What are some examples of Lovecraft's racism in his published short stories?

Question

I was reading a review of Color out of Space at Ars Technica and some of the commenters were really up in arms about Lovecraft's racism.

Now, I don't doubt the man was racist and that above the average for his contemporaries, which was itself a depressingly high bar to match. He had a high output of letters and his racism is not in dispute – I have heard of it for a long time, nor am I defending it.

But, specifically when it comes to African-Americans, how much of that made it into his stories? One caveat there: it isn't really sufficient to point to an instance where an African-American character is "just" routinely belittled or disparaged, because there are many, many, cases where Lovecraft talks up imbecility or inbreeding when referring a character's ethnic group or community and a lot of that concerns Caucasians, and not necessarily only those who get too frisky with fish.

But, yes, granted that Lovecraft was a bigot and a racist, which of his published stories gives a good unequivocal example of it? His equivalent of the Merchant of Venice, if you will.

Wikipedia barely mentions it and really only refers to an article about award statuettes, which in turn mentions a poem. One could argue that, whatever his literary merits and contributions, this aspect might be covered a bit more there.

Edit: I am not trying to witchhunt or boycott HPL. I have enjoyed, and will continue to enjoy, his writings. Still, an important consideration, if you are really interested in him, is the aspect of his racism and I posted this because I was curious to see what we knew about it. The man had a some other mental issues, such as an extreme phobia of the sea, IIRC. An interesting author, certainly with feet of clay.

Answer 1

This is a poem and not exactly a short story, but it's still a work of literature written and published by Lovecraft in 1912: "On the Creation of Niggers". Content warning: this is probably the most openly, shockingly, racist thing I've ever read:

When, long ago, the gods created Earth
In Jove's fair image Man was shaped at birth.
The beasts for lesser parts were next designed;
Yet were they too remote from humankind.
To fill the gap, and join the rest to Man,
Th'Olympian host conceiv'd a clever plan.
A beast they wrought, in semi-human figure,
Filled it with vice, and called the thing a Nigger.

If you're specifically looking for short stories rather than poems, I'll delete this answer. But it certainly shows that Lovecraft's racism was expressed not only in essays and letters to friends, but in his published creative writing too.

Answer 2

Leaving aside his poetry and his collaborative works, here are some other examples of racism in Lovecraft stories.

"The Rats in the Walls" features a cat named "N----- Man"

"The Horror at Red Hook" refers to a villain as "an Arab with a hatefully negroid mouth"

The Case of Charles Dexter Ward: "the wife [had] a very repulsive cast of countenance, probably due to a mixture of negro blood."

Herbert West: Reanimator contains a particularly problematic bit of description:

The negro had been knocked out, and a moment’s examination shewed us that he would permanently remain so. He was a loathsome, gorilla-like thing, with abnormally long arms which I could not help calling fore legs, and a face that conjured up thoughts of unspeakable Congo secrets and tom-tom poundings under an eerie moon. The body must have looked even worse in life—but the world holds many ugly things.

Answer 3

The story that comes to my mind is “Medusa’s Coil” by Lovecraft and Zealia Bishop. It’s a typical Lovecraft story in many ways, and at the end the ultimate horror is revealed: Marceline is black!

It would be too hideous if they knew that the one-time heiress of Riverside—the accursed gorgon or lamia whose hateful crinkly coil of serpent-hair must even now be brooding and twining vampirically around an artist's skeleton in a lime-packed grave beneath a charred foundation—was faintly, subtly, yet to the eyes of genius unmistakably the scion of Zimbabwe's most primal grovellers. No wonder she owned a link with that old witch-woman—for, though in deceitfully slight proportion, Marceline was a negress.

This story is technically a collaboration, but Lovecraft scholar S. T. Joshi writes in the introduction to The Horror in the Museum, according to Lovecraft the story is nearly entirely his work.

All three stories revised for Zealia Biship--"The Curse of Yig," "The Mound," and "Medusa's Coil"--were, as Lovecraft notes, based on the scantiest of plot-germs and are accordingly close to original works by Lovecraft.

Answer 4

From "The Call of Cthulhu"

Duty came first; and although there must have been nearly a hundred mongrel celebrants in the throng, the police relied on their firearms and plunged determinedly into the nauseous rout.

...

Examined at headquarters after a trip of intense strain and weariness, the prisoners all proved to be men of a very low, mixed-blooded, and mentally aberrant type. Most were seamen, and a sprinkling of negroes and mulattoes, largely West Indians or Brava Portuguese from the Cape Verde Islands, gave a coloring of voodooism to the heterogeneous cult. But before many questions were asked, it became manifest that something far deeper and older than negro fetishism was involved. Degraded and ignorant as they were, the creatures held with surprizing consistency to the central idea of their loathsome faith.

...

...but had come in his dreams upon at least three of the precise words of the formula uttered alike by Eskimo diabolists and mongrel Louisianans?

...

One thing which I began to suspect, and which I now fear I know, is that my uncle’s death was far from natural. He fell on a narrow hill street leading up from an ancient waterfront swarming with foreign mongrels, after a careless push from a negro sailor.

The only thing Lovecraft hated worse than people of African descent (followed by other non Anglo-Saxons to varying degrees) was mixed-race people. Truly a special kind of racist ass.

Answer 5

It's perhaps a bit more subtle than some other examples, but the theme of "miscegenation" is strong in Facts concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family (a.k.a. The White Ape). The basis of the story is a man travelling to the Congo, discovering a thitherto unknown species of hominids and there mating with such a "white ape". The narrator then discovers to his horror that he is a descendant of this race of "white apes", and commits suicide in a dramatic fashion after elaborating on the peculiarities/illnesses within his family history.

While of course on the surface these "white apes are non-human creatures, it is perhaps easy to read this as a thinly-disguised allegory of racial degeneration and miscegenation that could equally well be applied to unions of whites with black Africans, in Lovecraft's mind. After all, this theme is visited several times throughout his works, e.g., in The Lurking Fear (more about miscegenation with lower social castes and inbreeding) among others.

So, perhaps this is an unkind interpretation, but it's certainly a believable one taken in the context of Lovecraft's works and the social climate in the US at the time.

Answer 6

The short story "Winged Death" is about doctors in South Africa who breed poisonous flies and experiment on local members the native population. Lovecraft uses very negative language when describing the protagonist's attitudes toward various African people. Below are some excerpts.

"It was the half-belief of the four men, fostered by lives spent close to the black, settled secrets of brooding Africa, which made them shiver so violently in spite of the searing January heat."

"Am feeding them all on tainted crocodile meat, and after infectivity develops will try them on some of the blacks—apparently, of course, by accident."

"No question but that Trypanosoma gambiense is feeding on him—but he holds out better than the n******s around here."

"If any black had seen it, he’d have laid it at once to the absorption of the poor devil’s soul."

"A human intellect—did not that take one back to the most primitive legends of the Uganda blacks?"

"Is this a portent of some sort? I am getting as superstitious as the blacks."

"Winged Death" was co-authored by Hazel Heald, however HPL claims to have written most of it.

The narrator is supposed to seem unsympathetic and inhumane, so there's arguably some degree of separation between the author and character. Then again, HPL was the one who devised the story's premise and put these words on paper. Given what we know about him today, it probably wasn't a stretch for HPL to write as a character with racist attitudes.

Answer 7

While it doesn't display racism against blacks, "The Street" does display antisemitic racism quite clearly.

The plot of the story can be summed up as "a street in New England has an animistic intelligence, notes a gradual degradation of its conditions, and after WW1 a bunch of what were most probably Jews move there and the communists among them begin planning a revolution that is thwarted after the spirit of the street causes the street to implode and kill them all."

All in all, the story's probably one of the blatant displays of prejudice that HP Lovecraft ever wrote.

Answer 8

Unpublished poems: early antisemitism

Lovecraft includes the following horrible little antisemitic cartoon and annotation accompanying his poem On the Vanity of Human Ambition written age 12 (published posthumously):

HIC·HOMO·EST·AVARISSIMVS·ET·TVRPISSIMVS·IVDAEVS·
HOMO·QUIS·PECVNIAM·QUÆRIT
("This man is the greedy and ugly Jew,
a man who seeks money.")
— Poemata Minora, or, Minor Poems, Vol. II : Poemata Minora Lovecraftis - vel - the Shorter Verse of H. Lovecraft, Vol. II

Published works

Anti-asian alarmism

Lovecraft makes several references to characters having visions of a nightmarish future America colonised by Asians:

Quote	Explanatory notes by S.T. Joshi
"I saw hooded forms amidst ruins, and yellow evil faces peering from behind fallen monuments." - Nyarlathotep	The suggestion is that the “yellow races” have overwhelmed Caucasian civilization. Cf. a similar glimpse of the future in “He”
"And swarming loathsomely on aërial galleries I saw the yellow, squint-eyed people of that city..." - He	As early as 1919 Lovecraft had stated: “Orientals must be kept in their native East till the fall of the white race. Sooner or later a great Japanese war will take place . . . The more numerous Chinese are a menace of the still more distant future. They will probably be the exterminators of Caucasian civilisation” (SL I.90).

Racist descriptions

[T]he throngs of people that seethed through the flume-like streets were squat, swarthy strangers with hardened faces and narrow eyes, shrewd strangers without dreams and without kinship to the scenes about them, who could never mean aught to a blue-eyed man of the old folk, with the love of fair green lanes and white New England village steeples in his heart.
— He

Some casual antisemitism and zoomorphic racism:

The match had been between Kid O’Brien—a lubberly and now quaking youth with a most un-Hibernian hooked nose—and Buck Robinson, “The Harlem Smoke”. The negro had been knocked out, and a moment’s examination shewed us that he would permanently remain so. He was a loathsome, gorilla-like thing, with abnormally long arms which I could not help calling fore legs, and a face that conjured up thoughts of unspeakable Congo secrets and tom-tom poundings under an eerie moon. The body must have looked even worse in life—but the world holds many ugly things.
— Herbert West - Reanimator

... the prisoners all proved to be men of a very low, mixed-blooded, and mentally aberrant type.
— The Call of Cthulhu

A telling delineation and choice of verbs:

I can recall that fire today as I saw it then at the age of seven, with the Federal soldiers shouting, the women screaming, and the negroes howling and praying.
— The Rats in the Walls