The Old Racist Cat

Product Information

If you really want to choose a name that speaks to its fur coloring, why not choose something like Overcast? All of these writers tended to play with the idea that unnatural or supernatural elements, perhaps even entire worlds, lurked just outside civilization, often adjacent or right next door to it; their unassuming (white male) characters often stumbled into or encountered these worlds and supernatural forces by accident. Lovecraft, working within the tradition in fiction of borrowing from and remixing other stories, often directly borrowed story elements from many of his fellow writers. Several recurring images run throughout their collective works, such as Bierce’s fictional city of Carcosa and Chambers’s “ the Yellow King,” both signifiers of encounters with other worlds and the unholy, unknowable monster who rules them. Following the later cross-platform virality of Uncanny Cat memes in June 2023, one of the main proponents of the meme within the DEAD AHEAD Discord server, user 15placek, claimed that "the origins of the uncanny and canny cat shit is racism" in a June 2023 message [14] (shown below). Although Lovecraft was extremely well-read, between his family’s financial decline in his boyhood and what seem to have been his own episodes of mental illness, he never graduated high school. By the time his mother also began to experience signs of psychological breakdown — perhaps also because of syphilis — Lovecraft was in his late 20s, and his fear of mental illness, his raging xenophobia, and his fixation on the cosmos as a reflection for all the dread he felt were well established through his writing.

There’s also an element of an incredible voyage inherent in these stories, which borrows from the influence of other pulpy 19th-century writers like Jules Verne. Often, Lovecraft’s characters are doomed travelers or explorers who make dark treks across the Earth — or even just across New England — to find a lost city, or to find and read a forbidden book. Giving the cat time and space to develop this trust in their own time is very essential. Routine or overall consistency in the interactions with your cat always goes a long way in establishing strong bonds. Past Experiences Shaping Behavior For those who love rich world-building and sprawling epics but also want some substance, strong character development, and fuel for introspection, Samuel R Delany’s work is the stuff for you.It was so on-trend, in fact, that white people would also use racial slurs to name plants, mountains, celestial objects, and even sports teams. To his neighbors and contemporaries, a cat with this name wouldn’t have been unusual at all. In fact, it would have probably been considered rather uncreative. HP Lovecraft’s Views on Race And this is where Lovecraft’s writing turns both brilliant and inescapably racist. Because much of this metaphor is built not just around Lovecraft’s dread of the universe, but his fear of race-mixing. Lovecraft’s racism left a long shadow over the genre he popularized

Tabby is a name many have used to describe the cats with the coloring of the same name, but there is nothing different or unique about this. Perhaps that means the universality of Lovecraft’s themes can also serve as the fundamental appeal that allows modern horror writers to subvert and ultimately transform his tropes into smart, aware commentaries on the very kind of racism he evinced. Sorry if that sounds harsh, but cats deserve people who love and respect them, not demean them. 3. Racist and derogatory names that demean others Cats are not racist, you only need a better understanding of your cat’s behavior and the factors that determine their reactions and preferences. After all, a cat and a tiger are very different from each other and we can guarantee there are a lot of cats who have been called Tigger already.And that’s perhaps the biggest Lovecraftian twist of all: the unknown cosmic terror, transformed into something as familiar and tawdry as everyday racism — and then vanquished with the light of understanding in favor of newer, better stories. Still, there’s an extent to which all of this discussion has been taking place within Lovecraft’s niche community of genre writers — still well below the mainstream radar, away from the broader influence of his work. (As late as 2014, it was possible to read Lovecraft explainers in media outlets that made no mention of his racism.) That might finally be changing with HBO’s Lovecraft Country now spotlighting the conversation around the author’s racist legacy — but it also inevitably yields frustration because Lovecraftian imagery and themes are so embedded within the pop culture landscape. For those who saw the meme and couldn’t help but google it, HP Lovecraft’s cat has stirred up much controversy, despite being dead for the past 120 years. For those who haven’t seen the meme, the gist of it is that the godfather of weird fiction had a dearly beloved cat who he “affectionately” called N-word Man. The cat with the racial slur for a name was his childhood pet who went missing in 1904 when he was 14 years old, the first of a series of tragic events that would beset the struggling author. Ah, this myth rears its ugly head again. The truth is that people who think a cat is going to have a certain temperament will approach that cat with the expectation of that behavior. And then there’s the classic “Texas Sharpshooter” logical fallacy — finding a pattern to fit a presumption — which causes people to chalk up perfectly normal cat behavior to “tortitude.” HP Lovecraft wasn’t just casually “a man of his times” racist, though. He voiced his opinions loudly, to whoever he could find to listen. He held tight to a rigidly elitist worldview where the English were at the top and everybody else was not only inferior but actually inhuman.