Action Jackson: Shirley Jackson's stories about race

Shirley Jackson took up the theme of race in some of her 1940s-era (?) stories collected in "The Lottery and Other Stories." I don't know that she was way ahead of her time or anything, but it's admirable that she took on the issue head-on when, it seems looking back, that the typical New Yorker story of the era was nonpolitical or apolitical and about a fairly narrow social strata (I may be exaggerating). Recently read and posted on Eudora Welty's Collected Stories, many from the same era, and it was amazing how few of her stories had anything to do with racial relations - which one would think would be an inescapable topic for someone who lived in and wrote about Mississippi in the pre-Civil Rights era. That said, Jackson wasn't a deeply thoughtful or analytic writer, and her stories on racial relations are somewhat tendentious and meant to build upon a minor shock of recognition - which is to say, we're meant to be quite a bit smarter than the characters (and maybe a little less smart than the author): one story about a white boy who brings home a black friend and the white mom condescendingly makes assumptions based on stereotypes and offers the boy (Boyd) some old clothes, assuming he needs charity in fact his dad is gainfully employed (the nice touch in the story is that the boys don't even notice the condescension and just go on playing together). Another story involves a woman new to an old neighborhood who is shunned because she hires a black man to help her around the yard - seems a bit of a stretch, but it shows the subtleties of prejudice and the perniciousness of racism, even in a minor key. But the stories, for all their strengths, are pretty much two-dimensional sketches and they are not the works that gave Jackson her lasting reputation: those would be her stories of the gothic, the macabre, and the bizarre.