Hemingway - racist???

[groundloop]

I'm taking a trip to Key West and Cuba next year and figured this would be a good excuse to read some Hemingway again. I just finished 'To Have and Have Not' and must say that I was put off by the racist references he usued

In the first chapter a limo driver was simply referred to as 'the n****r', later on the deckhand on Harry Morgan's boat was again referred to as 'the n****r', and some Chinese men whom Harry Morgan was supposed to smuggle into the US were 'C***ks'.

It's been quite a few years since I'd read any Hemingway and I don't seem to recall this in the other books of his I'd read. SO.... I'm wondering what others who are more scholarly than myself think of this - was Hemingway simply a racist, or did he use racist language in order to portray the way that whites talked and thought at the time?

[Lint Head]

1. I think he was just demonstrating the way a particular character talked.

It's kind of like a writer can write a murder mystery yet we know the writer has not actually committed a murder. There is reality in language. Hemingway could have been racist. It was a different time and Hemingway was known to be a virulent man, Safari Hunter and heavy drinker.

[Marcuse]

2. An interesting thesis...

http://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1874&context=etd

Ernest Hemingway and the white, male characters he crafted have become synonymous with Canonical literature’s misogyny, racism, and in general a troublingly nonexistent concern for minorities, or anyone that is not white and male. This lack of concern with the plight of underrepresented people in American society has, as a whole, usually been attributed to the author as well. In fact, Hemingway’s lack of concern for “others” has been taken on faith for so long that Nobel Prize-winning author and critic Toni Morrison notes in surprise that the few black characters in Hemingway’s fiction sometimes serve to “articulate the narrator’s doom and gainsay the protagonist-narrator’s construction of himself... We are left, as readers, wondering what to make of such prophecies, these slips of the pen, these clear and covert disturbances” (84). Morrison goes on to read in Hemingway’s work a troubling trend of not giving a voice to minorities, be they of another race or of the female gender.