World Fantasy Award organizers recently announced that they would stop giving out busts of infamous racist H.P. Lovecraft to winners. Lovecraft biographer S.T. Joshi is outraged, calling the decision “a craven yielding to the worst sort of political correctness.” Joshi has returned his World Fantasy Awards in protest, The Guardian reports.
It's important to draw a distinction between banning the works of Lovecraft — which nobody is demanding, for the record — and literally idolizing him with a statue. Much has been written about Lovecraft's racism in recent years, including the Lovecraft-inspired comics of Alan Moore. Here's an interesting essay about Moore's evolving attempts to address the racism in Lovecraft's work. We can't sweep that part of Lovecraft's character under the rug; we must acknowledge it, examine it, and learn what we can from it.