Racism has a pulpy core, softened by rot.
The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu by Sax Rohmer is a romp but oh the racism and oh the overwrought emotion, yikes. Yellow Peril stuff, saving ‘the White Race’ therefrom, and crammed with racial references — dacoits, lascars — and wild ejaculations of intense and over-the-top emotional hysteria, this is what passed as pulp in the 1920s, and it was popular.
Keep in mind, Dashiell Hammett, Ernest Hemingway, and many others were also publishing at that time, without all the overt racism.
Sadly, Rohmer could write a fast-paced engaging story, and could even write well when he settled down and focused, but he relied on then-current stereotypes, cliché phrases, and unexamined prejudices, as well as almost-literal pot-boiling, to keep the story rolling at top speed.
This was in fact insidious. It encouraged lazy plot-point reading while racing past the racism on which the plot relied, which is a form of indoctrination. Readers absorbed attitudes without realizing, eager to see how the next cliff-hanger might resolve.
A similar mix afflicts the Charlie Chan tales. But for the racism and mincing pidgin dialogue put into Charlie Chan’s mouth, they are excellent mysteries. Sad that so much otherwise good work is tainted, especially compared to contemporary fiction that did not carry such taints.
Obviously, the same will be true of contemporary fiction, even if most are blind to it. Look at the shock BLM ushered in, when it began to be clear to a wider swath of society how blatantly racist America has always been.
Racism is not the only problem. In Steampunk, the exploited underclasses are generally ignored or given dismissive short shrift. That’s classist. It’s been called out and addressed but including the downtrodden spoils Steampunk’s fun, its exuberance, so few have been tried to solve the problem, especially among American writers.
My solution is Steampunk Noir, a mix allowing both the genteel and the enslaved stage time pertinent to plots. Both those blessed with steam tech and those supplying labor and raw material become pertinent in noir frameworks of crime and hidden agendas.
In mainstream and literary fiction, an influx of voices from other cultures and tongues has expanded our references wonderfully. Major events can now be seen — in books — from many viewpoints, often contrary and surprising to provincials. Amy Tan writes as a Chinese American; Salman Rushdie as an Indian-born British/American; Carmen Maria Machado as a Latin American. All these and dozens more broaden literature as it stands in this wobbly American epoch. These diverse voices allow us to appreciate many dimensions of reality.
So why read old fiction full of objectionable material?
Standards change.
Earl Der Biggers wrote Charlie Chan novels as a counter to the racism of the Yellow Peril novels of Fu-Manchu and so on. He based Chan on a real Honolulu detective, too. (Later, Steve McGarrett of HAWAII-FIVE-O was somehow extruded from the same source material, despite Jack Lord being the antithesis of a Polynesian American.)
Today we view Chan as racist, same as Fu-Manchu. A mincing, pidgin-English muttering stereotype rooted in race baiting and mockery. Yet Biggers and his readers saw Chan as an antidote to the fear and villainy of Yellow Peril supervillains. Chan was admirable, fair, and wise, a hero of sagacity and restraint.
At UCLA their John Wayne statue and exhibit are being taken down due to racist statements Wayne made, including a clip of him saying he was a white supremacist. His family says that’s taken out-of-context but what context makes it okay to say that?
The Sierra Club is removing John Muir, once their icon, from all links to the club due to Muir’s connections with various racist groups.
Each time we awaken to other views we realize how unfair we’ve been in so many ways, and we try to change for the better, most of us. What we must not do is discard those past examples of our narrower thinking or try to erase wholesale all but a current view because now will become then soon enough, and standards will change once again, we hope for the better.
No Ministry of Truth imposing momentary sanctioned thought can replace the perspective and enlightenment our past can teach us.
Those who forget history are condemned to repeat it, as George Santayana so memorably wrote.
This means facing our own pasts.
We can be literate and sophisticated enough to sort the good from the bad in any given work, we think, and to choose our models and icons carefully. There is no need to expunge H. P. Lovecraft entirely but to honor him in award statuettes and busts is insulting to those his racism reviled, and outrages those who oppose racism itself. This is not censorship, it is decency. There is much good to be found in HPL’s work but the taint of racism cannot be denied and must not be seen to be honored.
No artist is without human flaws and foibles. Some traits disqualify those who have them from being admired. Other flaws may be considered afflictions or diseases — did Sinclair Lewis or Ernest Hemingway’s alcoholism mean their Nobel Prize for Literature was invalid?
On the other hand, a recent prize given to a fascist, a supporter of genocide, and a defender of war criminal Milosoviç, did create controversy and should have disqualified the recipient. Apologetics for vile crimes is not the kind of content that elevates one’s work to award-worthy status.
That rides another point: are Art and Artist inseparable or distinct? Brahms was considered a dirty old man who loved telling off-color jokes through his haze of cigar smoke in order to shock the sensibilities of the young ladies in the orchestra, but this did not affect his music. No one would know this about him from his music. Only gossip gave us that tidbit.
If Roman Polanski’s movies promoted or celebrated creepy pedophilic or hebephilic behavior, they should be condemned, but if his films show no signs of such, they should be judged apart from what we know about him. Woody Allen, on the other hand, has made many movies showcasing his obsessions and warped behaviors — condemn them for their content, not solely because they’re linked to him.
Of course, there are financial reasons for blacklisting and boycotting.
Kevin Spacey as fired from a hit TV show and became radioactive as an actor once his predilection for abusing his position and power to force himself on young men became known. No one wanted to be associated with him — or Harvey Weinstein, or Jeffrey Epstein, or Jimmy Saville, or those liked to the Franklin Scandal, or Jeff Gannon, et alia — for fear of losing money by association.
Ask Fatty Arbuckle, who was acquitted, how easily a career can evaporate due to a lingering bad smell from even false accusations.
Lizzie Borden was acquitted, too, yet we still view her as an ax murderer of her parents, don’t we?
So we have seen many incur the wrath of blacklist and boycott, usually with a lot of validity. That’s a business choice based on public relations. Yes, Spacey can act, no one ever denied that, but all people think now when they see or mention his name is him putting sick moves on naive boys. You don’t want that kind of distraction if you’re a filmmaker, and fans don’t want to enrich people like that by buying tickets.
So there is a blur and keeping Art distinct from Artist is not always possible, or desirable.
Roald Dahl was supposedly creepy about kids and supported Nazism, yet his position as a premiere writer of children’s books remains solid.
Senator Thomas Eagleton was primed to run for President, with good chances, until it was found he’d once consulted a shrink. That whiff sufficed to let the opposition destroy his chances and political career.
Trump commits vile crimes daily, brags about them, makes racist comments, race baits, and no one blinks.
There is no general fix or response. Each case has its own set of flavors and favors. Things change fast, too. It’s easy to go from top to out in the flash of a camera, in an open-microphone moment.
All the more reason to preserve all the evidence, to protect facts, to keep history complete. Using Orwell’s Ministry of Truth methods of revising history and news to reflect only that moment’s currenly-approved version of reality creates fascist lies and delusional bubbles of idiocy, as should be clear to anyone rational, sane, and paying attention.
That’s why to read the likes of Sax Rohmer or Earl Derr Biggers or to compare and contrast Edgar Rice Burroughs and H. Rider Haggard for fact checks, while keeping racist or other currently-objectionable — or laughable — content in a poised context of history. It gives perspective. It teaches us how far we’ve come and how far we have to go if the goal is kindness, fairness, and an open inclusivity of all humanity — to the exclusion of haters.
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Having said all that, particularly about Sax Rohmer, I find I’m at a point of disgust. His racism is too much. I could force myself through only perhaps four chapters, hoping he’d drop the racism, warm to his plot, and get on with a rollicking tale. No such luck. His racism permeates every scene. Since the villains are all Asian, each encounter brings racist babble — how ‘exotic’ their women, how ‘dangerous’ their acrobatic assassins.
I realized racism WAS his plot. It was anti-Asian propaganda he was presenting, in the form of popular entertainment. Yellow Peril stuff, literally, as a socio-political aim. So I bailed.
While Rohmer could write a rollicking tale of chases and suspenseful escapes, this grinding of racist teeth constantly reduced enjoyment to nil. Think of Mickey Rooney’s horrific racist ‘chinaman’ in BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY’S — now imagine him in nearly every scene.
Time to bail, no question. The brain cannae take much more, Captain.
Perhaps one could read these books as a child but one would have to be a particularly naive and provincial child fully to enjoy them. As with A. Conan Doyle’s nonsense about logic and deduction, adult sensibility rejects the parts kids don’t even notice. It’s not a charming reminder of days gone by, it’s despicable racist propaganda Rohmer wrote, and he put it out as entertainment, suckering readers to think less, feel more hatred, and to accept that racism is how things were.
“That’s just the way it is,” says the scathing indictment song by Bruce Hornsby and The Range. “Some things will never change.”
Oh yes they will. Oh yes we can. Black Lives Matter. Women should vote and have equal pay for equal work. On and on.
Rohmer stoked the average reader with the fuel of bigotry useful to the fascists at the top of the fading Raj mentality. It was political screed.
Imagine if all his prattle about Asians were instead about the Irish, or Africans. Standards change. Remember the signs No Irish Need Apply, turning away Irish immigrants from sheer bigotry? In recent years the racist right tried to deny such signs had ever existed, despite Mark Twain having written about them. Then people found photographs. Lots of them. Their attempted Big Lie imploded on them, so they moved on to others.
As we read our thrillers and pot-boilers, our diversion and entertainment during the trump plague lock-downs, the fascist Gestapo street patrols, and the utter lack of reliable help or information, we should keep in mind that many of the unexamined assumptions found in all fiction — such being inescapable as part of belonging to a society, a prevailing mind-set rooted in your experience and observation during your upbringing — will soon be examined, are already being picked apart, by others from differing cultures and societies, and when they make their voices heard, much of what we took for granted will be revealed as yet another layer of the con, yet another set of lies, yet another manipulation to keep us socially and politically tractable. Try to remember that. Try to spot such things.
Read as if your reality depends on it, because it does.
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