Racism in writing fantasy: Does it exist?

[Trinopus]

G.K. Chesterton and Robert W. Chambers were uncomfortably anti-Semitic.

Sax Rohmer’s racial insensitivity in the Fu Manchu books is well known. (He actually got better over the course of his career, until the very last of the books actually has some sensitivity and grace.)

Talbot Mundy was pretty good, by and large, but when he gets to describing Tibetans, the language gets very uncomfortable for most modern readers.

FWIW, the Charlie Chan books, by Earl Derr Biggers, are quite noteworthy for not being racist! We’re accustomed to the movies, which are generally pretty awful, but the actual books were remarkable for being quite ahead of their time in terms of racial relations.

[Brynhildr_Budladottir]

@Morwen Edhelwen

I read on another forum that apparently HPL and REH were close – and that REH thought HPL was OTT in his racism.

Also just as a matter of fact, some of those medieval Icelandic stereotypes are really unusual and weird; Black people (blamenn) sometimes have yellow eyes like cats and eyebrows that cover their faces. Really. At least one of the other Black characters (apart from the protagonist, whose eyes are dark brown) has the yellow eyes, but no one has the face-covering eyebrows.

Does anyone know (of) a modern-day (so from 18th-19th century onwards) racist who hates Black people and genuinely believes Black people have yellow eyes? Or face-covering eyebrows? (Of course there probably ARE racists who believe anything that fits in with their racist views, and some medieval stereotypes still survive in the 21st century.)

EDIT: Also wondering if **Skald The Rhymer ** who also shares my interest in Norse myth and legend, is aware of these medieval racial stereotypes.

[Brynhildr_Budladottir]

@Trinopus

G.K. Chesterton and Robert W. Chambers were uncomfortably anti-Semitic.

Sax Rohmer’s racial insensitivity in the Fu Manchu books is well known. (He actually got better over the course of his career, until the very last of the books actually has some sensitivity and grace.)

Talbot Mundy was pretty good, by and large, but when he gets to describing Tibetans, the language gets very uncomfortable for most modern readers.

FWIW, the Charlie Chan books, by Earl Derr Biggers, are quite noteworthy for not being racist! We’re accustomed to the movies, which are generally pretty awful, but the actual books were remarkable for being quite ahead of their time in terms of racial relations.

As an Asian, I can say that the “Charlie Chan” accent does exist-- only the movie accent was an exaggerated vaudeville one. Some Chinese people do swap r and l sounds.

[Brynhildr_Budladottir]

Is using the phrase “blacker than pitch” to describe skin colour necessarily racist?

Here’s the sentence from the story mentioned in the OP (Isaholmi Spar) to put the phrase in context:

My face’s round and I’m blacker than pitch. My skin’s blue if you look at it in the light. I look like a thrall. Or like a troll.

[Trinopus]

@Morwen Edhelwen

As an Asian, I can say that the “Charlie Chan” accent does exist-- only the movie accent was an exaggerated vaudeville one. Some Chinese people do swap r and l sounds.

Have you read the books? I’d be deeply fascinated to learn your opinion of them.

(He plays fair with the mysteries, too: I’ve actually managed to figure out one or two of them!)

[Trinopus]

@Morwen Edhelwen

Is using the phrase “blacker than pitch” to describe skin colour necessarily racist? . . .

Not necessarily racist…but some would say that it is. I wouldn’t use the phrase.

(But one of my old co-workers once said his skin – his own skin – was the color of shit. I was absolutely horrified, and I think it must have shown on my face. If someone else had said that, it could have been a career-ending offense.)

[Lemur866]

@dracoi

In some stories, that probably is what he means. But he uses the term degenerate in other places simply to describe back-woods types who are uneducated and uncivilized.

Yes, but as a typical racist of his day, HPL believed that these backwoods folk were uneducated and uncivilized because they were physically and mentally inferior to normal white folks.

So it goes:

Harvard Professor>middle class white man>working class white man>backwoods white man>asian or other swarthy type>black>Deep One hybrid.

And this is due to the hereditary differences between these types of creatures. A working class person isn’t inferior because they are uneducated, they are uneducated because they are inferior.

[Evil_Captor]

Well it appears that the “Horror at Red Hook” was the Lovecraft story I was thinking of, I found a source online that includes quotes:

It is in “The Horror At Red Hook” that Lovecraft is perhaps at his racist worst. The two years Lovecraft spent in New York were the most miserable of his life for several reasons, but Lovecraft never failed to credit his unhappiness to the heterogeneous population of New York in the 1920s; the slum of Red Hook thus represented everything Lovecraft feared and loathed, and Lovecraft apparently saw little need to include much in the tale other than description in order to create what was, for him, a real life horror story. The descriptions of the immigrants in “The Horror At Red Hook” are virtually indistinguishable from those found in his letters from the same time. Lovecraft pads the lacking plot of “Red Hook” with reams of paranoid description. A brief excerpt: “From this tangle of material and spiritual putrescence the blasphemies of an hundred dialects assail the sky…occasional furtive hands suddenly extinguished lights and pull down curtains, and swarthy, sin-pitted faces disappear from windows when visitors pick their way through.” (Dagon, 248)

In an infamous and particularly venomous letter to Frank Long, one can almost hear the bile as Lovecraft writes about the inhabitants of New York slums: “monstrous and nubulous adumbrations of the pithecanthropoids and moebal; vaguely molded from some stinking viscous slime of earth’s corruption, and slithering and oozing in and on the filthy streets or in and out of windows and doorways in a fashion suggestive of nothing but infesting worms or deep-sea unnamabilites.” (SL I, 333-334) In “The Subway And The Shoggoth (Part I),” Robert H. Waugh discusses a popular American legend contemporary to Lovecraft’s time revolving around a multileveled subterranean labyrinth that lay below San Francisco’s Chinatown. Waugh notes similarities between this legend, cemented in the Fu Manchu fictions of Sax Rohmer, and Lovecraft’s own fears of immigrant ghettoes teeming with unseen masses dwelling beneath the ground. While Waugh is discussing the underworld legend solely in connection to Lovecraft’s fear of Asians in particular, “Red Hook” contains a smorgasbord of Lovecraft’s racisms. While for the most part Lovecraft observed differences in the races he viewed as inferior,8 no such distinctions are found in “Red Hook”: “the population is a hopeless tangle and enigma.” (Dagon, 247) By name he mentions Syrian, Spanish, Italian, negro, Scandinavian, Asian, Arabic, Mongoloid, Persian, Kurdish, and Greek elements in Red Hook’s population and does little to distinguish between any of these undesirables. The plot of the story, so much as there is one, culminates in a detective discovering a vast underground cove beneath the slums where occultists have been conducting their unspeakable rites. The detective’s quarry, who has died under mysterious circumstances, is resurrected at an altar to an ancient demonic fertility goddess. The number of gods and religious traditions that are referenced in the chanting of the cultists are too numerous to mention; it is enough for Lovecraft to simply include whatever “foreign” and ergo evil tropes he can collect. In a frustratingly confusing ending, the reanimated corpse somehow upsets the ritual, and, much like in the case of “The Street” the houses above, “doubtless long rotten with decay in its most insidious form” (Dagon, 263) collapse9 while the detective faints in true Lovecraftian form. In both “The Street” and “Red Hook” no attention is paid to the long-term effects of the immigrant populations they depict; Lovecraft’s imploding buildings kill them off before they become too settled, and so Lovecraft’s anxieties concerning miscegenation and the sexual act remain unexplored in these reductive racial allegories.

Source

[Brynhildr_Budladottir]

@Lemur866

Yes, but as a typical racist of his day, HPL believed that these backwoods folk were uneducated and uncivilized because they were physically and mentally inferior to normal white folks.

So it goes:

Harvard Professor>middle class white man>working class white man>backwoods white man>asian or other swarthy type>black>Deep One hybrid.

And this is due to the hereditary differences between these types of creatures. A working class person isn’t inferior because they are uneducated, they are uneducated because they are inferior.

That’s why I’m not reading HPL.

Funny thing is that in the 21st century I think a lot of non-Asian people would stereotype an Asian person as an intellectual type. I even have an internet friend who said “well, you extra intelligence points because you’re Asian” to me. And I thought “Yeah, if only that were true!”

[Brynhildr_Budladottir]

@Trinopus

Not necessarily racist…but some would say that it is. I wouldn’t use the phrase.

(But one of my old co-workers once said his skin – his own skin – was the color of shit. I was absolutely horrified, and I think it must have shown on my face. If someone else had said that, it could have been a career-ending offense.)

Just out of interest, did you read the quoted sentence? It’s written in the context of the young Black narrator Bjarki describing himself. Kind of like how your old co-worker did.

Another related issue; most Dopers have seen the movie version of the musical Oliver! with Oliver Reed as Bill, right? The story in the OP has Bjarki being raised by a dwarf who’s named after JRRT’s Thorin (Thorinn is an Old Norse name and Thrainn, his father’s name was actually used during the Saga Age) but is based on Ron Moody’s Fagin. He adopts kids and teaches them to steal - “pick a pocket or two”-. In light of what I mentioned about JRRT’s dwarves being the inspiration for mine in terms of culture, is a dwarvish Fagin something which does or could carry unfortunate implications? Keep in mind that this character is based on the Lionel Bart version of Fagin, not the original Dickensian version, so while he does threaten a young Bjarki with hanging (in an “If you don’t stop that right now, the trolls will get you!”) way, it’s basically an empty threat.

[Trinopus]

@Morwen Edhelwen

Just out of interest, did you read the quoted sentence? . . .

Yes. I usually trim quotes when responding, to keep my posts brief, but I do read people’s entire posts.

[Brynhildr_Budladottir]

@Trinopus

Yes. I usually trim quotes when responding, to keep my posts brief, but I do read people’s entire posts.

OK. Thanks for the explanation.

Anyone have opinons on possible unfortunate implications of me creating a dwarvish Fagin, keeping in mind that both JRRT’s dwarves and mine have cultures inspired b medieval Judaism (mine even live in ghettos) and that Fagin is a famous stereotypically anti-Semitic character?

[grude]

@Evil_Captor

Fair enough, I can’t demonstrate that the Hitler vs. Lovecraft quotes were from any of his stories. I’ll look for that quote when I get a chance.

I’ll bet the racism in Conan you are referring to was in his description of the Picts, savages living not too far from Aquilonia (close enough to have border skirmishes. There was a historical people called the Picts, they were from Scotland and Ireland and were not black, but they were definitely Iron Age savages. Conan’s Picts lived in the jungle and were black or at least very dark, and were described as fierce, awful, nasty, icky people who totally lacked redeeming values. I’ll bet that’s where you got your racism. The black people of Schendi were described as civilized, and also fierce, proud fighters. They were roughly equivalent to other nations not composed mostly of black people. So Howard made a clear distinction between two groups of black people here. I’m not sure the Picts were meant to be a statement about black people generally, but were a convenient set of generic bad guys Conan could fight.

It was actually from a story where Conan busts up a gang of cannibals working with a shady hotel owner.

[Brynhildr_Budladottir]

grude, any opinions on a dwarvish Fagin character?

[iiandyiiii]

I think you have to be very careful with a Dwarvish Fagin character, just as you’ll have to be very character with your black character. Any scenes with your dwarf counting coins might be a bit unfortunate, to say the least.

[grude]

@Morwen Edhelwen

grude, any opinions on a dwarvish Fagin character?

I don’t think it would be racist, TVtropes even has a page for this very topic(called jews in space I think). That is where an author uses stand ins to explore race and racism.

[Mississippienne]

@dracoi

But I do see the cited poem someone provided, so it sounds like HPL was definitely racist during at least some parts of his life.

I’m sorry, but the grudging tone of this statement is unintentionally hilarious. Lovecraft was incredibly racist! We’re talking about a guy who named his cat Nigger-Man. He also thought Hitler was a reasonable bloke. That is pretty fucking racist, y’all. Hell, other white people in the 1920s thought he was taking it a bit far. That’s one of those ‘accomplishments’ that boggles the mind to grasp, like being too much of a drunk to be in Metallica!

[Penfeather]

@grude

It was actually from a story where Conan busts up a gang of cannibals working with a shady hotel owner.

I really want to read a story in which Conan checks into a hotel.

[Penfeather]

@Mississippienne

I’m sorry, but the grudging tone of this statement is unintentionally hilarious. Lovecraft was incredibly racist! We’re talking about a guy who named his cat Nigger-Man. He also thought Hitler was a reasonable bloke. That is pretty fucking racist, y’all. Hell, other white people in the 1920s thought he was taking it a bit far. That’s one of those ‘accomplishments’ that boggles the mind to grasp, like being too much of a drunk to be in Metallica!

Yeah, what baffles me is people who think that Lovecraft’s racism is up for debate: Tolkien and Lewis you can argue about, sure, but Lovecraft was a fucking racist or the word has no meaning.

[Rick_Kitchen]

@iiandyiiii

I think you have to be very careful with a Dwarvish Fagin character, just as you’ll have to be very character with your black character. Any scenes with your dwarf counting coins might be a bit unfortunate, to say the least.

The Tate family, a family of dwarfs in Glen Cook’s “Garrett PI” series are pretty aggressive penny pinchers, and I haven’t heard any charges of racism.