World Fantasy Awards may drop H.P. Lovecraft's likeness from award statuette due to author's racism.

[Vedrenne]

Playing something of a devil's advocate here, but this does seem similar to the Chris Benoit situation in certain respects. A person who was arguably one of the most talented in there field (Horror Fiction/Wrestling) commits acts or acts (Holding of Racist Views/Murdering Wife and Child) that leads to them being reviled from that point onward.

I do find some humour that there are issues with Lovecraft and his racism, but most people are entirely unaware of Stephanie Meyer (writer of the Twilight series) using the funds from the books and movies to fund anti-LGBT laws in the US. Gives me a chuckle, any road up.

By the by, I disagree with the decision, but don't disagree with the reasoning behind it.

 

[Mad as a Hatter]

Playing something of a devil's advocate here, but this does seem similar to the Chris Benoit situation in certain respects. A person who was arguably one of the most talented in there field (Horror Fiction/Wrestling) commits acts or acts (Holding of Racist Views/Murdering Wife and Child) that leads to them being reviled from that point onward.

I do find some humour that there are issues with Lovecraft and his racism, but most people are entirely unaware of Stephanie Meyer (writer of the Twilight series) using the funds from the books and movies to fund anti-LGBT laws in the US. Gives me a chuckle, any road up.

By the by, I disagree with the decision, but don't disagree with the reasoning behind it.

citation needed. Where are your evidence of this. And no twitter post is not enough.

 

[Thaluikhain]

I do find some humour that there are issues with Lovecraft and his racism, but most people are entirely unaware of Stephanie Meyer (writer of the Twilight series) using the funds from the books and movies to fund anti-LGBT laws in the US. Gives me a chuckle, any road up.

Hadn't heard that, but wouldn't surprise me.

OTOH, I'd imagine a lot more gamers care about Lovecraft than Meyer.

 

[Batou667]

This is a tricky one. On the one hand, we ought to be able to divorce the man's works from his personal character. Plenty of great figures from history have been pretty despicable and hopefully we realise it's folly to expect our role models to be perfect in every regard (having said that, Lovecraft was a writer, and his flaws are apparent through some examples of his writing). On the other hand, I would understand a black recipient of the award being hesitant or even resistant if given the statue.

 

[JimB]

A person who was arguably one of the most talented in there field (Horror Fiction/Wrestling) commits acts or acts (Holding of Racist Views/Murdering Wife and Child) that leads to them being reviled from that point onward.

Uh, when it comes to prioritizing what aspect of a person's life holds more weight with me, I don't feel like I'm being unfair to say the bit where he committed multiple acts of murder seems heavier than the bits where he pretended to beat people up on stage.

 

[Ingjald]

It's their award and they can make it in the likeness of H.P. Lovecraft's cat for all I care, but this is a very slippery slope to demonize and marginalize famous individuals who held beliefs or did actions that were not only considered acceptable, but downright normal, for the time in which they lived.

To give examples of people we should now remove from any sort of awards, building names, recognition, monuments, currency, etc., due to them having beliefs that were normal at the time but that we now see as barbaric or backwards:

-As many already mentioned, George Washington, Ben Franklin, and pretty much any of the original founders of the US (slave owners).

-Edgar Allen Poe (believed in phrenology, the now laughably bad science of believing head shape determined personality).

-Margaret Sanger, Alexander Graham Bell, Teddy Roosevelt (actually, pretty much any US President up until FDR), H.G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, Winston Churchill, William Welch, and many more. All supported eugenics, the belief (among others) that Government should be allowed to forcibly sterilize "undesirables" to improve the human race's gene pool. Was considered to be largely to blame for the Holocaust and the idea of the Nazi "Aryan race".

There are too many anti-semites to even begin a list, not to mention it'd be real interesting if we got into what people would have likely believed. How many famous individuals from prior to 1950, no matter how 'progressive' they were for their time, would have supported gay marriage, states paying for sex change surgery, or affirmative action, back when
ideas such as these barely even existed? Obviously one cannot speak for the dead, but I'd have serious doubts.

Trying to transpose the morality of our age onto those who lived in a completely different era is a fool's errand. The way I see it, who's to say that 200 years from now, people won't look back at us and consider us barbaric because we kept dogs and cats as pets, or ate meat, or watched trashy reality shows?

This is pretty much what I was going to write, so Quoted for Truth.

Also, if a screenwriter/playwright were to be given a statue of Shakespeare as a prize for plying that craft, is that somehow validating anti-semitism (if Merchant of Venice is anything to go by.), or implying that the reciever shares this view?

While Tolkien would be a better choice for a prize of fantasy writing, Lovecraft isn't a bad one just because he had shitty views on people for shitty reasons. I'd much rather get a prize of literature depicting a great writer, who was also a raging racist, than I would get a prize in humanism depicting Agnes Bojaxhiu ("mother" Teresa).

 

[ObserverStatus]

I find this hard. Distinguishing the art from the artist. Example Orson Scott Card is something I fundamentally disagree with, but Endor's Game was one of my favorite stories as a child and many of his works are very well written. It causes a real dilemma for me.

I really liked the part when the Little Doctor was deployed against the ewoks.

 

[JimB]

So what makes the other one any more valid?

The other what? I'm not clear on what you're talking about. Would you please be more specific?

An issue like this isn't an "all or nothing" type of deal. You're basically saying because Lovecraft has any recognition whatsoever that means it's somehow supporting all of his racist views.

No, I'm saying that when his image is being given out as an award by an organization, it is a de facto endorsement of his works--all of his works and the attitudes they exhibit--until and unless that organization provides some kind of disclaimer; and it strains credulity somewhat when such a disclaimer is offer if that organization continues to use him image as an avatar.

Again, none of his racist views are being singled out and racism was far from the main aspect of his character or a pervasive theme in his writing (outside of few isolated examples, though only that single poem was the worst offender).

None of his racist views are being singled out by whom?

I get recognizing historical figure's faults, but you're coming fairly close to demonizing him because of a singular outdated view he held.

I don't care enough about his reputation or good name to have any interest in demonizing him. I care about the message being sent by awarding a statue of the man who wrote "On the Creation of Niggers" to a black author. No matter what anyone says about historical context or disallowing us to consider some of his catalog of work while determining how appropriate it is to use him as an idol, that is still fucked up.

More often than not, it ends up completely ignoring historical cultural context and vilifying any individual that took part in such an act despite such a thing being far from the only thing they've done.

I generally don't care about historical, cultural context. Those things explain bad behavior; they do not excuse it.

People (other than extreme racists like the KKK or Neo Nazis that is) aren't trying to argue that slavery isn't a bad thing, just not everyone that participated in the slave trade wasn't an irredeemable monster.

I am not in the business nor the habit of worrying about anyone's redemption. I am not a priest, and this is not a confessional booth.

Censorship isn't limited to government intervention.

You get your definition from a different source than I do, then, but even so, that still isn't censorship. No government, media outlet, or authority--except for whatever authority resides at the World Fantasy Awards, of course--is involved; and if that is censorship, then the word's definition is so broad it's useless.

 

[jthwilliams]

I find this hard. Distinguishing the art from the artist. Example Orson Scott Card is something I fundamentally disagree with, but Endor's Game was one of my favorite stories as a child and many of his works are very well written. It causes a real dilemma for me.

I really liked the part when the Little Doctor was deployed against the ewoks.

Naw, the best part was when Hans Solo shot first in the battle school games.

 

[Irick]

I really liked the part when the Little Doctor was deployed against the ewoks.

Naw, the best part was when Hans Solo shot first in the battle school games.

Gentlemen, we have fixed the original trilogy.

 

[Aurion]

Presentism always makes for an amusing read.

By all means though, if a writer who was a virulent racist in a time when being a virulent racist was completely normal offends you to the point it devalues his contribution to literature, campaign to change the statue.

 

[Panda Pandemic]

I am more than fine with not celebrating racists. Sure acknowledge if they did something important, but actually doing something that would qualify as some sort of personal honor is unnecessary. More than fine with this including this including American founders. They get a disgusting amount of hero worship that could use a dose of reality. Don't care if lots of people were awful in the past. Just means people in the past were shittier people. Its a good reason not to look up to them

 

[Phil the Nervous]

I want a Mi-go for the statuette. It fits the concept of imaginative twisted supernatural perfectly.

 

[JarinArenos]

Sounds good to me. Now can we get Jackson off the US $20?

 

[kitsunefather]

All right, here goes, into the breach.

During the era in which H.P. Lovecraft and his contemporaries lived (including H.G. Wells and Conan Doyle) the idea had begun to examine humanity with a scientific eye, but this was largely done through a lens of justification for English and European colonialism. As such, it birthed into existence the concepts known today as "Physical Anthropology" and later, "Eugenics".

Physical Anthropology is the study of the different races as sub-species of Homo Sapiens, and tried to validate the idea enough that the notion was pushed to give them scientific names such as Homo Sapiens Africanus and the such. This was largely justified using the anecdotal issues of what the researchers deemed as fundamental to having and developing culture, as they understood it, as well as focusing on basic aesthetic differences between the races. Africans tended to be slimmer and taller, therefore this was a trait identifiable to them.

This has since been supplanted by "Biological Anthropology" which uses genetics and DNA as a guideline, and which has debunked the notion of sub-species within Homo Sapiens, but there are still people who cling to this malignant way of thinking.

Eugenics, however, was the next step in that thinking, because if there were sub-species, then there clearly would have to be a "pure" species of Homo Sapiens. Looking for the traits that separated the "barbarous races" from the "civilized" ones created a "map" of sorts to breeding back into being a purer form of human, and protecting the species from becoming increasingly "devolved".

We know where this kind of thinking went. Forced sterilizations of the poor and infirm in the US. The Holocaust in Europe. Suffice to say, very few reputable academics still hold to the idea of the virtues of Eugenics.

However, in the day of Lovecraft, this was the accepted reality of human biology. That Europeans were superior by virtue of "greater purity" and that other races had somehow "devolved" from that purer stock. Ludicrously racist now, but many of the authors we look to today from that era accepted this as fact.

In addition, for Lovecraft's part he was an elitist of fairly high caliber. Most of his public writings on race refer not to color, but rather to the idea of a race of born thinkers, and race of born workers, and he made it clear in several of his letters that it was for the prior group he was writing his stories.

By all means, take his likeness of the statuette. By modern standards, definitely a racist, and even by standards of the time he was of "questionable integrity" with several investigations into his "potential homosexuality" and possible "moral deviance".

I say all this not to argue the statuette shouldn't be changed, it should if the contest owners or recipients feel he no longer truly represents their ideas and virtues. To reduce him to a hate-spewing ideologue though, is to do a disservice to writers of every era. He wrote the world as he understood it, nothing more.

For a greater example of the era's "hate-speech" writing, read H.G. Wells History of the World, where he turns his keen prose towards explaining how the world came to be using contemporary science and the notion of Aryan supremacy. Sometimes good people internalize terrible notions.

 

[Vorlayn]

For the love of Cthulhu, when will the racism-whining finally STOP?

Yes, he was a racist, like most people in his time. Does that have ANYTHING to do with the award? No.

Racism is set to replace rape and murder as the most heinous crime a person can commit if this keeps up. Heck, maybe it already has. This thought-policing, history-rewriting, politically correct *self-censored* thoroughly, utterly disgusts me.

When has political correctness gotten to the point where we have to go THIS far with it? So far that even historical figures have to match our worldviews or be shunned?

Society has "evolved" to the point where we've decided everyone should have equal rights. Good. That is progress. I support that wholeheartedly. But to go so overboard that everyone who has ever held different beliefs is now a monster? If that is what the world will be, I say it's gone one step forward, a hundred back.

Ugh, had to edit this. Why? Because I found that they are considering making the statuette look like another author: http://www.biography.com/people/octavia-e-butler-38207

Who here has even HEARD of her? Is she truly one of the "greats" or is it just that she is a politically correct choice due to her skin color? Also, how is that NOT racism?

 

[Zacharious-khan]

Oh well it's their award, i personally think that in matters of achievement it doesn't really matter what the person's personal feelings are. HP Lovecraft was an excellent writer which makes him fit to be on a writing award

 

[NortherWolf]

For the love of Cthulhu, when will the racism-whining finally STOP?

Yes, he was a racist, like most people in his time. Does that have ANYTHING to do with the award? No.

Racism is set to replace rape and murder as the most heinous crime a person can commit if this keeps up. Heck, maybe it already has. This thought-policing, history-rewriting, politically correct *self-censored* thoroughly, utterly disgusts me.

When has political correctness gotten to the point where we have to go THIS far with it? So far that even historical figures have to match our worldviews or be shunned?

Society has "evolved" to the point where we've decided everyone should have equal rights. Good. That is progress. I support that wholeheartedly. But to go so overboard that everyone who has ever held different beliefs is now a monster? If that is what the world will be, I say it's gone one step forward, a hundred back.

Ugh, had to edit this. Why? Because I found that they are considering making the statuette look like another author: http://www.biography.com/people/octavia-e-butler-38207

Who here has even HEARD of her? Is she truly one of the "greats" or is it just that she is a politically correct choice due to her skin color? Also, how is that NOT racism?

People way earlier in the thread have already refuted the claim that Lovecraft was just another guy of his time, so you might not want to rely on that argument.

On topic: Eh, I'm fine with it, their prize, their choice.

 

[Vorlayn]

Whether he was or was not is irrelevant. It has nothing to do with the reason he is the person the statue was modeled on. I'm afraid you missed my point completely. My problem with this is the rampant use of racism to justify anything and everything. Well, not the only problem. The possible choice for a replacement seems ridiculous as well. "To protest racism we will give the spot to a politically correct person, deserving or not."