Yet another pseudo-scholarly article on the racism of Howard Phillips Lovecraft, trying to sweep him into the dust bin of history because of his racism. And yet again, it falls into the same fallacy of almost all those that went before it. Yes, HPLs racism was ugly, but completely typical, so the man of his times defense holds. To claim otherwise is to ignore his times, when racial segregation was the unchallenged law of the land; racial intermarriage was often, and uncontroversially, punishable with a jail sentence; the KKK enjoyed its greatest, national, political legitimacy; and the most racist major motion picture in American history, Birth of a Nation, was also the most profitable and popular, motion picture in the world made. Heres a simple test, starting with Obama and working backwards, who was the first American President who did not public make explicitly racist statements? Or more to the point, how far do you have to go back to find when explicitly racist public statements were controversial enough to deny a man the Presidency? Answer: Dwight D. Eisenhower was our first convincingly un-racist President, so before 1953, racism was so normal, no one was publicly shamed for it. Before Eisenhower, even Presidents who challenged the KKK and fought for civil rights, like Truman, were unapologetically racist. (Hell, loud-and-proud racist Truman had a better civil rights record than not-racist Eisenhower.) This repeated fallacy is frustrating because it speaks of a profound ignorance that Americans have about themselves; this used to be a very different country, and not as nice a country, and in the very recent past. Ignorance of America’s virtuous transformations breeds an easily-exploitable cynicism that is corrosive to both left and right. It causes the historically ignorant left to try to prune our literature of not only HPL, but Mark Twain, who was a hero of egalitarianism. On the right, it encourages degenerate legal philosophies like “originalism” and a reactionary “texturalism” and the declaration that the constitution is “dead, dead, dead” (as declared by Supreme Court Justice Scalia). The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there -- L. P. Hartley racialicious/2014/05/28/the-n-word-through-the-ages-the-madness-of-hp-lovecraft/
Posted on: Mon, 19 Jan 2015 14:52:49 +0000