John Campbell was a fucking fascist and a racist piece of shit. We can do better than holding him up as some sort of father figure to the field. https://t.co/ce9rlGjHOV
— Pablo Defendini (@pablod) August 24, 2019
I agree that Campbell was pretty vile, but I also have a problem with complete history erasure like this. Taking a red pencil to the past doesn’t work well and it’s fundamentally a lie. The truth is that Campbell had and still has — even long dead — enormous influence on the sf field. Just papering over this because he’s now persona non grata doesn’t actually improve anything.
I don’t really give a crap if some particular award is named after the guy. That matters less than nothing one way or the other and is a distraction from the real issues. But I do care that we are forced to pretend in some Ministry of Truth liberal orthodoxy that he never existed, or that absolutely everything he did was some unmitigated evil. It wasn’t, and without him it’s unclear that the sf field would’ve developed to be anything close to what it is today, even with all its flaws.
Mitigate on and improve upon the inequities and iniquities of the past, but erasing the past is something that is, first of all, impossible and second, actually hurts instead of helps people. Yes, even people of color and women.
Leave the past as is; improve the future.