Trump’s Racism Is Of Its Time

We unduly flatter ourselves when we think that we’re better than people in the past.

Yesterday I published a piece on the egregious racism in the H.P. Lovecraft short story “The Call of Cthulhu.” Lovecraft’s racism is well documented and widely discussed. Few deny it outright. However, when discussing him, critics and fans sometimes argue that his racism needs to be understood in the context of his time. Most white people in Lovecraft’s day were racist; racism was normal. Should we condemn him for simply abiding by the norms of his day?

This argument is not just applied to Lovecraft, obviously. It comes up when discussing slaveholder founding fathers like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson; it even comes up when discussing Joe Biden’s opposition to busing in the 1970s. People in the past didn’t know better and didn’t have the opportunity to know better. We can’t necessarily condemn them for their actions; after all, would we have been more noble? From this perspective, it’s arrogant to judge people in the past, who didn’t have the opportunity to be as morally enlightened as we are now.

I think that this argument is confused—and that it’s especially confused in the age of Trump. How racism is expressed does change somewhat over time. But every era of US history (and not just US history) has had its racists and its antiracists. Refusing to judge racists in the past overstates our own enlightenment and understates the resistance to racism in the past. More, the idea that one person’s racism is only wrong relative to the racism of those around them creates a permission structure for demagoguery.

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Lovecraft vs. Langston Hughes

Lovecraft wrote most of his stories in the 20s and 30s. That was an extremely racist time. It was so racist, in fact, that historians sometimes refer to it as the “nadir of American race relations.” The racial idealism of the abolitionist movement and of Reconstruction had been defeated; both political parties embraced Jim Crow in the South and permanent second class status for Black people in the north.

So, it’s true that Lovecraft’s racism was not uncommon in his day. Many of his readers and editors would have shared it.

At the same time, it’s not true to say that no one in his day knew better, or that no one in his day was antiracist. The 20s and 30s were the years of the Harlem Renaissance. Langston Hughes published his antiracist anthem “Let America Be America Again” in 1936 in Esquire—a larger and more mainstream publication than Lovecraft ever managed:

O, let America be America again—
The land that never has been yet—
And yet must be—the land where every man is free.

Hughes was himself building on a well-established tradition of antiracist activism and writing. Ida B. Wells-Barnett published her anti lynching manifesto The Red Record in 1895; W.E.B. Du Bois published The Souls of Black Folks in 1903; the NAACP organized a boycott campaign against the racist, KKK-promoting film The Birth of a Nation in 1915; in 1929 singer and actor Paul Robeson spoke out after being denied admission to the Savoy Grill in London; his protest received international coverage.

Lovecraft was a highly educated and literate man; he was certainly aware that people—especially Black people—did not agree with his racist views. And sure enough, Lovecraft frequently included debates about racism in his stories. In “The Call of Cthulhu,” a Norwegian sailor giving testimony is shocked to discover that many of those in positions of authority believe his genocidal rampage against a non-white ship’s crew smacks of “ruthlessness.” In “The Shadow Over Innsmouth,” the government’s genocide of the Innsmouth fish creatures is greeted with “Complaints from many liberal organisations.”

Of course, the racists always win these arguments in Lovecraft’s stories. The liberal organizations in “Shadow Over Innsmouth,” for example, are quickly converted to race realism when the government explains How Bad the fish-thing threat is.

But the point is that Lovecraft knew there was an argument. He was well aware that in his own time, there were many who disagreed with him. His racism was not a mere reflection of everyone’s opinion. His racism was an ideology he knew had to be advanced and defended against other people’s opinions. Then, as now, some people were racist and some people were less so. As a result, racists never spoke as if theirs was the only possible opinion. They spoke in full knowledge that theirs was not the only view, and that they needed to defend their racist ideology from those who saw through it.

Lovecraft vs. Eleanor Roosevelt

Again, many of the most thoughtful and eloquent antiracist voices in Lovecraft’s day (as in ours) were Black. So when people say Lovecraft was of his time, they often add the caveat when pressed that his racism was typical specifically of white people in his own day. Black writers and activists were more knowledgeable and more enlightened, but you can’t really expect more from a white person of that time.

There are a number of problems with this argument. First, despite the best efforts of racists, it’s just not true that white and Black opinion was strictly segregated or completely walled off one from the other. As mentioned above, Hughes’ poetry appeared in Esquire, a mainstream magazine. Paul Robeson was an international star. The boycott of Birth of a Nation was national news. White people like Lovecraft knew that Black people objected to racism. Black people were his peers too, and his refusal to acknowledge them as such was part of his racism, not an explanation of it.

Second, there were in fact white people who found Lovecraft’s brand of racism repugnant. Eleanor Roosevelt is one obvious and prominent example. Many white Communists organized alongside Black Communists to try to free the Scottsboro Boys in the 1930s. Again, Lovecraft was aware of this, and regularly included white liberals in his books so he could refute them. (Lovecraft would not acknowledge that Black people could engage in public discourse at all, though of course he knew they could.)

Lovecraft would have voted for Trump

Finally, and most importantly, I think we need to acknowledge that most white people are racist today just as most white people were racist in the past.

We just had an election in which the majority of voters cast ballots for a gutter racist and open fascist. And while it’s true that not all of those voters were white, the bleak fact is that the Republican party, since its racist turn, has been buoyed overwhelmingly by white voters. Trump won about 60% of white voters, and he lost virtually every other demographic by large margins, including Black voters, Hispanic voters (a narrower margin), Asian voters, and Native American voters.

The “of its time” argument is that white people in the past, as a demographic, were racist, so the racism of individual white people is a collective issue rather than an individual one. But the thing is that, based on who they vote for, white people in the present are still quite racist as a demographic.

Lovecraft would no doubt be startled and horrified by many aspects of modern existence. But it’s easy to see him casting a ballot for Trump along with a lot of other white people on the grounds that Trump shared his loathing of immigrants, of Black people, of Asians, and of other non-white people.

White American racism certainly shifts over time, but at its core it hasn’t really changed all that much. If the US has gotten less racist (a big if!) it’s because the country’s demographics have shifted, not because white people have become enlightened en masse. Racism continues to appeal not to all white people, but to a solid majority of them.

And the fact that most white people support racist policies and racist ideologies is often used to justify racism. After massive Southern resistance to Reconstruction, white people got tired of defending Black rights—and the fact that white people were tired of defending Black rights became an argument for abandoning Black people.

Similarly, in 2024, Trump won the election—and his victory was seen as a popular and populist mandate for increased racism. Media oligarchs, corporations, educational institutions, politicians from both parties, both concluded that the American (white) public was fine with racism, and so you couldn’t really blame Trump for his racism. Trump is, after all, of his time. How can you hold him accountable when he is just reflecting the racism of his time?

Racism is evil because it is evil, not because it is unpopular. If every white person decided that racism was great, racism would still be evil. We’d like to believe that racism is becoming less virulent over the decades. But it certainly seems to be becoming more virulent right now—and in any case, part of the way you fight to make it less virulent is by rejecting the idea that racism is acceptable, or reasonable, or impossible to push back against if it is sufficiently popular and accepted.

Everybody is of their time. The question is, what do you do with that time? Lovecraft and Trump tried to make their country, and their world, more racist. The choices they made were wrong and evil. We should say so clearly, in part to try to make better choices with the time we have.