Yeah,most authors reflected the casual racism of that era, but we tend to remember the ones who were more in the Abolitionist camp (Thoreau, Emerson, Darwin, Melville, Conrad, Twain) and that’s not just because of some post-modern academic PC conspiracy.
But we still love HL Mencken, because there’s one racist in every wood pile I guess. And even Edgar Rice Burroughs was crazy racist in his assumption that an inbred English lord orphaned in the jungle was so genetically superior to African tribesman that in battle Tarzan could brush them off like gnats.
