Diversity, Conformity and Bigotry #1

The science fiction writer H. P. Lovecraft is a well regarded writer. He is a less well regarded man. He is an unquestioned superior writer in the Horror genre and is esteemed as such by Steven King and Joyce Carol Oats. But he was a racist, perhaps even out of proportion for his time, although there is an argument that he was less a racist than an exclusive lover of all things British.  

Every year the World Fantasy Award includes a statuette of Lovecraft. The 2011 award winner was Nnedi Okorafor, an American born writer of Nigerian parentage. She is a 2001 graduate of the Clarion Writers Workshop in Lansing, Michigan, and holds a PhD in English from the University of Illinois, Chicago. She is a professor of creative writing at Chicago State University.

Here is one of Lovecraft's poems that she discovered that ruined her award for her:

On the Creation of Niggers  (1912)
by H. P. Lovecraft

When, long ago, the gods created EarthIn Jove’s fair image Man was shaped at birth.
The beasts for lesser parts were next designed;
Yet were they too remote from humankind.
To fill the gap, and join the rest to Man,
Th’Olympian host conceiv’d a clever plan.
A beast they wrought, in semi-human figure,
Filled it with vice, and called the thing a Nigger.

This is part of an essay Okorafor wrote on learning of Lovecraft's personal history:
“This is something people of color, women, minorities must deal with more than most when striving to be the greatest that they can be in the arts: The fact that many of The Elders we honor and need to learn from hate or hated us.”

This is very poignant and sad. Nothing about Lovecraft's personal life makes him an interesting or compelling guy. But does that trump his fiction? (In fairness, one could argue the Horror genre is just not worth it anyway. Edmund Wilson said, "the only real horror in most of these fictions is the horror of bad taste and bad art.")
H. G. Wells was no less a bigot, but perhaps better writers get a pass. Or, as so many of the early progressives, was Wells' heart in the right place if his perceptions were not?