Uncertain

[moon_custafer]

So I used to follow an H.P. Lovecraft group on facebook -- mostly they posted drawings of Cthuhlu and so on. Today I noticed in my feed a photo, probably a selfie, of a young black man pulling a goofy "duckface" expression, which someone had posted with the caption "escapee from Innsmouth." As I described this to Andrew just now, he got a horrified look even without having seen the post, so I know it's not just me. anyway, I went "ew," then checked the comments with the intention of saying something. Turns out someone already had asked if he was the only one uncomfortable with laughing at a PoC for having big lips and comparing him to a village of fictional people who'd intermarried with fish demons -- and everyone else in the thread had promptly closed ranks and said, "what, we never said anything about the guy's skin colour, *you're* the one who brought race into this, so you're the racist, nyah," and went on to call him a troll and mock him for using the term PoC when he continued to argue with them that it was creepy. I clicked "like" on each of his statements, and then left the group. Not sure if I should have said something too, given their evident unwillingness to listen.

Comments

[teenybuffalo.livejournal.com]

HPL fans who pat themselves on the back about their racist insensitivity are full of crap in a special way that makes me unusually angry. Like, we're already fans of a writer whose creativity is inextricably tied with his racism/xenophobia/general loathing of everyone not like him. We, of all fans, ought not to be willfully ignorant racists. Nobody should be, but it looks particularly bad on us.

Remember when Nnedi Okorafor won the World Fantasy Award, which comes with the HPL bust? Apparently she'd never read his stuff till then, so I think she did a quick Google and found his racist poetry and was appalled. She was all, why have you given me an award which honors this godawful sack of shit? (She said it more classily than that, but that was the idea. Good point.) I was full of second-hand embarrassment because HPL's racist poetry makes me want to dig him up and punch him. It also made me start to take the defensive fan attitude, like "Hey, he was much less of a racist later in life!" but that's not an out. The racism is still there, and I think being a fan of HPL should include noticing and acknowledging it.