Decompiling Oppression #3
Sam McVeety
Happy February! I've got something a little different this month, to honor Black History Month. We're going to explore a bit about Afrofuturism, why representation matters, and what it means to bring an antiracist lens to speculative and science fiction writing. As a kid that grew up watching Star Trek, reading stacks of sci-fi, etc., this is a topic that is close to my heart. I'll start by introducing two of my favorite authors in speculative fiction: Octavia Butler and NK Jemisin.
Octavia Butler was one of the first black women in speculative fiction to gain widespread recognition and acclaim. Kindred is perhaps her best-known book,weaving together a present-day and antebellum narrative through the context of slavery, complicity, and generational trauma, employing the narrative device of multiple time periods to examine our present and past. Butler's Earthseed duology looks into a potential future through the prism of race and class, where cities have become barricaded enclaves for a wealthy few and rural townships depend on mutual defense to survive.
Another of her creations, Lilith's Brood, asks the reader to imagine the repopulation of earth. After a species-survival abduction, a black woman argues that humanity is not beyond saving, even as the peers she reawakens to work alongside her return to old habits of gender and race. Throughout Butler's work, her protagonists are defined not by their trauma, but rather by their resilience, so much so that her work inspired its own following of sorts in Emergent Strategy, a contemporary manual for community organizing that grounds its philosophy in the idea that adaption is the one essential skill in a world where change is endemic.
NK Jemisin made history when she won the Hugo prize three years in a row for her Broken Earth trilogy, which deftly integrates race, class, and gender into a depressingly recognizable world rife with massive geologic and climate events. She explores oppression most directly through the community of earth-shaping "orogenes" (complete with their own too-familiar slur) who inhabit the world, showing the ways that power and oppression can mutate and evolve to bind even the most powerful societies. Her world echoes some of Butler's work, as its societies reveal the many ways in which they've learned to mitigate the constant looming presence of catastrophe.
There's also her collection of short stories, How Long 'Til Black Future Month, which collects progenitors to some of her long-form work alongside everything from a steampunk, hydrogen-powered free Haitian state to a battle for the living soul of New York City. My personal favorite, however, is The Ones Who Stay and Fight, a companion piece to Ursula Le Guin's classic The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas. Both stories need only a handful of pages to deliver the harrowing challenge of examining what injustice we're willing to allow in our midst for the price of security and comfort.
In some ways, it's miraculous that our society has been given the gift of these authors. As a white man, I'm not used to looking for myself in the fiction I read, since characters who look like me are already omnipresent. As black women, Butler and Jemisin have challenged and subverted a culture that was built to exclude them, in ways both subtle and overt. One of the more affecting things I've read on the matter comes from Jemisin's take on growing up with the Starship Enterprise:
Because Star Trek takes place 500 years from now, supposedly long after humanity has transcended racism, sexism, etc. But there’s still only one black person on the crew, and she’s the receptionist.
This is disingenuous. I know now what I did not understand then: that most science fiction doesn’t realistically depict the future; it reflects the present in which it is written. So for the 1960s, Uhura’s presence was groundbreaking — and her marginalization was to be expected. But I wasn’t watching the show in the 1960s. I was watching it in the 1980s, amid the destitute, gritty New York of Tawana Brawley and Double Dutch and Public Enemy. I was watching it as one of five billion members of the human species — nearly 80% of whom were people of color even then. I was watching it as a tween/teen girl who’d grown up being told that she could do anything if she only put her mind to it, and I looked to science fiction to provide me with useful myths about my future: who I might become, what was possible, how far I and my descendants might go.
The myth that Star Trek planted in my mind: people like me exist in the future, but there are only a few of us. Something’s obviously going to kill off a few billion people of color and the majority of women in the next few centuries. And despite it being, y’know, the future, my descendants’ career options are going to be even more limited than my own.
… and I can't help but be reminded of Dune, where the only gay character is a villanous pedophile. It takes very little to say "you don't belong".
Thinking back to our discussion of the victim and perpetrator perspectives, it's important to see how the impact of a piece of popular culture can stretch far beyond any overt discrimination. Once the ink is dry, these stories become part of our culture, and take on meaning independent of the author's original intent. Before us lies the hard, messy work of reclaiming, recontextualizing, and reinventing our conceptions of the future in order to imagine them so that they may one day become real.
My invitations to you for this week:
Personal: If you're a reader and up for it, read The Fifth Season. For just a taste, this interview with NK Jemisin explores the points above in much more depth.
Communal: Choose a piece of popular fiction and arrange a group conversation about it (movie night, book club, etc.). Talk about the role that representation plays, and the different messages it might send to different consumers. Who is represented in the piece? How are they represented? Who is missing?
Solidarity: Visit your local library, especially if you've never been! Support Hugo House, a nonprofit for writers with an equity focus.