shouts out to the weekly discussion thread for moby dick that r/classicbooks had three years ago. particularly the discussion of the second chapter when the narrator accidentally enters an african-american church and he describes them as looking like "Black Parliament in Tophet" (Black Parliament is an infamous moment in Scottish history where conspirators against the throne were violently killed, Tophet was a location in Jerusalem that the bible condemns because of child sacrifice rituals that were performed there) and described the preacher as looking like an "Angel of Doom" and many commenters in the thread tried to argue that this wasn't racist