People who moan about Lovecraft's racism are barely more cringy than people who try to excuse it. Because let's face it, Lovecraft was literally an ardent racist. You can't know him at all and pretend this isn't the case. His actual views are a lot more complex than the cherry picked shitposts he made from time to time, though.
There are a lot of things that are just objectively true, though.
He was an ardent supporter of Hitler before Hitler took office, and part of this was he literally just really liked Hitler's ideas about the Jews.
Yet at the same time, somehow he married a Jew (Sonia Greene). How did this make the remotest amount of sense? It didn't. His actual opinions and his actual behavior were often divergent.
Apparently, his personal interactions with everyone of every race he encountered were incredibly polite. He may have said incredibly offensive things in private but then he'd be entirely pleasant in person. He did not actually discriminate against people.
And if you've read his letters (which you should as they are some of the best things he ever wrote), he had vastly softened his racist views by the time he died and was actually ashamed of his earlier support of Hitler as well as other opinions he'd had. He died pretty young. Could he have come around to something like egalitarianism if he hadn't died so young? Who knows?
In any event the man should be judged by his actions, not just entirely by his words, and whatever he said, he was a pretty cool guy.
