Hot take on my end: Lovecrafts work wouldn't have been as effective if he wasn't a racist. You need a deep seated paranoia and fear to make what he did. And despite being his target of fear, I find his quality of work to have values that trancend race and class paradoxically. Despite being a massive racist, the guys work resonates with me deeply on a values level in the feeling of isloation and lonliness.
Thats the power of art over pure propaganda.
Not only that, but a number of mythos fiction actually challenges Lovecraft's racism and wouldn't be able to do that if he wasn't racist.
Lovecraft Country wouldn't exist if Lovecraft wasn't racist. Neither would stories like "The Litany of Earth" or "The Black Brat of Dunwich" which depict Lovecraft's monsters as the victims.
("The Black Brat" is also technically a body horror story. Imagine what it must be like
to be a yog-spawn and
not wanting to destroy the world.)
What I find interesting is that the torch & pitchforks crowd ignore the handful of positive depictions of minorities, such as the doctor in "Cool Air" and the elderly Black couple living in the old Curwen house in the "Strange Case of Charles Dexter Ward."
Or the minorities keeping the thing from the Shining Trapezohedron at bay with nightly vigils.
But of course racists see racism everywhere.
Plenty of Lovecraft's stories, like "The Dunwich Horror" and "Beyond the Wall of Sleep," depict white hillbillies as subhuman vermin too.
I am watching the show right now. First question: are American movie makers capable of making movies with black folks without making it all about racism?
I find the view of the past here bizarre. Do they really think that if som black people went to the wrong town in the fifties white people would immediately start shooting? Or that virtually every conversation that black people had was about racism?
It's ironic, because there's a "
Race Bechdel Test" that exists specifically to prevent movie makers from doing precisely this.
In order to pass the test, you need to have two or more named black characters talk to each other about something other than whites/racism. It's a very low bar, too.