Things That Don’t Go Away: Race and Science Fiction (Part II) by Sarah Zettel
Column | BSCreview Guest | February 7, 2009 at 8:40 am
You knew I was going to drag Hollywood into this, didn’t you? Partly because I said I would last week, and I am nothing if not a woman of my word. Hollywood, is, of course, the short-hand term for the wildly successful US movie industry. Hollywood is a nice target for anyone who wants to take a shot at US culture, or lack thereof. Hollywood takes a lot of blame for things it never originated. Takes a lot of credit for things it never originated, too.
One of the things it has done, however, is exacerbate some of the problems extant in US science fiction’s handling of race, culture and gender.
Back in the day, waaaaay back in the day, back in the late 1920s, early 1930s talking pictures were the big, scary new medium. They were ruining morals, making kids disrespect their elders, causing girls to run off with traveling salesmen, dogs and cats living together, etc., etc. Because of the immediate and present danger movies presented to the public morality, every single town had a censorship board, and these boards could decide what movies were shown in that town, whether it was Weehauken, or Boston. Or Atlanta, Georgia.
By now, the astute reader will see where this is going. This was the time of the segregated South. Jim Crow had settled in, apparently for good. Lynchings were a common occurrence. And there was no way whatsoever the boards of censors were going to permit movies to be shown in their town that did not portray African Americans in strictly proscribed roles. They had to be separate, they had to be subservient. They could be talented, but they could not be better. They could not be professional, they could not be educated. They could not, in short be full citizens on screen.
To be fair, it wasn’t just the South perpetuating this outlook, but it was in the South the social mores were most tightly enshrined in black letter law.
Now, Hollywood is not about making movies any more than the publishing industry is about making books. Hollywood is about making money, and making as much money off as little product as possible, and it’s pretty much been this way from the beginning. Oh, there are artists in the machine, and some of them are geniuses, but the machine is still in charge. Therefore, it wasn’t difficult for the Hollywood moguls (who were not noted as being a morally or socially progressive bunch) to reach their decisions. If the South would not show integrated movies, integrated movies simply would not be made. There would be “race” films to reach the “Negro” audience, but in all other cases, Jim Crow would be respected.
So. What does this have to do with science fiction? Ursula K. Le Guin said it best, “We cannot really write about the future. All we can do is write about the present.”
Throughout the 30s and into the 40s and 50s, that time period known as The Golden Age of Science Fiction, when the future was portrayed on the screen, the future had a white, American face. Simple as that. This, combined with Campbell’s all-white, mostly-male, mostly-American futures had a tremendous effect upon the generation of writers who came up during that time. It imprinted a very specific idea of what the future would look like and who would run it. The future was a place of advanced technology, advanced technology was the exclusive province of the elite, and if you were black, or brown, or Asian, or any combination thereof, you could not be a member of the elite, therefore you didn’t get to be in the future.
What’s more, presenting an all-white, mostly male future didn’t seem to be hurting business any. After all, the audience was all white and mostly male. A white male audience was not offended by the AWMM vision of the future, and they might, just might, be shocked or offended by a different view, which might lead them to stop buying books, or subscribing to magazines, so why risk it?
Yes, there were editors and publishers who saw beyond this and who understood that if you were going to call science fiction the literature of ideas, you needed to open it up to more than one kind of idea, but this was the dominant picture and business model going into the Cold War. And if there was anything that held back change in US science fiction, it was the Cold War and its child, the Space Race. These two historical events added an imperative to the genre, and gave it its very own private myth of exceptionalism.
TO BE CONTINUED, but not quite yet. Next week is Valentine’s Day and we will be taking a break from the weighty cultural commentary to talk about True Love.
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Tags: Race and Science Fiction, Sarah Zettel, Science Fiction, Things that Don't Go Away
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This is unrelated to SF, but I recently watched the original Mission Impossible TV series and I was wondering at this time (which admittedly seems late) was such a role that Greg Morris played considered abnormal or something spoken of as such? Looking at it now, it looks perfectly innocent (and he was a pretty essential character who actually was a bit of the tech whiz), but perhaps an ‘older’ reader knows?
I ask not knowing if or how popular this series was when it was actually on.
The series was enormously popular when it was on, and Morris was a great favorite. Like Lt. Uhura on the Original Star Trek and Bill Cosby’s character on I Spy, he was a real ground breaker. It is notable that it was TV that broke the color barrier earlier and more firmly than movies.
What Hollywood–or the SciFi Channel–did to LeGuin’s Earthsea books–is horrible. I shudder to think what they’d do to Octavia Butler’s work if given the chance!
Craig, I remember the fallout from that with LeGuin making very public comments (essays/articles) about it.
Oh, it was beyond criminal what they did to Earthsea. After seeing what they did to LATHE OF HEAVEN, I didn’t watch, but I heard all about it.
The second book of the Earthsea series, The Tombs of Atuan was the book that convinced me I wanted to become a writer. If there are other Earthsea fans out there, you might want to check this out:
http://blip.tv/file/1721545
It’s Ms. LeGuin (who I am proud to say is a member of Book View Cafe) reading from Earthsea.
I have come very late to le Guin (mainly Earthsea) but I fell in love with her writing right away. On eof the things that I really liked about the books were the fact that they were firmly centered in a world where whiteness was the default mode. I have yet to read her sci-fi but am looking forward to it. Octavia Butler is another prominent female sci-fi writer that’s on my TRP.
Octavia Butler is brilliant, and much missed. LeGuin’s LATHE OF HEAVEN is the book I recommend to folks who are just starting to get into science fiction. You might also want to check out any or all of the following: Nisi Shawl, Tianreeve Due, Steve Barnes, Tobias Buckell, and, of course, Samuel Delaney
Thank you for the recommendations. Is there anything in particular by Butler that you could recommend as a place to start?
Wild Seed is a good spot to start. Also Kindred. Parable of the Sower is great, but alas, she was never able to finish the series.
“It is notable that it was TV that broke the color barrier earlier and more firmly than movies.”
Respectfully, this is also completely wrong. The integration of African-Americans into mainstream films began in 1949; see here for a long list of examples, such as :
* Cry, the Beloved Country, 1951
* Go Man Go, 1954
* Goodby, My Lady, 1956
* Edge of the City, 1957
* Something of Value, 1957
* The Defiant Ones, 1958, with Tony Curtis
* Porgy and Bess, 1959
* Paris Blues, 1961
* A Raisin in the Sun, 1961
* Pressure Point, 1962
# Lilies of the Field, 1963 *
# The Bedford Incident, 1965
# A Patch of Blue, 1965
And that’s just with Sidney Poitier! Continuing to quote:
And so on.
Whereas I, Spy the first drama to respectfully portray an African-American as an equal to a light-skinned American didn’t come on the air until 1965, and Star Trek, in which Uhura was a minor role, until 1966. Julia, the first American tv show to respectfully show and individual star an African-American didn’t premiere until 1968.
Before that, all there was on American tv by way of African-Americans were Beulah — originally portrayed by white actresses, in which she played a servant, and Amos ‘n Andy.
Outside drama and sitcoms, there was the brief blip of The Nat King Cole variety show in 1957, but that only lasted a few months, and wasn’t a drama. And that’s it for tv and African-Americans until the late Sixties. So movies definitely came way before tv in leading the way for African-Americans to play major roles, speak out against racism, and star in vehicles.
This is a great article! Did you know that when the first episodes of Star Trek were being produced there was quite a bit of trial and error with Spock’s makeup. Originally Vulcans were to have red skin, but since most people still had black and white televisions, the skin color was changed to green. The reason for this was that they didn’t Spock to appear to be black as they wanted Vulcans to be distinctly alien.
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