We Need a Better Class of Sci-Fi Racists\Racial Dialogue

In recent years, mainstream filmmaking has made tentative but sure steps to portraying racists with greater complexity. Three films have been particularly emblematic of this: American History X, This is England, and The Believer. American History X is well known, but the Believer is an obscure film that shows how a self-hatred for one's own racial\religious group (here Judaism) can lead to the very bigotry that victimizes you. What makes The Believer such a great movie is that its protagonist, Danny Balint, is a three dimensional racist, not someone who is just solely committed to ruining every minority person's day. I believe that American racial dialogue really needs this kind of honesty, because the mainstreaming of simplistic binaries between good anti-racists and bad racists simply does not work. People know real life is not that simple, and they also are aware of the class advantages that many proponents of anti-racism have had. I think science fiction badly needs some honest racial dialogue. The last time we had an honest movie about race was probably Brother from Another Planet, and that is almost three decades old. Series like Alien Nation tried to say something about race, but they were simply too embarrassingly simplistic to do any good. Star Trek, the most race-obsessed series on television, usually settled for simplistic racial signifers: mean Klingons, cunning Romulans, good humans, mercantile Feringi. If we're going to get somewhere with the genre, sci-fi authors and television producers need to take a good hard look at real racial anxieties in America. I think the ideal place to start is with Octavia Butler's excellent and complex meditations on race, such as Lillith's Brood and Kindred (especially the latter; the former occasionally becomes a feminist jeremiad). Only by doing so will the genre really become the racially sensitive genre it's ostensibly supposed to be.