[marioneta]

I read Joshi's post on this fellow's campaign to make a bust of Octavia Butler for the W.F.A. award instead of the current H.P. Lovecraft one. S.T. Joshi is right in ridiculing Mr. Older efforts at being "holier than thou". Lovecraft held racist views in the context of his time, as did many of that period. Even H.G. Wells made some statements that today sound like he was in favor of "ethnic cleansing". Should we judge his whole work on the basis of these statements? If we want to be politically correct and narrow minded, the answer would be "yes", but we would be committing a grave injustice.
Robert Bloch wrote an excellent introduction to a collection of Lovecraft stories. In it he tackled Lovecraft's racism:

"Degenerative mutation also figures in "The Outsider," "The
Lurking Fear," "The Rats in the Walls," and in the grotesque
miscegenation of "The Dunwich Horror" and "Arthur Jermyn"
. Some critics cite this as a disguised example of the racism they
find evident in "He," "The Horror at Red Hook,"The Call of
Cthulhu," and other stories.
If Lovecraft was a racist we must recognize that the
term was not generally considered pejorative during his
own time. In the twenties and thirties, Anglo-Saxon super-
iority was virtually taken for granted not only in literature
but in daily life. And nowhere was this belief more pronoun-
ced than in New England. Here the D.A.R.(Daughters of the
American Revolution) held sway, and the inhabitants of the self-
styled Shrine of Liberty shuddered as their communities
were invaded by immigrants. Ignoring the fact that most
of these "foreigners" had been imported by blue-blooded,
100 percent Americans to provide cheap labor for their
factories, they watched in dismay as cities became crowded,
old landmarks gave way to new construction, and their
political, economic, and social control gradually vanished.
To Lovecraft these changes were anathema, and ex-
pressed his attitude both privately and in print. But his
views were not inflexible. As he matured he gradually came
out of his shell and his outlook broadened; the racist ele-
ment of earlier efforts is muted or absent in later tales.
And what sort of anti-Semitic author marries a Jewess,
associates with Jews as friends, and retains one as his
literary agent?"

This is the type of analysis the so-called Marxist China Mieville should have made.