vox--2020-08-18--Lovecraftian horror — and the racism at its core — explained

His work saturates modern horror and literary fiction .
He has directly influenced countless writers of modern horror , from Stephen King to Junji Ito to Guillermo del Toro .
His monsters — and the men who encounter their cosmic evil — have left imprints everywhere from Alien designer H.R .
Giger to the otherworldly tentacle monsters of Stranger Things to True Detective ’ s Rust Cohle .
There ’ s a prehistoric sea cucumber named after his most famous creation , Cthulhu .
Yet H.P .
Lovecraft and his works of literary horror are long overdue for a cultural @ @ @ @ @ @ @ one of the 20th century ’ s most influential writers , but he was also one of its most gallingly racist .
Lovecraft leaves no room for a debate about separating the artist from their art .
He injected many of his most famous and beloved stories with overt racist metaphors and frequent blunt literal racism .
For the past decade or so , as the extent of his racism has become more widely known and acknowledged , horror and fantasy writers whose landscapes are saturated with Lovecraft ’ s influence have been @ @ @ @ @ @ @ about him .
Matt Ruff ’ s 2016 novel Lovecraft Country was one of the first attempts at an answer .
By centering Black characters who were often the metaphorical villains of Lovecraft ’ s stories , the book allows for a new layer of meaning to map onto Lovecraft ’ s old fears .
With HBO ’ s adaptation of Lovecraft Country into a 10-episode drama , that broader , overdue cultural reckoning may have finally arrived .
The series , helmed by Misha Green and produced by Jordan Peele , places @ @ @ @ @ @ @ center of a proper Lovecraftian mystery .
The story teems with all the typical Lovecraftian tropes : creepy New England villages , dark mansions with esoteric secrets , and tentacle monsters shipped direct from the cosmic void ; but it ’ s also full of very realistic horror , in the form of the racist police violence and white supremacy our heroes must confront at every turn .
Necessarily , Lovecraft Country ’ s approach to Lovecraft ’ s legacy is simultaneously one of shrewd affection and resigned repugnance .
For the problem @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
His influence is so ubiquitous within horror and fantasy that you simply can ’ t ignore it — nor is it always easy or simple to subvert it .
What we can do is explain it .
With Lovecraft , it ’ s helpful to understand both how and why his stories were so influential , and why there ’ s been so much hand-wringing over how to think about and discuss them since .
Lovecraft grew up haunted by madness and death H.P .
Lovecraft was a turn-of-the-20th-century author whose works @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of horror that would come to be known as “ Weird fiction.
” Born in Providence in 1890 , Lovecraft grew up with an agonizing fear of both death and mental collapse .
When he was 3 years old , his father had a psychological breakdown , probably related to syphilis , and Lovecraft moved in with his mother ’ s wealthy family .
His father ’ s confinement in an asylum and his maternal grandmother ’ s death — which occurred not long after Lovecraft moved into the matriarchal family manse — @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and Lovecraft became obsessed with the fear that he , too , might experience a psychological breakdown .
As a teen he suffered severe social anxiety and agoraphobia , and poured himself into voracious reading and studying , especially horror fiction and astronomy .
Although Lovecraft was extremely well-read , between his family ’ s financial decline in his boyhood and what seem to have been his own episodes of mental illness , he never graduated high school .
By the time his mother also began to experience signs of psychological breakdown — @ @ @ @ @ @ @ was in his late 20s , and his fear of mental illness , his raging xenophobia , and his fixation on the cosmos as a reflection for all the dread he felt were well established through his writing .
By that time , he ’ d also established himself as a writer by contributing to zines — part of the magazine medium that later became known as pulp fiction .
Zines , still popular in geek culture today , are a combination of fictional anthology and community bulletin .
Prevalent throughout many niche @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , they were full of stories and discussions of the day , and mailed to contributors and subscribers .
Often distributed for free or a relatively low fee , zines functioned as a kind of niche writing circle and amateur hobbyist group .
Subsequently , within the speculative fiction community — horror , science fiction , and fantasy writing — they fostered most of the now-seminal literature of the first half of the century ; Conan the Barbarian , Tarzan , Flash Gordon , Buck Rogers , and Perry Mason were all characters @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , in zines .
Nobel Prize winner Sinclair Lewis edited a zine , and nearly every 20th-century genre author you ’ ve ever heard of appeared in one at some point .
Lovecraft grew to become hugely involved in this community both as a writer and as an opinionated reader .
One of the most popular zines of the day was the popular Weird Tales , which ran from the ’ 20s to the ’ 50s and published hugely important genre authors like Ray Bradbury , Robert Bloch , and many more .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ s own works — nearly all short stories — and helped him gain a following .
The sprawling vast horror subgenre that Lovecraft codified and popularized ultimately became known as “ Weird ” fiction ( the W is capitalized to indicate that it ’ s a genre ) partly because of the zine ’ s influence .
As a writer , Lovecraft was extremely generous .
He frequently mentored and encouraged other writers , and fostered among his devoted cult of acolytes a “ share and share alike ” mentality that turned his @ @ @ @ @ @ @ where everyone was invited to play .
He freely gave every writer around him permission to write fanfiction of his works , be they remixes of his stories or new stories with crossover elements .
Countless other horror writers throughout the 20th and 21st centuries have set their own stories within the fictional universe Lovecraft created , often referred to as the Cthulhu Mythos or simply “ the Mythos.
” This act — allowing people to share his ideas and his story elements — probably did more than anything else to help spread @ @ @ @ @ @ @ view of horror : what we call “ Lovecraftian ” today .
But Lovecraft never reaped any broader acclaim for his work in his lifetime .
He died penniless and unknown in 1937 , at the age of 46 , just before World War II .
Yet among his fans , Lovecraft had fostered such a loyal cult following of horror aficionados that his influence spread slowly and steadily throughout the remainder of the century .
Legions of horror and fantasy writers who came after Lovecraft spread his influence further — until today @ @ @ @ @ @ @ horror landscape .
Lovecraft had very specific visions of very vast cosmic horror Lovecraft is often credited with creating Weird fiction , and he did coin the term , but he emphatically didn ’ t invent the genre .
He was writing within a broader tradition of supernatural fantasy that had been growing and evolving since the first works of gothic horror were published in the late 1700s .
In particular , Lovecraft was working under the influence of a subset of Victorian and Edwardian authors , both British and American , who @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a source of existential dread .
These writers , like Algernon Blackwood , M.R .
James , Ambrose Bierce , Robert W. Chambers , and Arthur Machen , would all come to be hugely influential in the development of Weird fiction and specifically Lovecraft ’ s view of horror .
All of these writers tended to play with the idea that unnatural or supernatural elements , perhaps even entire worlds , lurked just outside civilization , often adjacent or right next door to it ; their unassuming ( white male ) characters often @ @ @ @ @ @ @ supernatural forces by accident .
Lovecraft , working within the tradition in fiction of borrowing from and remixing other stories , often directly borrowed story elements from many of his fellow writers .
Several recurring images run throughout their collective works , such as Bierce ’ s fictional city of Carcosa and Chambers ’ s “ the Yellow King , ” both signifiers of encounters with other worlds and the unholy , unknowable monster who rules them .
What Lovecraft contributed to this general vibe was a deeply lush writing style , a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and fantasy of the 19th century .
He became known for gravely serious , detail-rich descriptions of untold “ eldritch ” horrors , often blended with existential wonder .
These descriptions nearly always included his fictional characters confronting the idea of a cold , different , and perhaps even actively hostile cosmic universe .
Lovecraft ’ s confrontations usually involve his characters experiencing brief brushes with terrifying otherworldly phenomena .
They ’ re rarely described in detail , but Lovecraft usually provides just enough description to make you feel , along with the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ glimpsed the edge of a vast and overwhelming universe full of darkness and terror .
One defining example is his most famous story , “ The Call of Cthulhu , ” in which the narrator writes , “ I have looked upon all that the universe has to hold of horror.
” Cthulhu — pronounced “ kuh-THOO-loo ” or sometimes “ CUT-uh-loo ” or “ CLUE-loo ” — is Lovecraft ’ s most famous monster , introduced in its aforementioned namesake tale .
Lovecraft refers to Cthulhu with many different names , including @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Tsathoggua , ” and “ Him Who is not to be Named.
” Cthulhu , a giant tentacle monster on a bulbous winged body , is far from a daunting figure these days — look at all these snuggly Cthulhu plushies I found on Etsy !
— but to Lovecraft , he was the pinnacle of a race of monsters that Lovecraft called “ Elder Gods ” or “ Great Old Ones.
” Other gods in this vein included creatures Lovecraft dubbed yog-sothoth , “ night-gaunts , ” and various cryptically named demons @ @ @ @ @ @ @ waits to awake and take over the world , Cthulhu has the ability to infiltrate your mind and drive you mad through a constant powerful summons to join him in his lair of darkness .
Consequently , in many of Lovecraft ’ s stories , Cthulhu actually does have a cult of followers who are devoted to helping him rise .
There ’ s also an element of an incredible voyage inherent in these stories , which borrows from the influence of other pulpy 19th-century writers like Jules Verne .
Often , Lovecraft @ @ @ @ @ @ @ explorers who make dark treks across the Earth — or even just across New England — to find a lost city , or to find and read a forbidden book .
The Arctic was a popular destination , since in the Mythos , many of Lovecraft ’ s monsters slumber in a lost city at the bottom of the world called R ’ lyeh .
But Lovecraft also placed monsters throughout America — like in Mammoth Cave , Kentucky — and very frequently in fictional towns in Massachusetts and Rhode Island .
In @ @ @ @ @ @ @ was most often directly in his own backyard .
His most famous fictional New England settings include the small , mysterious town of Arkham , Massachusetts , where one of his most famous characters , “ Reanimator ” Herbert West , lived and worked .
Then there ’ s Dunwich , home to the “ Dunwich Horror ” and the fictional Miskatonic University , where one of Lovecraft ’ s most famous inventions , the Necronomicon or book of the dead , supposedly resides .
Nearly all of these encounters with cosmic terror @ @ @ @ @ @ @ going mad , fearing that they will go mad , or — worst of all — realizing that they themselves are somehow directly related to the monster they ’ re afraid of , or slowly becoming the monster themselves .
“ The monster is me ” is a staple of horror fiction these days , and Lovecraft unfailingly used it to turn his fears inward .
In Lovecraftian fiction , the safe option for the narrator is ultimately madness — because to him , the far worse alternative is recognizing that you are @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is where Lovecraft ’ s writing turns both brilliant and inescapably racist .
Because much of this metaphor is built not just around Lovecraft ’ s dread of the universe , but his fear of race-mixing .
Lovecraft ’ s racism left a long shadow over the genre he popularized One of the problems with Lovecraft is that his work and influence was everywhere before most people knew he was anywhere .
Despite the spread of his ideas among genre fans and writers , Lovecraft himself didn ’ t become more widely known @ @ @ @ @ @ @ late 1980s and ’ 90s .
Consequently , the popular culture he so thoroughly left his mark on was slow to really parse where that influence came from — or address the fact that the man at the center of it was an extreme racist .
And let ’ s make no bones about it .
Lovecraft was an avid , loud , horrific racist — suffice it to say you ’ ll probably fail this “ Hitler or Lovecraft ?
” quiz — and on top of his frequent racist rants in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ racist fears infuse and inform nearly all of his work .
Famous Lovecraft short stories like “ The Shadow over Innsmouth ” ( about a seaport town of murderous cultists who are secretly mating with terrifying fish people ) and “ The Horror of Red Hook ” ( a story full of textual xenophobia and horror at New York ’ s immigration influx and the “ primitive half-ape savagery ” of nonwhite New Yorkers ) may be beloved and hugely influential , but they ’ re also built on overt racist metaphors .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ of miscegenation ( race-mixing ) , hereditary evil , and his concern that he himself might have an impure bloodline , which all takes his “ monster is me ” trope in a terrible direction .
Throughout the decades , many of his fans have attempted to argue that actually , Lovecraft wasn ’ t that racist , and that he would have eventually turned away from his beliefs if he ’ d only lived longer .
This is a terrible argument ; Lovecraft ’ s form of racism was already profoundly more @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of his time , and the assumption that he was growing more tolerant in his beliefs is based on wishful thinking .
And as the genre has begun to diversify its scope over the past decade or so , more people have realized that .
This debate about how racist Lovecraft actually was , and what to do about it , has played out directly among the community of the World Fantasy Award — which traditionally , from its founding in 1975 , awarded a bust of Lovecraft ’ s head as its @ @ @ @ @ @ @ writer Nnedi Okorafor won the annual honor , and only realized Lovecraft ’ s legacy after a horrified friend pointed out to her that the man whose head sat upon her mantle was a lifelong , virulent racist .
When Okorafor wrote a blog post about how conflicted she felt that “ a statuette of this racist man ’ s head is one of my greatest honors as a writer , ” including in it Lovecraft ’ s most overtly racist piece of writing , she drew inescapable new attention to a subject @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
In 2014 , writer Daniel José Older began a petition to change the World Fantasy Award to a bust of Black writer Octavia Butler .
That same year , Black writer Sofia Samatar won the honor , and said in her acceptance speech , “ I can ’ t sit down without addressing the elephant in the room , which is the controversy surrounding the image that represents this award.
” The following year , in 2015 , the awards finally retired Lovecraft ’ s image — which caused controversy both because @ @ @ @ @ @ @ overdue and because some were furious at what they saw as the erasure of Lovecraft ’ s legacy .
The conversations have been ongoing among horror fans ever since .
Speaking at the “ Shadow Over Lovecraft ” discussion on Lovecraft ’ s racism , held in New York in 2019 by the Miskatonic Institute ( a recurring panel series named for Lovecraft ’ s fictional university ) , Lovecraft Country author Matt Ruff discussed the ways Lovecraft ’ s fear of the other , even though it was rooted in racism , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
“ In giving vent to his bigotry , he taps into a larger fear that I think we all have of people who are different from us and mean us no good , ” he said .
“ It ’ s one of the reasons you can take his stories and repurpose them .
...
He may not have realized the universalism of some of what he was writing about , but I can take that away from his work.
” In other words , there ’ s something timeless and universally @ @ @ @ @ @ @ fiction that keeps even reluctant readers coming back to him .
That doesn ’ t mean one has to overindulge ; “ not reading Lovecraft ’ s letters is a form of self-care , ” writer Ruthanna Emrys quipped on the same panel .
Still , there ’ s an extent to which all of this discussion has been taking place within Lovecraft ’ s niche community of genre writers — still well below the mainstream radar , away from the broader influence of his work .
( As late as 2014 , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in media outlets that made no mention of his racism . )
That might finally be changing with HBO ’ s Lovecraft Country now spotlighting the conversation around the author ’ s racist legacy — but it also inevitably yields frustration because Lovecraftian imagery and themes are so embedded within the pop culture landscape .
“ He ’ s so woven in , I think for horror as a whole , it would feel to me a little bit like removing an arm , ” Black horror writer Victor LaValle , who often @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ And so instead I feel like an alternative choice is to identify the illness and then maybe you can save the arm.
” In many ways , as LaValle pointed out to me , sampling Lovecraft is also an important introduction to the fears that animate the landscape of white America .
Whereas European writers often frame their supernatural horror as a kind of wrong turn into a strange place , the American version of that strangeness is usually much more aggressive .
“ The American versions of that are usually like @ @ @ @ @ @ @ us .
They ’ re out to get us .
We have to fight , ” LaValle explained .
“ Certainly one of the central ideas of America is like , we have to push back — we have to clear what ’ s here to make it civilized place.
” “ It ’ s no surprise , ” he continued , “ that particularly so many white Americans would be driven somewhat insane by the need to be the light of civilization , but also , unfortunately they ’ re just human @ @ @ @ @ @ @ with flaws ... [ and ] you see the ways that they throw that onto the groups they fear .
This [ other ] group is criminal .
This [ other ] group is thieves .
This [ other ] group is oversexed .
It ’ s all things that they fear in themselves.
” The solution , then , is to spread awareness of Lovecraft ’ s legacy alongside the work itself .
LaValle told me that with a cultural influence that ’ s so fully saturated , the alternative is to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ already there , to try to create something new while still acknowledging what we love about what ’ s old .
“ What that means is talking about things , shedding light on things , and beginning to teach the genre as a whole as a way to talk about things that are wrong or broken or outdated .
And being able to say , ‘ We can talk this thing through and then keep the best of it and identify the worst of it.
’ ” He also stressed capitalizing on Lovecraft @ @ @ @ @ @ @ own stories to overwrite that legacy into newer , more progressive visions of horror .
For instance , his award-winning Lovecraftian horror novel The Ballad of Black Tom largely revolves around the underlying premise that much of Lovecraft ’ s horror is predicated on ridiculous white privilege .
That horrific realization that all Lovecraft ’ s characters undergo that the universe doesn ’ t revolve around them ?
That ’ s not a problem any Black character would ever have .
“ If you ’ re Black , ” he said , “ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ as a whole thinks you are wonderful because all you have to do , if you ’ re a Black American , all you have to do is walk through America , and this country teaches you .
...
The idea that you would be driven mad because you found out that the universe doesn ’ t think you ’ re special is a joke to me as a Black American.
” LaValle , published The Ballad of Black Tom on the same day as Ruff ’ s Lovecraft Country in 2016 .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ novel is also being developed into a TV series , but by AMC instead of HBO .
He points to stories like Get Out and HBO ’ s Watchmen as a sign that modern Black creators are successfully subverting many of the racist tropes that fuel genre media .
And genre , he said , is “ the pleasant , pleasant casing that makes the medicine go down.
” Perhaps that means the universality of Lovecraft ’ s themes can also serve as the fundamental appeal that allows modern horror writers to subvert @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , aware commentaries on the very kind of racism he evinced .
And that ’ s perhaps the biggest Lovecraftian twist of all : the unknown cosmic terror , transformed into something as familiar and tawdry as everyday racism — and then vanquished with the light of understanding in favor of newer , better stories .
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His work saturates modern horror and literary fiction. He has directly influenced countless writers of modern horror, from Stephen King to Junji Ito to Guillermo del Toro. His monsters — and the men who encounter their cosmic evil — have left imprints everywhere from Alien designer H.R. Giger to the otherworldly tentacle monsters of Stranger Things to True Detective’s Rust Cohle. There’s a prehistoric sea cucumber named after his most famous creation, Cthulhu.
Yet H.P. Lovecraft and his works of literary horror are long overdue for a cultural reckoning — because Lovecraft may have been one of the 20th century’s most influential writers, but he was also one of its most gallingly racist.
Lovecraft leaves no room for a debate about separating the artist from their art. He injected many of his most famous and beloved stories with overt racist metaphors and frequent blunt literal racism. For the past decade or so, as the extent of his racism has become more widely known and acknowledged, horror and fantasy writers whose landscapes are saturated with Lovecraft’s influence have been trying to figure out what to do about him. Matt Ruff’s 2016 novel Lovecraft Country was one of the first attempts at an answer. By centering Black characters who were often the metaphorical villains of Lovecraft’s stories, the book allows for a new layer of meaning to map onto Lovecraft’s old fears.
With HBO’s adaptation of Lovecraft Country into a 10-episode drama, that broader, overdue cultural reckoning may have finally arrived. The series, helmed by Misha Green and produced by Jordan Peele, places Black protagonists and horror nerds at the center of a proper Lovecraftian mystery. The story teems with all the typical Lovecraftian tropes: creepy New England villages, dark mansions with esoteric secrets, and tentacle monsters shipped direct from the cosmic void; but it’s also full of very realistic horror, in the form of the racist police violence and white supremacy our heroes must confront at every turn.
Necessarily, Lovecraft Country’s approach to Lovecraft’s legacy is simultaneously one of shrewd affection and resigned repugnance. For the problem with Lovecraft is that Lovecraft is everywhere. His influence is so ubiquitous within horror and fantasy that you simply can’t ignore it — nor is it always easy or simple to subvert it.
What we can do is explain it. With Lovecraft, it’s helpful to understand both how and why his stories were so influential, and why there’s been so much hand-wringing over how to think about and discuss them since.
Lovecraft grew up haunted by madness and death
H.P. Lovecraft was a turn-of-the-20th-century author whose works were a key part of the subgenre of horror that would come to be known as “Weird fiction.” Born in Providence in 1890, Lovecraft grew up with an agonizing fear of both death and mental collapse. When he was 3 years old, his father had a psychological breakdown, probably related to syphilis, and Lovecraft moved in with his mother’s wealthy family.
His father’s confinement in an asylum and his maternal grandmother’s death — which occurred not long after Lovecraft moved into the matriarchal family manse — were looming events of his childhood, and Lovecraft became obsessed with the fear that he, too, might experience a psychological breakdown. As a teen he suffered severe social anxiety and agoraphobia, and poured himself into voracious reading and studying, especially horror fiction and astronomy.
Although Lovecraft was extremely well-read, between his family’s financial decline in his boyhood and what seem to have been his own episodes of mental illness, he never graduated high school. By the time his mother also began to experience signs of psychological breakdown — perhaps also because of syphilis — Lovecraft was in his late 20s, and his fear of mental illness, his raging xenophobia, and his fixation on the cosmos as a reflection for all the dread he felt were well established through his writing.
(It’s not clear where Lovecraft’s racism and xenophobia originated, though his upbringing may naturally have had a lot to do with it. Even his biographer and ardent supporter S.T. Joshi notes that Lovecraft’s love of science wouldn’t have supported his views, since “the brute fact is that by 1930 every ‘scientific’ justification for racism had been demolished.” What is clear is that by the early 1930s, Lovecraft was passionately espousing his racist viewpoints in letters to friends, defending white lynch mobs, and trumpeting Hitler with praise that may seem eerily familiar these days: “I know he’s a clown but god I like the boy!”)
By that time, he’d also established himself as a writer by contributing to the magazine medium commonly referred to as pulp fiction.
Pulp fiction made up the first wave of the geek magazine medium that would later become known as zines. Still popular in geek culture today, zines are a combination of fictional anthology and community bulletin, mailed or emailed to contributors and subscribers.
Prevalent throughout the early 20th century, pulp fiction titles were mass market, often distributed for free or a relatively low fee. They were full of stories and discussions of the day, and functioned as a kind of niche writing circle. Subsequently, within the speculative fiction community — horror, science fiction, and fantasy writing — they fostered most of the now-seminal literature of the first half of the century; Conan the Barbarian, Tarzan, Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers, and Perry Mason were all characters who appeared first, and often only, in pulp fiction series. Nobel Prize winner Sinclair Lewis edited a pulp, and nearly every 20th-century genre author you’ve ever heard of appeared in one at some point.
Lovecraft grew to become hugely involved in this community both as a writer and as an opinionated reader. One of the most popular pulps of the day was the popular Weird Tales, which ran from the ’20s to the ’50s and published hugely important genre authors like Ray Bradbury, Robert Bloch, and many more. It also published many of Lovecraft’s own works — nearly all short stories — and helped him gain a following. The sprawling vast horror subgenre that Lovecraft codified and popularized ultimately became known as “Weird” fiction (the W is capitalized to indicate that it’s a genre) partly because of the pulp’s influence.
As a writer, Lovecraft was extremely generous. He frequently mentored and encouraged other writers, and fostered among his devoted cult of acolytes a “share and share alike” mentality that turned his stories into a kind of giant sandbox where everyone was invited to play. He freely gave every writer around him permission to write fanfiction of his works, be they remixes of his stories or new stories with crossover elements. Countless other horror writers throughout the 20th and 21st centuries have set their own stories within the fictional universe Lovecraft created, often referred to as the Cthulhu Mythos or simply “the Mythos.”
This act — allowing people to share his ideas and his story elements — probably did more than anything else to help spread Lovecraft’s stories and his particular view of horror: what we call “Lovecraftian” today. But Lovecraft never reaped any broader acclaim for his work in his lifetime. He died penniless and unknown in 1937, at the age of 46, just before World War II.
Yet among his fans, Lovecraft had fostered such a loyal cult following of horror aficionados that his influence spread slowly and steadily throughout the remainder of the century. Legions of horror and fantasy writers who came after Lovecraft spread his influence further — until today his influence is essentially ubiquitous within the horror landscape.
Lovecraft had very specific visions of very vast cosmic horror
Lovecraft is often credited with creating Weird fiction, and he did coin the term, but he emphatically didn’t invent the genre. He was writing within a broader tradition of supernatural fantasy that had been growing and evolving since the first works of gothic horror were published in the late 1700s. In particular, Lovecraft was working under the influence of a subset of Victorian and Edwardian authors, both British and American, who dabbled in the idea of nature as a source of existential dread. These writers, like Algernon Blackwood, M.R. James, Ambrose Bierce, Robert W. Chambers, and Arthur Machen, would all come to be hugely influential in the development of Weird fiction and specifically Lovecraft’s view of horror.
All of these writers tended to play with the idea that unnatural or supernatural elements, perhaps even entire worlds, lurked just outside civilization, often adjacent or right next door to it; their unassuming (white male) characters often stumbled into or encountered these worlds and supernatural forces by accident. Lovecraft, working within the tradition in fiction of borrowing from and remixing other stories, often directly borrowed story elements from many of his fellow writers. Several recurring images run throughout their collective works, such as Bierce’s fictional city of Carcosa and Chambers’s “the Yellow King,” both signifiers of encounters with other worlds and the unholy, unknowable monster who rules them.
What Lovecraft contributed to this general vibe was a deeply lush writing style, a throwback to the stylization of gothic horror and fantasy of the 19th century. He became known for gravely serious, detail-rich descriptions of untold “eldritch” horrors, often blended with existential wonder. These descriptions nearly always included his fictional characters confronting the idea of a cold, different, and perhaps even actively hostile cosmic universe.
Lovecraft’s confrontations usually involve his characters experiencing brief brushes with terrifying otherworldly phenomena. They’re rarely described in detail, but Lovecraft usually provides just enough description to make you feel, along with the characters, as though you’ve glimpsed the edge of a vast and overwhelming universe full of darkness and terror. One defining example is his most famous story, “The Call of Cthulhu,” in which the narrator writes, “I have looked upon all that the universe has to hold of horror.”
Cthulhu — pronounced “kuh-THOO-loo” or sometimes “CUT-uh-loo” or “CLUE-loo” — is Lovecraft’s most famous monster, introduced in its aforementioned namesake tale. Lovecraft refers to Cthulhu with many different names, including “the Dread One,” “Tsathoggua,” and “Him Who is not to be Named.”
Cthulhu, a giant tentacle monster on a bulbous winged body, is far from a daunting figure these days — look at all these snuggly Cthulhu plushies I found on Etsy! — but to Lovecraft, he was the pinnacle of a race of monsters that Lovecraft called “Elder Gods” or “Great Old Ones.” Other gods in this vein included creatures Lovecraft dubbed yog-sothoth, “night-gaunts,” and various cryptically named demons. Even while slumbering ominously as he waits to awake and take over the world, Cthulhu has the ability to infiltrate your mind and drive you mad through a constant powerful summons to join him in his lair of darkness. Consequently, in many of Lovecraft’s stories, Cthulhu actually does have a cult of followers who are devoted to helping him rise.
There’s also an element of an incredible voyage inherent in these stories, which borrows from the influence of other pulpy 19th-century writers like Jules Verne. Often, Lovecraft’s characters are doomed travelers or explorers who make dark treks across the Earth — or even just across New England — to find a lost city, or to find and read a forbidden book.
The Arctic was a popular destination, since in the Mythos, many of Lovecraft’s monsters slumber in a lost city at the bottom of the world called R’lyeh. But Lovecraft also placed monsters throughout America — like in Mammoth Cave, Kentucky — and very frequently in fictional towns in Massachusetts and Rhode Island.
In fact, Lovecraft’s fictional universe was most often directly in his own backyard. His most famous fictional New England settings include the small, mysterious town of Arkham, Massachusetts, where one of his most famous characters, “Reanimator” Herbert West, lived and worked. Then there’s Dunwich, home to the “Dunwich Horror” and the fictional Miskatonic University, where one of Lovecraft’s most famous inventions, the Necronomicon or book of the dead, supposedly resides.
Nearly all of these encounters with cosmic terror end up with Lovecraft’s narrators going mad, fearing that they will go mad, or — worst of all — realizing that they themselves are somehow directly related to the monster they’re afraid of, or slowly becoming the monster themselves. “The monster is me” is a staple of horror fiction these days, and Lovecraft unfailingly used it to turn his fears inward. In Lovecraftian fiction, the safe option for the narrator is ultimately madness — because to him, the far worse alternative is recognizing that you are the thing you hate.
And this is where Lovecraft’s writing turns both brilliant and inescapably racist. Because much of this metaphor is built not just around Lovecraft’s dread of the universe, but his fear of race-mixing.
Lovecraft’s racism left a long shadow over the genre he popularized
One of the problems with Lovecraft is that his work and influence was everywhere before most people knew he was anywhere. Despite the spread of his ideas among genre fans and writers, Lovecraft himself didn’t become more widely known outside of a cult following until the late 1980s and ’90s. Consequently, the popular culture he so thoroughly left his mark on was slow to really parse where that influence came from — or address the fact that the man at the center of it was an extreme racist.
And let’s make no bones about it. Lovecraft was an avid, loud, horrific racist — suffice it to say you’ll probably fail this “Hitler or Lovecraft?” quiz — and on top of his frequent racist rants in letters and discussions with friends, his racist fears infuse and inform nearly all of his work. Famous Lovecraft short stories like “The Shadow over Innsmouth” (about a seaport town of murderous cultists who are secretly mating with terrifying fish people) and “The Horror of Red Hook” (a story full of textual xenophobia and horror at New York’s immigration influx and the “primitive half-ape savagery” of nonwhite New Yorkers) may be beloved and hugely influential, but they’re also built on overt racist metaphors. Often these metaphors involve his deep fear of miscegenation (race-mixing), hereditary evil, and his concern that he himself might have an impure bloodline, which all takes his “monster is me” trope in a terrible direction.
Throughout the decades, many of his fans have attempted to argue that actually, Lovecraft wasn’t that racist, and that he would have eventually turned away from his beliefs if he’d only lived longer. This is a terrible argument; Lovecraft’s form of racism was already profoundly more extreme than the “typical” racism of his time, and the assumption that he was growing more tolerant in his beliefs is based on wishful thinking. And as the genre has begun to diversify its scope over the past decade or so, more people have realized that.
This debate about how racist Lovecraft actually was, and what to do about it, has played out directly among the community of the World Fantasy Award — which traditionally, from its founding in 1975, awarded a bust of Lovecraft’s head as its trophy. In 2011, the Black writer Nnedi Okorafor won the annual honor, and only realized Lovecraft’s legacy after a horrified friend pointed out to her that the man whose head sat upon her mantle was a lifelong, virulent racist.
When Okorafor wrote a blog post about how conflicted she felt that “a statuette of this racist man’s head is one of my greatest honors as a writer,” including in it Lovecraft’s most overtly racist piece of writing, she drew inescapable new attention to a subject that had largely been buried and forgotten.
In 2014, writer Daniel José Older began a petition to change the World Fantasy Award to a bust of Black writer Octavia Butler. That same year, Black writer Sofia Samatar won the honor, and said in her acceptance speech, “I can’t sit down without addressing the elephant in the room, which is the controversy surrounding the image that represents this award.” The following year, in 2015, the awards finally retired Lovecraft’s image — which caused controversy both because many people felt the move was years overdue and because some were furious at what they saw as the erasure of Lovecraft’s legacy.
The conversations have been ongoing among horror fans ever since. Speaking at the “Shadow Over Lovecraft” discussion on Lovecraft’s racism, held in New York in 2019 by the Miskatonic Institute (a recurring panel series named for Lovecraft’s fictional university), Lovecraft Country author Matt Ruff discussed the ways Lovecraft’s fear of the other, even though it was rooted in racism, was also relatable on a basic level.
“In giving vent to his bigotry, he taps into a larger fear that I think we all have of people who are different from us and mean us no good,” he said. “It’s one of the reasons you can take his stories and repurpose them. ... He may not have realized the universalism of some of what he was writing about, but I can take that away from his work.”
In other words, there’s something timeless and universally appealing about much of Lovecraft’s fiction that keeps even reluctant readers coming back to him. That doesn’t mean one has to overindulge; “not reading Lovecraft’s letters is a form of self-care,” writer Ruthanna Emrys quipped on the same panel.
Still, there’s an extent to which all of this discussion has been taking place within Lovecraft’s niche community of genre writers — still well below the mainstream radar, away from the broader influence of his work. (As late as 2014, it was possible to read Lovecraft explainers in media outlets that made no mention of his racism.) That might finally be changing with HBO’s Lovecraft Country now spotlighting the conversation around the author’s racist legacy — but it also inevitably yields frustration because Lovecraftian imagery and themes are so embedded within the pop culture landscape.
“He’s so woven in, I think for horror as a whole, it would feel to me a little bit like removing an arm,” Black horror writer Victor LaValle, who often writes Lovecraftian fiction, told me. “And so instead I feel like an alternative choice is to identify the illness and then maybe you can save the arm.”
In many ways, as LaValle pointed out to me, sampling Lovecraft is also an important introduction to the fears that animate the landscape of white America. Whereas European writers often frame their supernatural horror as a kind of wrong turn into a strange place, the American version of that strangeness is usually much more aggressive. “The American versions of that are usually like, they’re out to destroy us. They’re out to get us. We have to fight,” LaValle explained. “Certainly one of the central ideas of America is like, we have to push back — we have to clear what’s here to make it civilized place.”
“It’s no surprise,” he continued, “that particularly so many white Americans would be driven somewhat insane by the need to be the light of civilization, but also, unfortunately they’re just human beings. So they’re filled with flaws ... [and] you see the ways that they throw that onto the groups they fear. This [other] group is criminal. This [other] group is thieves. This [other] group is oversexed. It’s all things that they fear in themselves.”
The solution, then, is to spread awareness of Lovecraft’s legacy alongside the work itself. LaValle told me that with a cultural influence that’s so fully saturated, the alternative is to educate and build off what’s already there, to try to create something new while still acknowledging what we love about what’s old.
“What that means is talking about things, shedding light on things, and beginning to teach the genre as a whole as a way to talk about things that are wrong or broken or outdated. And being able to say, ‘We can talk this thing through and then keep the best of it and identify the worst of it.’”
He also stressed capitalizing on Lovecraft’s love of fanfiction of his own stories to overwrite that legacy into newer, more progressive visions of horror. For instance, his award-winning Lovecraftian horror novella The Ballad of Black Tom largely revolves around the underlying premise that much of Lovecraft’s horror is predicated on ridiculous white privilege. That horrific realization that all Lovecraft’s characters undergo that the universe doesn’t revolve around them? That’s not a problem any Black character would ever have.
“If you’re Black,” he said, “you don’t think the universe as a whole thinks you are wonderful because all you have to do, if you’re a Black American, all you have to do is walk through America, and this country teaches you. ... The idea that you would be driven mad because you found out that the universe doesn’t think you’re special is a joke to me as a Black American.”
LaValle, published The Ballad of Black Tom on the same day as Ruff’s Lovecraft Country in 2016. Like Lovecraft Country, LaValle’s novel is also being developed into a TV series, but by AMC instead of HBO. He points to stories like Get Out and HBO’s Watchmen as a sign that modern Black creators are successfully subverting many of the racist tropes that fuel genre media. And genre, he said, is “the pleasant, pleasant casing that makes the medicine go down.”
Perhaps that means the universality of Lovecraft’s themes can also serve as the fundamental appeal that allows modern horror writers to subvert and ultimately transform his tropes into smart, aware commentaries on the very kind of racism he evinced.
And that’s perhaps the biggest Lovecraftian twist of all: the unknown cosmic terror, transformed into something as familiar and tawdry as everyday racism — and then vanquished with the light of understanding in favor of newer, better stories.
Will you become our 20,000th supporter? When the economy took a downturn in the spring and we started asking readers for financial contributions, we weren’t sure how it would go. Today, we’re humbled to say that nearly 20,000 people have chipped in. The reason is both lovely and surprising: Readers told us that they contribute both because they value explanation and because they value that other people can access it, too. We have always believed that explanatory journalism is vital for a functioning democracy. That’s never been more important than today, during a public health crisis, racial justice protests, a recession, and a presidential election. But our distinctive explanatory journalism is expensive, and advertising alone won’t let us keep creating it at the quality and volume this moment requires. Your financial contribution will not constitute a donation, but it will help keep Vox free for all. Contribute today from as little as $3.


vox--2020-08-18--Why does Instagram Reels suck so bad?

Why does Instagram Reels suck so bad?

Hello from The Goods ’ twice-weekly newsletter !
On Tuesdays , internet culture reporter Rebecca Jennings uses this space to update you all on what ’ s been going on in the world of TikTok .
Is there something you want to see more of ?
Less of ?
Different of ?
Email rebecca.jennings @ vox.com , and subscribe to The Goods ’ newsletter here .
I ’ ve been trying to put my finger on why Instagram Reels sucks so bad .
The feature — a rather shameless clone of TikTok — launched on August 5 , tucked away @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s already confusing Explore page even more so .
Nobody else really seems to be enjoying it either : the New York Times called it “ a dud ” for its lack of fun video editing features or useful discovery mechanisms ; my colleague at the Verge , Julia Alexander , notes how difficult it is to even find Reels on Instagram at all .
As one user in India told CNN , after TikTok had been banned in the country , “ There is no one that can come close to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ why Instagram Reels feels stale to seasoned TikTok users and regular Instagrammers alike .
But I think the root of the problem is this : Almost all the content is from blue checks .
“ Blue checks ” is a sort-of derogatory term for people who are “ verified ” on social media , the caste of celebrities and aspiring celebrities and not-at-all celebrities ( like journalists ) for whom posting online is less a personal hobby and more like an extension of their job .
I can ’ t just go around @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a reporter , and famous people can ’ t go around liking shady Instagram comments because it ’ ll make national news .
In short , blue checks have more to lose , so they ’ re nowhere near as creative or weird .
Which means that blue checks , in general , don ’ t post the kind of content that makes TikTok — or really any platform — wonderful in the first place .
I don ’ t watch TikTok for Jason DeRulo ’ s thirsty attempts at viral fame , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ who make up the For You page have built an entirely new language of comedy and video art .
Instagram Reels has replaced these wildly entertaining nobodies with professional lifestyle influencers , people who post brand-safe outfit transformation memes that peaked on TikTok six months ago .
It ’ s not to say that there ’ s no audience for that , but for a generation accustomed to seeing the best videos regardless of who they came from , it ’ s the same résumé-approved content that makes Instagram boring in the first @ @ @ @ @ @ @ same problem that persists on another recently hyped TikTok knockoff , but for different reasons .
Triller , which has splashy celebrity investors and hired TikTok star Josh Richards to act as chief strategy officer , seeks to be the “ adult version ” of TikTok .
If the app is any indication , this basically just means that pretty much everyone on the Triller home page is a verified user ( Blac Chyna , Lele Pons , and Donald Trump all showed up on my feed within about a minute of scrolling @ @ @ @ @ @ @ have leveraged their networks of influencers and celebrities to create content in the hopes that millions of regular people will follow .
TikTok tried the same thing , in the beginning ( Cardi B and the Jonas Brothers were briefly paid to join ) , but the reason it took off wasn ’ t because Will Smith made an account .
It was because young , creative kids were drawn to the editing features and an algorithm that made overnight virality possible .
By prioritizing the blue checks , neither of the biggest @ @ @ @ @ @ @ makes TikTok worth watching .
• My colleague Shirin Ghaffary wrote an extensive explainer on why TikTok is considered a national security threat ( hint : it has everything to do with Trump and China ’ s relationship and nothing to do with the app itself ) .
TikTok now has until November 12 to break from its Chinese parent company .
• Should it actually happen , the founder of a UK-based TikTok collective writes in the Guardian how a TikTok ban would hurt kids who ’ ve built massive followings on @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s difficult for anyone to “ go viral ” with 8,000 followers on Instagram – there is a clear line between who is and isn ’ t an influencer – people can get millions of views on their content on TikTok regardless of their follower count , ” he writes .
• More than a third of TikTok ’ s 49 million daily users are 14 or under , according to company data reviewed by the Times , raising questions of whether the company is doing enough to protect them .
( Musical.ly @ @ @ @ @ @ @ TikTok , was fined $ 5.7 million by the FTC in 2019 to settle allegations that it violated the Children ’ s Online Privacy Protection Act . )
• We have a new contender for the worst person on TikTok .
If 2019 was the summer of VSCO girls , 2020 is the summer of the “ main character.
” Since May , TikTokers , most of them young women , have been making videos in which they pretend , ironically or otherwise , to be the main character of their lives , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ an indie movie might do , like lay down in the middle of the street or jump in a random Uber and announce vaguely “ I ’ m going home.
” There is a sense of longing and need in the meme — “ drinking out of a wine glass and looking over the balcony so everyone on this beach knows I ’ m the main character , ” reads the caption on one , while one of the most popular videos just repeats the phrase “ give me attention ” — but @ @ @ @ @ @ @ lesson in here , too .
As another popular audio track advises , “ You have to start romanticizing your life .
You have to start thinking of yourself as the main character , because if you don ’ t , life will continue to pass you by , and all the little things that make it beautiful will continue to go unnoticed.
” This mom ’ s tutorial on old-school dance moves taught me more than 15 years of public education .
Will you become our 20,000th supporter ?
When the economy @ @ @ @ @ @ @ we started asking readers for financial contributions , we weren ’ t sure how it would go .
Today , we ’ re humbled to say that nearly 20,000 people have chipped in .
The reason is both lovely and surprising : Readers told us that they contribute both because they value explanation and because they value that other people can access it , too .
We have always believed that explanatory journalism is vital for a functioning democracy .
That ’ s never been more important than today , during a public @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a recession , and a presidential election .
But our distinctive explanatory journalism is expensive , and advertising alone won ’ t let us keep creating it at the quality and volume this moment requires .
Your financial contribution will not constitute a donation , but it will help keep Vox free for all .
Contribute today from as little as $ 3 .

Hello from The Goods’ twice-weekly newsletter! On Tuesdays, internet culture reporter Rebecca Jennings uses this space to update you all on what’s been going on in the world of TikTok. Is there something you want to see more of? Less of? Different of? Email rebecca.jennings@vox.com, and subscribe to The Goods’ newsletter here.
I’ve been trying to put my finger on why Instagram Reels sucks so bad. The feature — a rather shameless clone of TikTok — launched on August 5, tucked away within the Stories camera and making Instagram’s already confusing Explore page even more so.
Nobody else really seems to be enjoying it either: the New York Times called it “a dud” for its lack of fun video editing features or useful discovery mechanisms; my colleague at the Verge, Julia Alexander, notes how difficult it is to even find Reels on Instagram at all. As one user in India told CNN, after TikTok had been banned in the country, “There is no one that can come close to TikTok.”
you're weird if you watch reels on instagram — ♚ (@ervin_texta) August 14, 2020
There are a million reasons why Instagram Reels feels stale to seasoned TikTok users and regular Instagrammers alike. But I think the root of the problem is this: Almost all the content is from blue checks.
“Blue checks” is a sort-of derogatory term for people who are “verified” on social media, the caste of celebrities and aspiring celebrities and not-at-all celebrities (like journalists) for whom posting online is less a personal hobby and more like an extension of their job. I can’t just go around retweeting conspiracy theories because I’m a reporter, and famous people can’t go around liking shady Instagram comments because it’ll make national news. In short, blue checks have more to lose, so they’re nowhere near as creative or weird.
Which means that blue checks, in general, don’t post the kind of content that makes TikTok — or really any platform — wonderful in the first place. I don’t watch TikTok for Jason DeRulo’s thirsty attempts at viral fame, I watch it because the random nobodies who make up the For You page have built an entirely new language of comedy and video art.
Instagram Reels has replaced these wildly entertaining nobodies with professional lifestyle influencers, people who post brand-safe outfit transformation memes that peaked on TikTok six months ago. It’s not to say that there’s no audience for that, but for a generation accustomed to seeing the best videos regardless of who they came from, it’s the same résumé-approved content that makes Instagram boring in the first place.
It’s also the same problem that persists on another recently hyped TikTok knockoff, but for different reasons. Triller, which has splashy celebrity investors and hired TikTok star Josh Richards to act as chief strategy officer, seeks to be the “adult version” of TikTok. If the app is any indication, this basically just means that pretty much everyone on the Triller home page is a verified user (Blac Chyna, Lele Pons, and Donald Trump all showed up on my feed within about a minute of scrolling).
Both Instagram Reels and Triller have leveraged their networks of influencers and celebrities to create content in the hopes that millions of regular people will follow. TikTok tried the same thing, in the beginning (Cardi B and the Jonas Brothers were briefly paid to join), but the reason it took off wasn’t because Will Smith made an account. It was because young, creative kids were drawn to the editing features and an algorithm that made overnight virality possible. By prioritizing the blue checks, neither of the biggest alternatives will be able to replicate what makes TikTok worth watching.
TikTok in the news
My colleague Shirin Ghaffary wrote an extensive explainer on why TikTok is considered a national security threat (hint: it has everything to do with Trump and China’s relationship and nothing to do with the app itself). TikTok now has until November 12 to break from its Chinese parent company.
Should it actually happen, the founder of a UK-based TikTok collective writes in the Guardian how a TikTok ban would hurt kids who’ve built massive followings on the app. “While it’s difficult for anyone to ‘go viral’ with 8,000 followers on Instagram — there is a clear line between who is and isn’t an influencer — people can get millions of views on their content on TikTok regardless of their follower count,” he writes.
More than a third of TikTok’s 49 million daily users are 14 or under, according to company data reviewed by the Times, raising questions of whether the company is doing enough to protect them. (Musical.ly, the app that used to be TikTok, was fined $5.7 million by the FTC in 2019 to settle allegations that it violated the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act.)
We have a new contender for the worst person on TikTok.
Meme watch
If 2019 was the summer of VSCO girls, 2020 is the summer of the “main character.” Since May, TikTokers, most of them young women, have been making videos in which they pretend, ironically or otherwise, to be the main character of their lives, doing things that a stereotypical girl in an indie movie might do, like lay down in the middle of the street or jump in a random Uber and announce vaguely “I’m going home.”
There is a sense of longing and need in the meme — “drinking out of a wine glass and looking over the balcony so everyone on this beach knows I’m the main character,” reads the caption on one, while one of the most popular videos just repeats the phrase “give me attention” — but there’s a handy life lesson in here, too. As another popular audio track advises, “You have to start romanticizing your life. You have to start thinking of yourself as the main character, because if you don’t, life will continue to pass you by, and all the little things that make it beautiful will continue to go unnoticed.”
One Last Thing
This mom’s tutorial on old-school dance moves taught me more than 15 years of public education.
Will you become our 20,000th supporter? When the economy took a downturn in the spring and we started asking readers for financial contributions, we weren’t sure how it would go. Today, we’re humbled to say that nearly 20,000 people have chipped in. The reason is both lovely and surprising: Readers told us that they contribute both because they value explanation and because they value that other people can access it, too. We have always believed that explanatory journalism is vital for a functioning democracy. That’s never been more important than today, during a public health crisis, racial justice protests, a recession, and a presidential election. But our distinctive explanatory journalism is expensive, and advertising alone won’t let us keep creating it at the quality and volume this moment requires. Your financial contribution will not constitute a donation, but it will help keep Vox free for all. Contribute today from as little as $3.


vox--2020-08-18--“Racism may target Black people, but it damns a democracy and it damns humanity”

Rev .
William Barber II is one of the most unique voices in American public life .
A keynote speaker at the 2016 Democratic National Convention , Barber has since emerged as one of the most prominent — and relentless — advocates for poor people in this country .
The philosopher Cornel West has called him “ the closest person we have to a Martin Luther King Jr. , ” largely because of his former leadership of the North Carolina ’ s NAACP chapter , which has spearheaded the social justice movement called Moral Mondays .
In addition to serving @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Goldsboro , North Carolina , Barber leads Repairers of the Breach , an ecumenical activist group whose mission is to train and organize religious leaders around the country .
He ’ s also the face of the Poor People ’ s Campaign , a national movement challenging “ the interlocking evils of systemic racism , poverty , ecological devastation , militarism and the war economy , and the distorted moral narrative of religious nationalism.
” Barber is a progressive , yet he ’ s still hard to pin down politically .
He rejects @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ right ” and instead leans on the religious values of the Gospel to push a strong anti-poverty agenda .
This is partly what makes him so interesting as a public theologian : He speaks in morally clarifying terms about the plight of low-income people while refusing to engage in diversionary culture war fights .
Barber released a book in June called We Are Called to Be a Movement .
So I contacted him by phone to talk about his broader political theology and why he thinks we need a religious revival in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ many Christians care so little about poverty , why he thinks racism harms poor white people as much as it harms poor Black people , and if he believes economic justice is a precondition for racial justice .
A lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows .
Why isn ’ t the religious left a more visible force in American politics ?
I ’ m glad you asked it that way , Sean , because I want to challenge this whole language of “ left ” and “ right.
” I don ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and “ right ” because that language was actually sown by those who claim to be the religious right .
And if you ’ ve noticed , they took the right-wing side .
And so we have to get away from these terms and how they frame the argument because spending 30 minutes explaining why the “ religious right ” is wrong theologically just isn ’ t productive .
The important thing is that we do have a large number , and always have had a large number of people , who understood @ @ @ @ @ @ @ whether it ’ s Islam , Christianity , or Judaism , is how you treat the poor and the least of these .
It is critical to one ’ s claim of loving God .
You can call your religious experience anything you want to call it , but if you look closely at the Bible or the Torah or the Quran and it doesn ’ t produce a desire to end the systemic injustices of the world , then your claim of it being in line with God ’ s spirit is @ @ @ @ @ @ @ I can say that there are more than 2,000 Scriptures in the Bible that talk about how we ought to challenge injustice toward the poor , women , children , the immigrants , and those who are considered on the margins .
So that ’ s where I start .
Everything you just said about Scripture is true , and yet we have so many Christians in this country who are more passionate about tax cuts or recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel than they are about poverty or the lack of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ It ’ s a strange ethic to take hold under the banner of Christ .
Let ’ s look at Jesus ’ s political theology .
When Jesus preached his first sermon , he said , “ The spirit of the Lord is upon me , ” Luke chapter four , verses 18 and 19 .
“ The spirit of the Lord is upon me , for he hath anointed me to preach good news to the poor.
” And the poor were those who had been victimized by economic exploitation .
And @ @ @ @ @ @ @ broken-hearted , recovery of sight to the blind , liberty to the oppressed .
When Jesus was dying , or preparing to die , he said every nation will be judged by how it treated the least of these .
When I was hungry , did you feed me ?
When I was naked , did you clothe me ?
When I was sick , did you care about me ?
When I was in prison , did you care about me ?
So you can ’ t claim to be Christian and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ That ’ s why Frederick Douglass , when he was alive , said , “ You can ’ t love the Christianity of Christ and embrace the religion of the slave master .
To love one is to hate the other.
” And he never called the religion of the slave master Christianity .
The problem we ’ ve had in America is , one of my professors said , “ We ’ ve had the battle between Christianity and Americanity.
” Jesus made it very clear what his ethics are , and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ different political forms .
Martin Luther King Jr. talked about democratic socialism , for instance .
But as a theologian , I don ’ t like to align the gospels with any ideology , because that ’ s trying to bring the gospel down to a lower form .
For me , the teaching of Jesus is the highest .
I don ’ t claim to be preaching the left gospel or the right gospel or living out the left gospel or the right gospel .
It ’ s just the gospel .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s no separation between Jesus and justice , there ’ s no separation between Jesus and caring about the least of these and challenging the systems , whether that system be racism or economic exploitation , or ecological devastation , or the war economy , or false religious nationalism — the gospel is a critique of all of it .
Do you see economic justice as a precondition of racial justice ?
They ’ re interlocking , I ’ d say .
We often say “ The Poor People ’ s Campaign @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , but actually it was the National Welfare Rights workers who came to Dr. King and pushed him and said , “ We need a poor people ’ s campaign.
” And this issue of poverty became more central to his message .
He gave a sermon at Riverside about a year before his death called “ A Time to Break Silence.
” He declared that there were three triune evils that you could not separate : racism , poverty , and militarism .
He said you can ’ t separate them out @ @ @ @ @ @ @ They all are interlocking .
And we have to address them as interlocking .
Now , when he did that , he found himself at odds not just with white racists but also with what he called “ moderates.
” He challenged the moderate clergy .
When he finished at Riverside that night , most civil rights organizations wrote a resolution against his position on the war .
Most newspapers wrote against him , including some Black newspapers .
He even lost his invitation to the White House .
It was a rough @ @ @ @ @ @ @ moment that the National Welfare Rights workers came to him .
He convened a meeting with Rabbi Joshua Heschel [ a leading theologian and Jewish philosopher at the time ] and white workers from Appalachia and in Kentucky and other places and they decided that there had to be a “ Poor People ’ s Campaign.
” So we are building from that movement .
The thing I hear you say all the time , and I don ’ t know why it isn ’ t said more often , is that racism @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , it also harms poor white Americans because it reinforces a system that doesn ’ t actually serve them .
That ’ s true , Sean , but can I add something to that ?
Racism is a lie .
And my grandpa used to have a phrase , “ Scratch a liar , find a thief.
” And America ’ s going to have to come to an understanding that racism has four basic pillars that have undergirded it from the very beginning .
The first pillar is evil economics .
And @ @ @ @ @ @ @ means .
As long as it makes money , then however you get it is fine .
The second thing is sick sociology .
The teaching that people can ’ t be in the same space and can ’ t be equal in the same society based on color .
This is an old doctrine that goes back hundreds and hundreds of years .
The next is part is bad biology , where you actually have scientists and people in science who suggest that brain size could be determined by skin color , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to other races .
And the last pillar is something I call heretical ontology .
And that is the belief that God intended it to be this way .
Those are the four pillars , Sean .
And racism might be targeted at Black people , but ultimately it is built on lies and it hurts the very people who are told it helps them .
So let ’ s take something like voter suppression , which is obviously aimed at Black voters .
We have some data we ’ re going to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ state that is a racist voter suppression state is also a high-poverty state .
And notice that I didn ’ t say high Black poverty .
And these are also states with high child poverty and poor health care and a lack of living wages and basic human rights .
These maps follow voter suppression .
And why is that ?
Because racist voter suppression is targeted at Black people .
When that happens , it allows people to get elected , and when they get elected , they use their power to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
For instance , in my state ( North Carolina ) , racist voter suppression allowed people to get elected who blocked the Affordable Care Act .
Well , 346,000 of [ the ] people that would benefit from it are white .
Roughly 157,000 are Black .
So who is that really harming ?
And you ’ ll find a similar story across the country .
So that goes back to what I said a minute ago , “ Scratch a liar , find a thief.
” If you scratch a racist @ @ @ @ @ @ @ will tell you who to hate while stealing your health care , stealing your living wages , stealing your public education dollars , and stealing your elections .
So , yeah , racism may target Black people , but it damns a democracy and it damns humanity .
And that ’ s why you have to have a moral fusion movement in order to battle racists .
The abolition movement was Black and white , the civil rights movement was Black and white and brown fusion .
What we ’ re seeing today @ @ @ @ @ @ @ more of it because of social media and so forth , but the reality is that we ’ ve always had to work together , across races and all other divides , in order to move forward .
What is the greatest obstacle keeping poor white Americans and poor Black Americans from coming together today ?
I think we have to change the narrative when it comes to poor people .
Too many people won ’ t use the word poverty .
Democrats have tended to run from poverty , while Republicans have @ @ @ @ @ @ @ tried to divide poor Black and white people by suggesting that programs that help the poor are helping “ those ” people .
But that ’ s absolutely false .
There are more white people on food stamps than Black people , for example .
Democrats have tended over the last 40 or 50 years to come up with code words like “ working class ” or “ those striving to get into the American dream ” and not even say the word “ poverty.
” And their consultants tell them that .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ you ’ ve got tens of millions of people making less than a living wage , if you have 80 million people who are underinsured or uninsured , if you have people who get up every morning and buy unleaded gas but can ’ t find unleaded water , if you have a country where you ’ re spending close to $ 800 billion on the war economy , where 54 cents of every discretionary dollar goes to the war economy , if that ’ s not at center of our political debates @ @ @ @ @ @ @ around the edges .
This movement is about bringing everyone together to address these injustices .
The greatest speech Dr. King gave wasn ’ t his “ I have a dream ” speech .
It was his speech at the end of the march from Selma to Montgomery .
It ’ s a long speech and he begins to unpack how every time in this country there is an opportunity for Black and white poor people to come together and build political power to change this nation , he says the aristocracy sows @ @ @ @ @ @ @ happens over and over again .
And his point is that poor Black and white people would hold the power in the South and elsewhere if they ever woke up to this fact .
This is as true today as it was then .
The South is not red states .
The South consists of unorganized states where people have not focused on bringing Black and poor white people together and getting past the Southern strategy that was intended to divide them .
But we ’ re crunching the numbers and organizing to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ so obvious that if you could organize poor Black and white Americans , there ’ s not a Southern state that wouldn ’ t change .
The politicians aren ’ t going to do this for us .
Republicans want to keep the divisions , and often Democrats don ’ t seriously try to overcome them .
So we ’ ve decided we can ’ t wait on the politicians .
We need a movement .
That ’ s what this whole thing is about .
Will you become our 20,000th supporter ?
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ the spring and we started asking readers for financial contributions , we weren ’ t sure how it would go .
Today , we ’ re humbled to say that nearly 20,000 people have chipped in .
The reason is both lovely and surprising : Readers told us that they contribute both because they value explanation and because they value that other people can access it , too .
We have always believed that explanatory journalism is vital for a functioning democracy .
That ’ s never been more important than today , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ justice protests , a recession , and a presidential election .
But our distinctive explanatory journalism is expensive , and advertising alone won ’ t let us keep creating it at the quality and volume this moment requires .
Your financial contribution will not constitute a donation , but it will help keep Vox free for all .
Contribute today from as little as $ 3 .

Rev. William Barber II is one of the most unique voices in American public life.
A keynote speaker at the 2016 Democratic National Convention, Barber has since emerged as one of the most prominent — and relentless — advocates for poor people in this country. The philosopher Cornel West has called him “the closest person we have to a Martin Luther King Jr.,” largely because of his former leadership of the North Carolina’s NAACP chapter, which has spearheaded the social justice movement called Moral Mondays.
In addition to serving as pastor of Greenleaf Christian Church in Goldsboro, North Carolina, Barber leads Repairers of the Breach, an ecumenical activist group whose mission is to train and organize religious leaders around the country. He’s also the face of the Poor People’s Campaign, a national movement challenging “the interlocking evils of systemic racism, poverty, ecological devastation, militarism and the war economy, and the distorted moral narrative of religious nationalism.”
Barber is a progressive, yet he’s still hard to pin down politically. He rejects the language of “left” and “right” and instead leans on the religious values of the Gospel to push a strong anti-poverty agenda. This is partly what makes him so interesting as a public theologian: He speaks in morally clarifying terms about the plight of low-income people while refusing to engage in diversionary culture war fights.
Barber released a book in June called We Are Called to Be a Movement. So I contacted him by phone to talk about his broader political theology and why he thinks we need a religious revival in America. I asked him why so many Christians care so little about poverty, why he thinks racism harms poor white people as much as it harms poor Black people, and if he believes economic justice is a precondition for racial justice.
A lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows.
Sean Illing
Why isn’t the religious left a more visible force in American politics?
Rev. William Barber
I’m glad you asked it that way, Sean, because I want to challenge this whole language of “left” and “right.” I don’t use the language “left” and “right” because that language was actually sown by those who claim to be the religious right. And if you’ve noticed, they took the right-wing side. And so we have to get away from these terms and how they frame the argument because spending 30 minutes explaining why the “religious right” is wrong theologically just isn’t productive.
The important thing is that we do have a large number, and always have had a large number of people, who understood that the center of religious values, whether it’s Islam, Christianity, or Judaism, is how you treat the poor and the least of these. It is critical to one’s claim of loving God. You can call your religious experience anything you want to call it, but if you look closely at the Bible or the Torah or the Quran and it doesn’t produce a desire to end the systemic injustices of the world, then your claim of it being in line with God’s spirit is fully suspect.
As a Christian, I can say that there are more than 2,000 Scriptures in the Bible that talk about how we ought to challenge injustice toward the poor, women, children, the immigrants, and those who are considered on the margins. So that’s where I start.
Sean Illing
Everything you just said about Scripture is true, and yet we have so many Christians in this country who are more passionate about tax cuts or recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel than they are about poverty or the lack of living wages and basic human dignity. It’s a strange ethic to take hold under the banner of Christ.
Rev. William Barber
Let’s look at Jesus’s political theology. When Jesus preached his first sermon, he said, “The spirit of the Lord is upon me,” Luke chapter four, verses 18 and 19. “The spirit of the Lord is upon me, for he hath anointed me to preach good news to the poor.” And the poor were those who had been victimized by economic exploitation. And the good news was healing to the broken-hearted, recovery of sight to the blind, liberty to the oppressed.
When Jesus was dying, or preparing to die, he said every nation will be judged by how it treated the least of these. When I was hungry, did you feed me? When I was naked, did you clothe me? When I was sick, did you care about me? When I was in prison, did you care about me? So you can’t claim to be Christian and then not be for those things. That’s why Frederick Douglass, when he was alive, said, “You can’t love the Christianity of Christ and embrace the religion of the slave master. To love one is to hate the other.” And he never called the religion of the slave master Christianity. The problem we’ve had in America is, one of my professors said, “We’ve had the battle between Christianity and Americanity.”
Jesus made it very clear what his ethics are, and those can manifest under a lot of different political forms. Martin Luther King Jr. talked about democratic socialism, for instance. But as a theologian, I don’t like to align the gospels with any ideology, because that’s trying to bring the gospel down to a lower form.
For me, the teaching of Jesus is the highest. I don’t claim to be preaching the left gospel or the right gospel or living out the left gospel or the right gospel. It’s just the gospel. And the gospel is clear that there’s no separation between Jesus and justice, there’s no separation between Jesus and caring about the least of these and challenging the systems, whether that system be racism or economic exploitation, or ecological devastation, or the war economy, or false religious nationalism — the gospel is a critique of all of it.
Sean Illing
Do you see economic justice as a precondition of racial justice?
Rev. William Barber
They’re interlocking, I’d say. We often say “The Poor People’s Campaign” is the unfinished work of MLK, but actually it was the National Welfare Rights workers who came to Dr. King and pushed him and said, “We need a poor people’s campaign.” And this issue of poverty became more central to his message.
He gave a sermon at Riverside about a year before his death called “A Time to Break Silence.” He declared that there were three triune evils that you could not separate: racism, poverty, and militarism. He said you can’t separate them out or put one before the other. They all are interlocking. And we have to address them as interlocking.
Now, when he did that, he found himself at odds not just with white racists but also with what he called “moderates.” He challenged the moderate clergy. When he finished at Riverside that night, most civil rights organizations wrote a resolution against his position on the war. Most newspapers wrote against him, including some Black newspapers. He even lost his invitation to the White House.
It was a rough time. But it was in that moment that the National Welfare Rights workers came to him. He convened a meeting with Rabbi Joshua Heschel [a leading theologian and Jewish philosopher at the time] and white workers from Appalachia and in Kentucky and other places and they decided that there had to be a “Poor People’s Campaign.” So we are building from that movement.
Sean Illing
The thing I hear you say all the time, and I don’t know why it isn’t said more often, is that racism doesn’t just harm Black Americans, it also harms poor white Americans because it reinforces a system that doesn’t actually serve them.
Rev. William Barber
That’s true, Sean, but can I add something to that?
Sean Illing
Please.
Rev. William Barber
Racism is a lie. And my grandpa used to have a phrase, “Scratch a liar, find a thief.” And America’s going to have to come to an understanding that racism has four basic pillars that have undergirded it from the very beginning.
The first pillar is evil economics. And that is that the end justifies the means. As long as it makes money, then however you get it is fine.
The second thing is sick sociology. The teaching that people can’t be in the same space and can’t be equal in the same society based on color. This is an old doctrine that goes back hundreds and hundreds of years.
The next is part is bad biology, where you actually have scientists and people in science who suggest that brain size could be determined by skin color, or that certain races are biologically inferior to other races.
And the last pillar is something I call heretical ontology. And that is the belief that God intended it to be this way.
Those are the four pillars, Sean. And racism might be targeted at Black people, but ultimately it is built on lies and it hurts the very people who are told it helps them. So let’s take something like voter suppression, which is obviously aimed at Black voters. We have some data we’re going to release shortly where we show that every state that is a racist voter suppression state is also a high-poverty state. And notice that I didn’t say high Black poverty. And these are also states with high child poverty and poor health care and a lack of living wages and basic human rights.
These maps follow voter suppression. And why is that? Because racist voter suppression is targeted at Black people. When that happens, it allows people to get elected, and when they get elected, they use their power to hurt mostly white people in raw numbers. For instance, in my state (North Carolina), racist voter suppression allowed people to get elected who blocked the Affordable Care Act. Well, 346,000 of [the] people that would benefit from it are white. Roughly 157,000 are Black. So who is that really harming?
And you’ll find a similar story across the country. So that goes back to what I said a minute ago, “Scratch a liar, find a thief.” If you scratch a racist, you’ll find someone who will tell you who to hate while stealing your health care, stealing your living wages, stealing your public education dollars, and stealing your elections.
So, yeah, racism may target Black people, but it damns a democracy and it damns humanity. And that’s why you have to have a moral fusion movement in order to battle racists. The abolition movement was Black and white, the civil rights movement was Black and white and brown fusion. What we’re seeing today is not new. It may be more of it because of social media and so forth, but the reality is that we’ve always had to work together, across races and all other divides, in order to move forward.
Sean Illing
What is the greatest obstacle keeping poor white Americans and poor Black Americans from coming together today?
Rev. William Barber
I think we have to change the narrative when it comes to poor people. Too many people won’t use the word poverty. Democrats have tended to run from poverty, while Republicans have tended to racialize poverty. Republicans have tried to divide poor Black and white people by suggesting that programs that help the poor are helping “those” people. But that’s absolutely false. There are more white people on food stamps than Black people, for example.
Democrats have tended over the last 40 or 50 years to come up with code words like “working class” or “those striving to get into the American dream” and not even say the word “poverty.” And their consultants tell them that.
Well, the reality is that if you’ve got tens of millions of people making less than a living wage, if you have 80 million people who are underinsured or uninsured, if you have people who get up every morning and buy unleaded gas but can’t find unleaded water, if you have a country where you’re spending close to $800 billion on the war economy, where 54 cents of every discretionary dollar goes to the war economy, if that’s not at center of our political debates, then we’re just tinkering around the edges.
This movement is about bringing everyone together to address these injustices. The greatest speech Dr. King gave wasn’t his “I have a dream” speech. It was his speech at the end of the march from Selma to Montgomery. It’s a long speech and he begins to unpack how every time in this country there is an opportunity for Black and white poor people to come together and build political power to change this nation, he says the aristocracy sows division. And he explains how it happens over and over again. And his point is that poor Black and white people would hold the power in the South and elsewhere if they ever woke up to this fact.
This is as true today as it was then. The South is not red states. The South consists of unorganized states where people have not focused on bringing Black and poor white people together and getting past the Southern strategy that was intended to divide them. But we’re crunching the numbers and organizing to build power. And it’s so obvious that if you could organize poor Black and white Americans, there’s not a Southern state that wouldn’t change.
The politicians aren’t going to do this for us. Republicans want to keep the divisions, and often Democrats don’t seriously try to overcome them. So we’ve decided we can’t wait on the politicians. We need a movement. That’s what this whole thing is about.
Will you become our 20,000th supporter? When the economy took a downturn in the spring and we started asking readers for financial contributions, we weren’t sure how it would go. Today, we’re humbled to say that nearly 20,000 people have chipped in. The reason is both lovely and surprising: Readers told us that they contribute both because they value explanation and because they value that other people can access it, too. We have always believed that explanatory journalism is vital for a functioning democracy. That’s never been more important than today, during a public health crisis, racial justice protests, a recession, and a presidential election. But our distinctive explanatory journalism is expensive, and advertising alone won’t let us keep creating it at the quality and volume this moment requires. Your financial contribution will not constitute a donation, but it will help keep Vox free for all. Contribute today from as little as $3.