But he clearly liked the English both as an idea and as an ethnicity. His dislike was reserved for those of particular ethnicities.
There are really two issues: was he particularly racist, given his context? The answer is “yes,” but that’s not necessarily relevant to his work. Except that the other question is: Did that impact his work? And the answer there is also “yes.” It was a core part of much of his work. Which is the really important bit because it acts as a weight upon the page, warping readings of his stories. Although I find that it makes it interesting as it potentially creates a radically different interpretation, as I mentioned in a comment above.
Yeah, Lovecraft was, in much of his “cosmic horror” just articulating was some of that new-fangled science was saying. Some of the rest of that was about immanent existential threats to the human species, but as Charles Stross has so neatly pointed out, that’s also completely old hat for those of us who grew up during the cold war…
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I’ve always thought that you need to be young and impressionable to receive his weird tales in the spirit that they were written. But I’m sure that if you’re a lover of the genre you can still find his writing fascinating, its a similar thing with people who dislike the Beatles and try to dismiss them as unoriginal.
Yes, the fact that they influenced everybody else means that you may… wait no, just no, if you don’t like it, fine, don’t give me reasons why you don’t like something that’s meant to have such a visceral response, I’ll appreciate it for myself thank you very much! 
It is an unacknowledged male concern (And a source of many chauvinistic attitudes I’m sure) that the worst thing a male (for whatever value of male you wish to insert) can be called, is useless.
“Award-winning horror writer David Nickle has been repeatedly frustrated in his attempts to have a frank and serious discussion of HP Lovecraft’s undeniable racism.” Is this not possibly because everyone is bored to tears with this particular discussion? I don’t think I’ve seen any mainstream discussion of his work that didn’t also include a frank and serious discussion of HP Lovecraft’s undeniable racism. If he’s looking to raise awareness about this pressing and current issue, then the horse has bolted and died of old age.
Read some Robert E Howard stories if you’re in the mood to be outraged (e.g. Skull Face, shocking and unreadably offensive today), read some Hemingway even, I don’t really understand why Lovecraft in particular comes under so much scrutiny. For my part, I would quite like to read a mainstream article that has something new (maybe positive, if that’s not asking too much) to say about this enduringly popular, much-loved writer other than “did u know Lovecraft was racist?” Yes, so does everybody, and no that does not affect my enjoyment of his work.
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I’m glad everyone went out of their way to respond to the individual who joined today to downplay racism as a form of intolerance and compare it to smoking.
Way to go massive comment thread.
You mean people that wrote in the lifetime of my grandparents is “long ago?”
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Why would you start with the last book for a series? Isn’t that guaranteed to confuse?
It changes how many of us read his stories knowing that he real world cognates for degenerate cultists were American Blacks and Jews, among others. Maybe that doesn’t bother you or you just don’t think about it.
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My mom absolutely loves Lovecraft’s work and introduced me to it (via her paperbacks) as a child.
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Well yeah, why would you ever invent gods to revile if you had never seen the dark heart of man?
The library was selling off worn-out books, I was travelling soon, I thought it would be interesting and didn’t know it was part of a series.
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I feel like it sort of misses the point to respond to the “product of his time” argument by saying that other people at the time weren’t as bad. It’s not like everyone in a given “time” is exposed to exactly the same ideological influences, so we can say that differences in their adult beliefs are solely due to differences in “character”. If someone said “those Aztecs must have been evil people for doing all that human sacrifice” and another person pointed out all the cultural influences which would have led a typical Aztec to believe these things were necessary and proper, would it make sense for the first person to respond “yeah, but there were plenty of other neighboring groups at that time that didn’t engage in human sacrifice on a massive scale, so that just goes to show the Aztecs must have been especially evil individuals!” Different people in the same time and general geographic area can still be subjected to very different ideological streams in their formative years, and while it’s true not all white people back then held Lovecraft’s ideas, “scientific racism” and eugenics were still very popular and mainstream ideas in his time.
To get a little more philosophical, maybe my dislike of loudly condemning people of the past has to do with the fact that I don’t believe in free will, so I think everyone’s actions (even, say, Hitler’s) are ultimately just a product of external forces outside of them, they have no more ultimate choice in the matter than an animal killing on instinct. Moral condemnation can serve a practical purpose insofar as it can change people’s behavior for the better, but that’s all. So there seems little point in condemning bad actions or beliefs of dead people unless there is a danger that they will influence living people who admire them (like Hitler’s influence on modern neo-Nazis and other anti-semites), or allow people to mentally paper over historical injustices that still have an influence on the present (like hagiography of Thomas Jefferson which ignores the fact that he was a slaveowner, and allow knee-jerk ‘patriots’ to avoid the cognitive dissonance that may come from thinking about America’s ‘original sin’ of slavery). But in this case, my impression is that while Lovecraft has plenty of admirers, the majority are aware that he was a racist, and of those who are aware of this, pretty much everyone finds these beliefs to be unpleasant and antiquated rather than thinking “hey, if Lovecraft was into it, maybe I should give this racism thing a chance!”
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I believe your question follows Betteridge’s Law of Headlines.
From memory Nyarlathotep’s “black man” form is specifically described as having black skin but Caucasian features, and occasionally having hoofed feet. This would make him fit early modern descriptions of the Devil, e.g. Stubbe Peter’s claim that a black man gave him the wolf pelt that turned him into a werewolf. I expect that associating Nyaralathotep with the Devil was indeed Lovecraft’s primary intent here. That this specific instance may be a poor example of racism in his writing doesn’t excuse him though, because hoo-boy was he racist in plenty of other places.
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Nope. I, for one, am bored with it.
Mind you, that doesn’t mean I want to keep HP on the award. While I enjoy his writing, I would not consider the man so important to the genre that he should make it onto an award. That he’s a known racist is only adding to the reasons to change the award.
However, accept that HP was a racist and move on, IMHO.
I think the main reason people discuss this at all is that they feel guilty for enjoying something that is (however loosely) associated with something they know is bad and to be avoided. When people dismiss HP’s racism, it is, I think, not because they don’t see it, but because they want to have a rationale that allows them to continue enjoying his writing.
Of course, enjoying his writing is not the same as agreeing with his racism; it should therefore be an entirely guilt-free experience to read his stories. The crux of the problem is that this kind of distinction doesn’t tend to survive long in emotional discussions, and any discussion about any form of injustice tends to get emotional fairly quickly.
So, yes, I’m very bored with the entire thing because it has very little to do with HP’s writing, and very much to do with everyone’s personal motivations.
I mean, why not open up the question again whether fantasy as a genre is inherently racist? There are few other genres that assign character flaws based on race or species quite so casually and blatantly.
His idea of “Englishness” was as realistic as Stephanie Meyer’s idea of Vampires though. 
I think that holding fictional narratives to task for something we can’t yet deal with in real life is fundamentally flawed though - and as you say, the Mythos simply wouldn’t exist without his warped descriptions of other races.
Accepting that they are depictions of an earlier time may help us to rid the present of those ideas though. Maybe. Perhaps. We can hope.
Let’s face it, the Jennifer Morgue (Charlie Stross) takes Lovecraft’s racism and Fleming’s sexism, and builds a new world - without losing any of the imagination that both writers brought to the field.
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I wasn’t condemning “people of the past”, I was condemning the worship of some people of the past; people who, when you look at them closely, really didn’t have anything interesting or innovative to say. Me, I’m usually impressed by independent thought, by someone who takes the time to be informed before having an opinion, and then proceeds from there.
In other words: who would be your hero, eh? Ronald Reagan or Stanislav Petrov?
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Actually, I think that proves my point even better. Art SHOULD be taken in context. What Duchamp was trying to do with the urinal has to be taken into the context of the times and the art movements.
But at the same time, if the art doesn’t hold on on it’s own, then perhaps it isn’t “good”. For example, you are more likely to like an artwork knowing it was drawn by Picasso or someone famous. Hey, if so-and-so did it, it must be good. But I think that is flawed. I think the art should stand on its own and weak work is often propped up by the artist’s prestige.
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