Racism and Xenophobia in Lovecraft
While H.P. Lovecraft’s works have been, and continue to be, a source of great admiration, there are also reasons for revulsion due to the overt racism and xenophobia which come out in many of his stories. Some would argue that this was a product of his time and that he was simply expressing cultural norms, as these do show up in the work other authors from this period (Robert Howard, creator of Conan the Barbarian, as well as numerous other genre characters). Lovecraft included dangerous stereotypes and even attacks on others due to their ethnicity or religion.
Xenophobia is the fear, usually associated with hatred, of people who different from the bigoted individual, either foreigners or of a different race or ethnicity. Xenophobia shows up in many of Lovecraft’s works sometimes subtly, in other cases explicitly blatant. Common tropes of xenophobia include placing blame for crime, poverty, job loss, or disease on an immigrant, or racial, group (whether they are of a different religious group can also add further “proof” of their guilt). Some of the targets of Lovecraft’s xenophobia include Asian and Eastern European immigrants and people of African descent, whether recent immigrants or descendants of American slaves. Usually xenophobia and racism reinforce each other as people who subscribe to those beliefs build a worldview of hatred towards “the other,” “who can then be blamed for all the ills they encounter.
The Horror of Red Hook, written in 1925, is one of Lovecraft’s transitional works between his earliest writings and shift towards the Cthulhu Mythos. It has elements of xenophobia and racism spread throughout: the people of Red Hook are described as a dangerous mix of Spaniards, Italians, and negroes who conduct smuggling, graft, and murder, who live in squalid buildings falling into ruin, and who conduct unholy blood rites in a desecrated church.[1] .
The Horror of Red Hook takes place in a fictionalized version of Red Hook, Brooklyn. The real Red Hook dates back to the oldest Dutch settlements in colonial New Amsterdam. After New Amsterdam was purchased by the English, Red Hook was incorporated into nearby Brooklyn. Between the 1920s and the early 1960s, Red Hook was one of the busiest freight ports in the world. This constant business attracted countless immigrants to live and work in the port: it became a melting pot of different cultures, languages, and customs. African Americans moved there from the American South, joining Dutch, Norwegian, German, Irish, Puerto Ricans Italian, Spanish, and Greek immigrants.
Immigrants tend to settle in areas where their ethnic group was already established; this continues into the modern day and is how we get areas known as “Little…” wherever they are from. Xenophobia and racism play a major role in creating these gentrified communities, as many “natives” did not want any outsiders living within their territory. The areas many of these outside groups called home were some of the oldest neighborhoods and were perceived as dangerous and run-down, even when they were not. It was easy for Lovecraft to identify and describe these “dangerous elements” and their run-down neighborhoods for audiences who would be familiar with, and likely bigoted towards, real people and locations. Racism and xenophobia comes into Lovecraft stories casually in both subtle and overt ways. The most obvious example to Lovecraft’s overt racism is the poem “The Creation of the Nigger” which many authors have already touched upon.
The elements which cause Red Hook to stand out in terms of xenophobia and racism is the way his main character, Thomas Malone (who happens to be of Irish descent and is a police detective), describes the neighborhood and those who inhabit it. The inhabitants are viewed as degenerate criminals who are on the verge of spilling out of their slums into better parts of the surrounding city. The Greeks and Spaniards, along with other less desirable immigrants and even foreigners, are involved in smuggling goods (likely alcohol, though Lovecraft doesn’t specify) into Red Hook via underground tunnels that connect to the area’s docks.
In theory, the only way for these Prohibition-outlawed products to come into American neighborhoods was smuggling. Those contraband goods were handled by people whose silence could be bought off and/or were desperately in need to money, thus the working-class were often involved in moving these goods. The transient nature of the workers and jobs, both legal and illicit, at docks and in the “slum neighborhoods” contributed to an idea of foreigners destroying the “good” areas around them.
Because so many people fled Europe in the aftermath of World War I due to the devastation of the conflict, the economic collapse of many regions, or the events of the Bolshevik Revolution and subsequent Russian Civil War, the United States was inundated by waves of “undesirable” immigrants. There was a great deal of fear of a possible Communist uprising, especially by those immigrants from Eastern Europe or the former Russian Empire, between 1919-1923. Lovecraft does not specifically mention political alignments of those described by Officer Malone, but he does mention that these people wanted to overthrow the “normal order” of society, which the reader can interpret as meaning religious, economic, or socio-cultural “normalcy.”
Readers are first introduced to Detective Malone in Pascoag, Rhode Island, seemingly suffering from a case of shellshock (now called Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD), associated with his recent investigation into the case of Robert Suydam. The case revolves around a series of strange events that rocked the neighborhood of Red Hook and Suydam’s connections to them. While Suydam himself is Dutch, it is noted that under his employ is odd collection of degenerate immigrants and foreigners who aid him in his strange rituals and crimes. Those crimes include smuggling (both mundane contraband and supernatural goods), along with the large number of kidnappings, and possible murders, some of which are of children (associated with the blood libel) and others, adults, including Suydam’s wife.
Malone became involved because Suydam’s extended family filed a court complaint to test the sanity of their reclusive relative, fearing for their share of the family’s wealth. Because of the nature of these strange objects, the only way Suydam can get his hands on them is illegally, with the help of immigrants and dangerous foreigners. Suydam’s criminal and occult activities lead to the death of Sudyam and his wife onboard his boat. His body is taken off by a group of foreign sailors and is prepared for a ritual to make him immortal. The resurrection itself takes place in an abandoned and desecrated church, with blood rites and human sacrifice needed to fuel the occult ritual.
Lovecraft’s use of both immigrants and foreign agents being both exploited and victimized by Suydam play into xenophobia in both fiction and reality. If the people of Red Hook were not superstitious and morally and ethnically degenerate, they would have possibly thwarted Suydam. By being transient, desperate, and criminally inclined, the people of Red Hook were active participants in the near destruction of their community. Events were only forced when outsiders took on an active agency to investigate and disrupt, hopefully, whatever criminal and supernatural activities Red Hook harbored.
This prejudiced view of “Eastern” people, whether they originate from the Middle East, Africa, or Greater Asia itself, is that they are dangerous, decadent, listless, or backwards is common of both xenophobes and racists of Europe and the Americas. This prejudiced idea of Eastern peoples being more decadent and less noble than their Western European counterparts’ dates to the Persian Wars between the ancient Greeks and the Persian Empire. This prejudiced Western worldview continued to color the interactions between Western Europeans and the peoples they colonized in the Americas, Africa, and Asia. It was not until the publication of Edward Said’s monograph Orientalism that this prejudice was properly identified and placed in historical context. Ironically enough, it is named Orientalism. Orientalism was, and still is, used as a means of dismissing the achievements of these conquered peoples, and is an important element of the worldview of racists and xenophobes.[2]
The Civil Rights Movements of the Twentieth Century finally allowed groups who were targeted by racists and bigots to have their voices heard. By being actively empowered to share their own cultures, experiences, and voices, these formerly targeted people have been able to turn the tables on the racism and xenophobia that still exists and haunts them. This reversal is an important element of Lovecraft Country. In the series the main characters, Atticus Turner, George and Hippolyta Berry, and Letitia Lewis, are African Americans who suddenly come face-to-face with the supernatural world while living in Jim Crow America. The story focuses on them and the multiple realities in which they encounter and must strive to overcome.
[1] This plays strongly into anti-Semitic slander of blood libel, which is an anti-Semitic myth regarding the kidnapping and ritual murder of Christian children by the surrounding Jewish community. According to anti-Semitic propaganda dating back as far as the 12th century, the blood of Christian children was needed to make unleavened bread for one of the most important Jewish holidays, Passover. Usually these allegations appear when a young child or teenager disappears and is found murdered. The Jewish community is falsely blamed for the murders (in many cases it turned out members of the child’s extended family committed the homicide and carried out the murder with specific “ritual” wounds to cover up their crimes). Once revenge has been taken by the community, the original allegations would fade, only to reemerge again when anti-Semitic tensions rose to fever pitch.
[2] An example of Orientalist racism that penetrated and shaped some early archeological interpretations of ancient civilizations are the following: How could the ancient African civilization of pharaonic Egypt construct the Pyramids of Giza and disappear? During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Orientalist intellectuals argued that the native Egyptians could not have constructed the Pyramids by themselves: rather it was a migrant group of Aryans who conquered Egypt and forced the natives to construct those ancient wonders. Even the ancient Mesopotamians and their enormous cities were labeled as a foreign conquering race who shaped the “native” peoples into the heights of civilization before the Aryan migrants were destroyed by interbreeding with the locals.