austinjimm wrote:Can anyone legitimately source the racism accusations against Lovecraft?
I tried.
They lead back to a poem published in a 1980's fanzine.
In the fanzine Lovecraft is credited as the author, but I can find no prior source for the offending poem in any authoritative Lovecraft material.
I think the Lovecraft racist poem is a fraud, but I'd be interested to see evidence to the contrary.
You obviously didn't look too closely. Several (as in more than one) of his short stories (and a whole lot of his private letters) make some very unfavourable comparisons between ethnic minorities and animals, and point out the general nature of such minorites to be degraded or sub-human.
It's also been suggested that Lovecraft was approached by none other than Henry Ford and Charles Lindberg who wanted him to write 'the American Mein Kampf' - it's debateable whether or not he wrote it or not, but it was never published in any case and there is no extant manuscript that I know of. Still, in my experience one doesn't typically get approached to write a racist manifesto unless you are well known by friends and acquaintances to hold some very racist beliefs.
Now, I happen to like Lovecraft's fiction, but I also believe it is being more than generous to just disregard or deny those personal beliefs which, even at the time, were considered flagrantly rascist. We're not talking about some confused 'I'm being picked on by reverse racists' or some shit, either. We're talking about a more direct 'We'd be better off shipping all the blacks, Jews, Italians, Slavs, Mexicans, etc. right back to where they came from' and 'Nazi Germany and the Klu Klux Klan make some good points' kind of thing.
If you want some more concrete examples, take a look at the stories 'The Outsider', 'The Street', 'Medusa's Coil' or 'The Horror at Red Hook'. I suppose one could choose to downplay it, or excuse it, but it's not one single questionable poem.
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