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.

Space 1999 and Racial Diversity

Space 1999 is a show that is often forgotten by sci-fi fans. Initially hugely popular, the series soon fell off, mainly because of its reputation (justly earned) for poor science and poor scriptwriting ability (despite the presence of otherwise able writers like Johnny Byrne, of Keepers of Traken fame. And yea, I think that's a good episode. Prove me wrong!). One thing that was very notable about Space 1999 was the multiracial, multinational cast. There was an Anglo-Asian woman, two white Brits, two Anglo-Africans, and three white Americans in the cast. Although there were no Russians because of Cold War concerns, Space 1999, like Star Trek, generally had a more positive view of the Eastern Terror than was common among Western television writers of the time. And I think that in many ways Space 1999's depiction of race was more positive than Star Trek's. For instance, the two black characters were both clearly intellectuals, avoiding the kind of animalistic casting of blacks that Uhura occasionally seemed to represent (let me dance to a Swahili tune, Mr. Spock, and get your Vulcan sex organs in an uproar). Although Americans represented the senior staff at the base, there was definitely less of a gung-ho, conquest of space narrative in Space 1999 than there was in Star Trek. I think in many ways Space 1999 resembled Babylon 5 in depicting a racial harmony that was less forced and less influenced by PC American standards of multiculturalism than Star Trek. People got along, not by denying difference (as in Star Trek), but by acknowledging it. Coincidentally, Space 1999 had one of the most pro-alien narratives of any sci-fi series up to that point and deserves acclaim for that. Regrettably, in season two much of the diversity in the series was lost, as the show took on a more American tone, but Space 1999 still stands as a landmark in nuanced racial depictions in science fiction.

Introduction to My blog

For all those who have read me from Against Biblical Counseling, this is my fun blog, that I will update periodically. On it, I talk about issues of race, class, sex, gender, religion, etc. as they pertain to science fiction. The picture from the left is of one of my favorite science fiction shows, Blake's 7. I am one of the few Americans under 30 whose even heard of the show (and I won't be under 30 for much longer). Blake's Seven was trendsetting in its approach to political issues. What really set it apart was that the Che Gueverra like good-guy, Blake, was often in the wrong, a trait not seen in American science fiction till Farscape and Firefly (two other shows that I like). Blake's 7, more than any other series, set the bar for the series to come after and so far that, here's a big "cheers" for rebel Blake, thief Vila, cynic Avon, and the rest of Blake's motley crew. Too bad they don't produce science fiction like this anymore.