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.

Afrofuturism

One course I would love to teach is on Afrofuturist science fiction. I am a big fan of African-American fiction, not because I'm trying to be politically correct, but because so much of African-American fiction is geared to people who grew up in religious, working class and lower middle class homes. Among Afrofuturists, I particularly like feminist Octavia Butler. Butler's works are some of the most radical in the science fiction genre. Even when she gets a little doctrinaire, as in Parable of the Sowers (kind of the Handmaid's Tale of Afrofuturism), her characters always have more complexity than those found in white feminists works, like Margaret Atwood. I also have Brother from Another Planet, the first Afrofuturist major film (so far the only one, though there were a couple of minor blacksploitation entries in the seventies), which is interesting but the sound quality makes it slightly hard to understand. And I would be remiss if I didn't mention the classic of all Afrofuturist works, Black No More by George Schuyler. Black No More is a hilarious sendup of racism in which all blacks are turned into whites through a scientific process and a one of these new whites becomes a member of a KKK-like organization. Unbelievably, impossibly politically incorrect, especially in the racist thirties, Black No More is the ultimate in science fiction's exploration of race.

"Our durn 'racists are dun' The portrayal of racists in science fiction

(According to the Star Wars novels,
the Emperor was a notorious racist, hence the
image).

One of my pet peeves with science fiction is the stupidity of its portrayals of racists. Apparently, to be a racist, you must either be a corporate executive or someone whose IQ is below 80. No where is there any indication that racism often comes from understandable but misguided concerns about economic and social competition with other racial groups. Instead, the portrayal of racist groups in science fiction aligns them with the "dumb working class", as if there's only nice regular Joe working class guys who don't complain, or on the other hand racist white snobs. Sorry to break it to you, Hollywood, but not every racist only graduated from the fourth grade. Science fiction series like Babylon 5 (i.e the Homeguard) spread the comfortable illusion that racism can be eliminated with education. British series are much more perceptive in this regard, with racism being used as a tool of government policy in Doctor Who (Genesis of the Daleks) and Blake's 7. Too often, too, the anti-racist character is identified with the white middle class - James T. Kirk, Picard, etc. Issues of racial separatism are rarely addressed, as every one lives in a multiculturalist harmony. This is problematic, I believe, because it assumes without cause that diversity is what everyone wants and that it is infinitely desirable. Yet many black separatists (and even a few white separatists) merely want to be left alone by those of other races, so much do they not trust those people. Science fiction has never been able to address the issue that we may, ultimately, not all want to get along.

For anyone interested in a more complex portrayal of racism than can be found in most Hollywood pics, I suggest you see two films: The Believer and This is England (neither sci-fi). These films are far more nuanced in their portrayal of race relations than is typical in Hollywood. The sci-fi novels of Octavia Butler as well as the sci-fi classic Black No More, are also a good place to start.