Howie and Racism

Meta
Title:	Howie and Racism
Creator:	Leeman Kessler
Date(s):	September 12, 2014
Medium:	online
Fandom:	Cthulhu Mythos, Lovecraft fans, weird fiction fandom
Topic:	fandom's reluctance to discuss Lovecraft's racism
External Links:	on author's website
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Howie and Racism was an essay analysing reactions to Lovecraft's racism in fandom. It was written by the actor Leeman Kessler, who impersonates Lovecraft in his web series Ask Lovecraft. The essay started as two separate Facebook post that later were posted as a single unit at the Geekually Yoked website, "The World's Best Married Christian Geek Podcast" created by Leeman and his wife Rachel.

The posts were inspired by the fandom's reactions to the Salon article It's OK to admit that H.P. Lovecraft was racist.

Some Topics Discussed

• arguments that fans use to downplay Lovecraft's racism and why they don't work
• reasons why the fandom dislikes discussing Lovecraft's racism

Topics Discussed in the Comments

• why is Lovecraft's racism is criticized much more than that of other, similarly racist pulp authors
• discussions of Lovecraft's racism as a reflection of certain trends in the weird fiction fandom

The Essay

I just read over 300 comments from a Lovecraft page in response to the Salon article and I have Some Thoughts™ regarding what I view as the problematic responses that crop up again and again

Dead Horse: Did you know there are themes of suicide in Hamlet? That a topic comes up again and again is not a problematic thing. It suggests that new eyes are coming across Howie and bringing with them familiar questions. That these questions are seen as a nuisance is telling. It’s not enough that folks don’t want to participate in these conversations but they don’t want these conversations taking place in a space they share. Mind you, there is seldom the same level of vitriol aimed at the 1001st discussion about del Toro’s Mountains of Madness or lengthy rants about Derleth but somehow race is the one topic that has been answered perfectly and need never be returned to. Ever. Hmm…

I Just Read It for the Articles: These are the folks who don’t care that Howie was racist because they just like the stories. He could be a cannibal clown and it wouldn’t make Colour out of Space a worse story. It just isn’t relevant so why bring it up? I don’t buy that folks can separate artist from art and in Howie’s case I think there are two issues which really undercut this. One is that his racial views pervade his stories just as much as his Spenglerianism or his love of Machen and Poe. The other is that Howie himself is a draw for folks. There’s just as many deviantart portraits of his giant jaw as there are of Cthulhu. People watch my show because they’re interested in him as a man and not just as some invisible clock-maker who wrote some stories and disappeared. Maybe it’s just that he has a catchy name but he is as much a product and marketable asset as his monsters and his biography and his worldview are a part of that and can’t be excised.

Man of His Time: The issue that usually takes up the most digital ink. We can admit that he said and wrote racist things but how racist were they given his environment and shouldn’t we cut the old man some slack? He’s like a doddling grandmother who keeps talking about her darkie nurse stealing her china. This is really something of a side issue because it doesn’t matter if Howie was racist for his time. As pointed above, his racial views spill over into his stories and folks today have to decide how they feel about him. You can recognize DW Griffith as an important film maker and still be really bothered by Birth of a Nation. Howie in his writings supported the terrorism meted out against southern blacks and in one casual moment opined that the Indian subcontinent could use a little “fumigation and extirpation” to make it fit for civilization. These are troubling things to hear come out of a hero’s mouth or pen and folks should be allowed to be discomforted by it and given space to discuss it.

PC Thought Police: They’re here to take away our N-bombs. Folks who bring this issue up or who think Howie’s might not be the best face for the WFA inevitably get called PC and are accused of trying to ban Howie. In all my many discourses, I have not once seen anyone try to ban him. Folks have called him a poor writer and some have said his racism turns them off from reading him but not once have I heard it said that he shouldn’t be read, that his books should be pulled from libraries or bookstores, or that he should be boycotted. This is a boogieman and a strawman and a way for folks not interested in having this conversation take place to try to shut it down. In many ways it is ironic that folks screaming “thought police’ spend so much energy policing the conversations they don’t want to take place.

Love It or Leave It: And here is the most troubling issue. If you aren’t comfortable with Howie’s racism then just go. We don’t want you. This is really what I think is at the heart of the matter. There’s a notion that real fans don’t complain or make waves or bring this issue up and only newbies or interlopers trying to force their agenda do and they need to go away and let the adults get back to talking about how quaint a name Niggerman is for a cat. Consciously or not, this sends a message that Lovecraftian fandom shouldn’t be a safe place for people of colour or women. It should stay what it’s been: a boy’s club where we can fart and put up half-naked pictures of women covered in tentacles and not have to think about how white and male our membership is and whether or not our response to discussions of Howie’s racial views is somehow communicating that fandom doesn’t belong to those who don’t look and sound like us.

Why We Don’t Like to Discuss Lovecraft’s Racism

1) Liking the work or celebrating the legacy of a racist could imply that one approves of said racism.

2) Acknowledging and bemoaning Lovecraft’s racism might lead to Lovecraft losing his status in the canon and might even lead to him being banned altogether.

3) Discussing Lovecraft’s racism diminishes his market value and thus threatens the livelihood of numerous writers, artists, publishers, etc.

4) There are a non-zero number of folks who do not disapprove of his racism and indeed for whom it is a feature not a bug.

5) Lovecraft’s legacy might very well be an artificial one built up and inflated by a network of fanboys and anything that diminishes his reputation could make folks realize that.

6) Any discussion of race reminds folks that racial issues are still alive and kicking.

Comments

[Andrew Reeves]: I wonder why it's still more of a live issue than REH's racism--but then I guess it's because Conan peaked in the early 80s and its been downhill ever since. (I still have fond memories of a time when one could go to the comic book store and pick up copies of Marvel's Conan the Barbarian and Conan the King in color, and Savage Sword of Conan the Barbarian and Conan Saga in black and white.) Or maybe it's because since someone like REH had such a hard on for barbarians, then his saying that black people are inherently barbaric mitigates his racism? (But then, his portrayal of black "savages" was invariably much, much nastier than his paler "barbarians.")

I think that your question also leads to the much more troubling issue of the degree to which HPL's racism and xenophobia are inseparable from the rest of his oeuvre. I know that in many ways it deals with a fear of contamination, of a lack of purity: the ending of Shadow Over Innsmouth is basically the anxiety of racial taint in one's ancestry made into a really creepy horror story. Fear of fish + fear of Pacific Islanders (and anyone else with the slightest bit of melanin) equals a really good creepy horror story. But the troubling question is whether you could have Lovecraft without the fear of miscegenation and melanin and still have him be Lovecraft?

And to some extent, I think that you might be able to. I tend to think that Mountains of Madness shows a maturing thinker, someone for whom shoggoths are still terrifying but also someone who's starting to move away from a worldview cultured by xenophobia. When he notes that the Old Ones (Elder Things or ANNING BLUE SKULL for their NATO designation) were men, although different, I have a strong sense that there's an HPL who's starting to pull away from his xenophobia. Of course, it makes MoM less horror and more SF, but it shows us a possible future had it not been for cancer. (F*ck cancer.) I think that that sort of fits in with HPL gradually becoming embarrassed at younger HPL's Grumpy Old Fart persona. (Sidebar: I think that Stross's employment of the Mythos shows that you *can* do Cthulhu Mythos without the underlying racial ick.)

But then a more SFnal Lovecraft would be something like a Howard the Regional Western Writer. Probably more mature as a writer, but neither the Cthulhu nor Conan that we know and love.

In lieu of rounding out my thoughts, I'll just trail off here.

[Leeman Kessler]: There is a weird trend that pops up in these massive discussions where someone proclaims, "You know what? I'm glad he was racist! His stories wouldn't have been nearly as good if he hadn't been! So there!" but somehow I don't think that's meant to invite larger discussion rather than act as a "see! racism can be good for things so shut up already!"

[Humash Hatul]: As often as I laud Facebook as a tool for education when used intentionally, this furious debate (see, Nathaniel?) over how "problematic" HPL's racism is strikes me as another contention by convention. Lovecraft was racist long before Facebook pointed it out to the casual reader, but I'm unclear why he in particular is getting so much flak right now, when other writers, like ERB (who sold his estate Tarzana on the condition the lots would only be sold to white families), were also avowed racists, whose racism bleed into work just as profusely (noting that Xotar, the black pirate of Mars, "...was handsome for a negro.") as anything HPL brought to print.

Is it because his stuff is more "weird" than the others..? ...does having a Disney movie made of your work justify it? (Now I'm thinking about my brother, a theater professor and expert in children's plays, saying Peter Pan is unstageable these days, "injuns" and all.)

[Andrew Reeves]: Part of this is also that we've long since reached and passed Peak Tarzan (in the same way we've passed Peak Conan). HPL, by contrast, is actually pulling out ahead of the other earlier twentieth-century pulp writers who were all fairly niche in teh later twentieth century. And so given that it's HPL who's now the dominant inter-war pulp writer, we also see people who aren't familiar with the pulps reacting with a great big "Holy F*CK this is racist!" And it's good if it leads those of us who shrugged and said, "White guy in the 1920s" to actually look more deeply into the question.

[Simon Barry McNeil]: There's a few confluences in fiction. There's been a hell of a lot of activity in Weird and New Weird lately with authors like Jeff VanDerMeer and Laird Barron doing amazing things, big anthologies, and ambitious stories. Since Weird traces its roots back to HPL and since Weird is currently A Big Deal in genre circles that makes discussion of HPL's influence important from a critical perspective. That branch of criticism must, if it is true criticism, interrogate the themes of his stories which must, if we're going to be unbiased include discussion of The Shadow Over Innsmouth, The Call of Cthulhu and The Horror at Red Hook.

The second issue is that the World Fantasy Award is still, inexplicably, HPL's head, despite him being a Weird / Horror / SF author rather than a fantasy author. The sooner the WFA becomes a statue of a bitchin' dragon or something the sooner that issue will get put to bed.

The third has to do largely with a culture war within genre fandom in general. Largely driven by the larger cultural conflict in the USA there's a huge movement going on in genre with many authors and major fan contributors taking sides one way or the other. The conflict over sexism and inclusion in SFWA has been fluctuating between a slow simmer and a roiling boil since before Orson Scott Card decided to start opening his pie hole to the press for... reasons... last year.

So, yeah, the HPL issue is SPECIFICALLY relevant to stuff going on right now in literature and in the fandom community and it also fits into a much much much much BROADER discussion regarding where genre fiction, genre writers and genre fans are headed culturally.

<drops mic, walks off stage>

[Douglas Muir]: I think Simon's #3 is particularly apt. The last few years have seen a slow-motion revolution in airing the genre's dirty laundry. this is long -- like, decades -- overdue.

[Steve Rosenstein]: The dead horse argument is a load of elitist horse poop. It is basically saying that HPL's work is now fixed, static. People who discover his work after the arbitrary cut of of when the horse was alive cannot bring anything to the discussion, cannot participate. Sadly, this means that his works are dead and irrelevant; and will either fade back into obscurity, relegated to out of print copies of the first edition AD&D Deities and Demigods or die out all together. The "true fans" will eventually die and with nobody left who can think for themselves, HPL will be about as relevant to fiction as Beta was to home theater.