Once something is a prestige HBO series, the topics involved are bound to get attention, as happened to Robert Chambers' The King in Yellow when it was a plot point in the first season of HBO's True Detective. Multiple online magazines started dissecting Lovecraft, his themes, and his racism. Slate, for example, has four different articles on the new series. None of them were very insightful, nor were they written by Weird fiction specialists.
Vox produced "Lovecraftian horror — and the racism at its core — explained", Not as thoughtful as I had hoped when I started to read it, but a decent take nonetheless. It treats fanzines and magazines as if they were the same thing, which is lazy writing (and makes me think perhaps Wikipedia* was the primary source of research for this journalist) and it does give short shift to defenders like S.T. Joshi, I have my own problems with Joshi's work, but he's definitely the world's leading Lovecraft scholar, he is a person of color, and his thoughts on this topic deserve a great deal of consideration.
Joshi's take on Lovecraft's racism appears in the middle of this article (and elsewhere, the man is as prolific as Lovecraft himself). he can also be heard in this podcast and his views specifically about the Lovecraft Country HBO series are discussed here. Joshi is too committed to Lovecraft study for us to take his absolution of Lovecraft's racism completely at face value, but he definitely gets one thing right that the Vox article gets wrong - racism permeates many of his works, but it is not the point of his work. The horror of mankind's utter cosmic inconsequence is the most important theme for Lovecraft.
The fact is, this is a difficult subject. Lovecraft was a racist, plain and simple. Lovecraft wrote thousands of letters to dozens (at least) of correspondents. Many letters espoused racist viewpoints but the man at 16 or 17 was not the same man when he died. Nor had he been totally redeemed.
Consider Lovecraft himself, he was a man with no power or wealth and no prospects for attaining either. He was a man who lived such extreme poverty that poor nutrition undoubtedly contributed to his early death, he had a very unhappy life - some bitterness is to be expected, and that it was often misplaced should surprise none of us. Though the banality of it is disappointing in someone so imaginatively gifted otherwise.
He was also a prolific author, who wrote scores of tales over his short lifetime. Some, but certainly not all, of his work is permeated by his racism (especially his earlier works). and it is no simple matter to determine that beyond obvious examples like those mentioned in the article.
As the Vox article notes, a bust of Lovecraft was originally given to winners of the World Fantasy Award, perhaps because the first award was given at the convention in 1975 held at Providence, Rhode Island and that convention's theme was Lovecraft's circle of fellow writers. I approve of changing the the award myself. I always thought it was in poor taste to make it an individual's bust in the first place, especially when that person is more a horror then a fantasy author, and while influential in the genre, no one could argue he was the most influential fantasy author by a long shot. The Hugo and Nebula awards are far more appropriate - a rocket ship and a transparent block with a glittering nebula respectively.
Simple hatred for Lovecraft is an easy cop-out, but it is hardly intellectually sound. Neither is claiming he was "of his time" and ignoring or literally white-washing his racism. The proper way to deal with it is to wrestle with it, and thankfully many new writers are.
Ruthanna Emrys is one new author doing just that, her Innsmouth Legacy series, especially Winter's Tide, the first novel, turns all of Lovecraft on its head, not only addressing his racism, but equally importantly, IMO, challenging his central thesis that atheism is fact, but also existentially terrifying. It's far from a perfect book - her protagonist is a bit too perfect - but her world-building is superb.
Of course, Matt Ruff's book, and the HBO series, are also doing the same thing as Emrys. I'm looking forward to reading the book (I'm afraid I'm not interested enough in the series to pay for HBO).
"Cancelling" Lovecraft would be incredibly counter-productive, his work is too foundational. But the entire point of fiction is to engage in it, to challenge and reply to it. Lovecraft isn't an answer, he is a question.
* Yes, I often link to Wikipedia articles. It is often (not always) a decent place to start. Not so much for its content, as for its bibliographies and references. I never link to a poor Wikipedia page, and i don't use it as a source. But if its got a solid summary and good references on a subject, then I happily direct folks to that entry.
