesting, esp. as it was clearly a dead attitude outside of the odd insane person (where it often reeks of jealousy) - even by the early 20th century in Britain people had changed from hiding Scottish roots to seeing them as a source of pride - not so in wherever Lovecraft came from I guess) and worth acknowledging as wild and untrammelled racism, but despite being more extreme, it wasn't alarming the same way some of the stuff in the Narnia books was, which seemed like hectoring and demanding that you agree with him "or else", and that was bad enough with Aslan but got into full-creepy territory with the Calormenes and so on. Even as a kid I was frowning pretty hard.</blockquote>

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