A bit of history

I’ll begin this blog with a bit of history: namely, an excerpt from an essay I wrote back in 1977. The essay was called “Why Blacks Don’t Read Science Fiction,” and it was first published in a fanzine called Windhaven. A revised version appeared in a book titled Brave new Universe in 1980. A later essay, “Why Blacks Should Read (and Write) Science Fiction, included in the first Dark Matter anthology in 2000, was a sequel to the earlier one, which was something of a rant.Here goes:In part, this article can be read as an open letter to science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon. The following passage from an interview published in Marvel Comics’ Unknown Worlds of Science Fiction provided the impetus:MARVEL: Do you suppose that one of the reasons SF is becoming more energetic is an input of new outlooks – increasingly as you say we have had more women writers, whereas in the past most of its writers have been men, WASPS at that, very few black writers …STURGEON: That’s been one of my concerns since 1951. I was at a science fiction writers’ conference in Milford, Pennsylvania, and I looked around at all these faces one night and realized that they were all white! And I thought back – every convention that I’d ever been to, they were all white; your average science fiction convention, even today, seen strictly from the outside, might just as well have been a convention of Southern Baptists. SF doesn’t have black writers because it doesn’t have a black readership. I don’t know the reason for that; I’d give anything to find that out.I did run across one black fan who said that the average black, especially the ghetto black, is far too concerned with reality to try to escape from it. His escapes really lay in the areas of music, and, to a degree, dancing – general mental/physical explosions – and not this intellectual kind of escape that science fiction represents. Still, I consider that not a decent answer at all. I would think that the black, with his particular strange kind of history where he was cut off from his own past and has been very put-down all these years, would welcome science fiction – partly as a learning experience, and partly as an escape. I can’t think of a greater escape from the ghetto than to escape to Mars or Jupiter or an alternate universe.My immediate interpretation of this exchange was that Sturgeon seemed to be saying that ghetto blacks would be better off shooting up on science fiction instead of heroin to escape their environment, while his “inside” informant rebutted that blacks have too much rhythm to become involved in something so abstruse as science fiction.My second reaction was to conclude that both Sturgeon and his informant were wrong. The black fan was merely reinforcing an old stereotype, while Sturgeon had seemingly not attempted to look at science fiction from a black reader’s viewpoint. It’s not just the conventions that have, until recently, been as white as a Ku Klux Klan meeting. So was the genre.In the 1930s and ’40s, and even through the “Golden Age” of the 1950s, the science fiction universe was akin to the proverbial driven snow. The writers of those times were capable of stretching their imaginations to the point of conceptualizing aliens with sympathetic qualities; even with attributes superior to those of humankind. But a black man or woman in a spacesuit was an image beyond the limits of early science fiction writers’ imaginations: even the infamous BEM (Bug-Eyed Monster) was more palatable to the tastes of the science-fiction readership of those formative years. Yet at that time the genre was no more or less racist than any other facet of North American life.There were some exceptions. One of the heroes of Leigh Brackett’s 1949 novelette “The Vanishing Venusians” was a black man named Sim, whose heroism involved the sacrifice of his own life to save those of his white companions. However, with all due respect to Brackett, stories such as hers were rare. If blacks appeared at all in the pages of the science fiction pulp magazines, they were presented as offensive “darkie” stereotypes. On the few occasions when they were not stereotyped, black characters did not have “Negroid features.” Edgar Rice Burroughs’ black pirates of Barsoom were an early example of these “non-black” blacks.In the “Golden Age” of the fifties, some breakthroughs from the previous pattern began to occur. The last man left on earth at the conclusion of Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End was a mulatto – still a non-black black, but at least Clarke acknowledged his racial identity without embarrassment. L. Sprague de Camp introduced Percy Mjipa, a Kenyan interstellar colonial official, in The Tower of Zanid. Mack Reynolds concocted a combination NAACP/Peace Corps in his “El Hassan” books, Black Man’s Burden and Border, Breed, Nor Birth. In this series, educated blacks from the U.S., England, and the Caribbean worked to lift their African brothers out of the darkness of colonialism. And “Way in the Middle of the Air,” part of Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles, describes a mass exodus of blacks from the benighted South.Such works, if happened upon by black readers of a generation ago, might have attracted them to the genre, if not active fandom. There was, however, a later work that seemed guaranteed to offend all blacks and many whites: Robert A. Heinlein’s Farnham’s Freehold. The first half of this post-nuclear holocaust/time-travel tale was liberal enough for its day. The family of Hugh Farnham, consisting of the patriarch, his wife, son, daughter, a young female houseguest, and a black houseboy, survive a nuclear war by taking refuge in Farnham’s backyard bomb shelter. Emerging in a world strangely untouched by radiation yet seemingly devoid of human life, the party, under Farnham’s direction, begins the difficult task of survival. Eventually Joe, the houseboy, becomes accepted as an equal in the family unit. Although this acceptance is not quite unanimous (Farnham’s son objects to taking orders from a “nigger”), Joe does get permission to marry Farnham’s daughter. Before the ceremony can take place, however, the daughter dies in childbirth (the child is not Joe’s).At that juncture, the second half of the novel begins. Farnham’s freeholders discover that they are not alone on earth after all. They’re abruptly swept into a futuristic black civilization. The nuclear explosion has thrust the freeholders forward in time, and they quickly learn that the future America is no place for whites. Blacks are now the masters; whites most emphatically slaves. Heinlein may have been attempting to point out what he calls the “poisonousness” of racism through this reversal of roles, but he also succeeded in giving flesh to all the white man’s nightmares: castration, cruelty, and cannibalism all vengefully visited upon the whites by a black society otherwise highly advanced, especially technologically.Heinlein, of course, has the right to say anything he wants in his works. However, I vividly recall the sense of outrage Farnham’s Freehold aroused in me when I first read it years ago. Had I not already been reading science fiction, Heinlein’s book might have prejudiced me against the genre. Yet Heinlein later turned around and made the hero of Starship Troopers black – though we don’t find that out until the end.Returning to the Sturgeon interview: at the time he seems to have come to his stated conclusions about the possible learning and escape value of science fiction for blacks, those conclusions were invalid and somewhat naive. First, an “escape” to a Mars or a Jupiter where the show is still being run by whites would not be an escape at all for blacks. And in the segregated fifties of the “Golden Age,” black science fiction readers would have learned that the stars were as closed to them as the lunch counter in a Birmingham Woolworth’s.That was then; this is now. How much do you think the genre has changed for people of color since the “Golden Age,” and even the 1970s? And how much has it stayed the same?
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