From
NYRSF
Issue 120, August 1998. "Racism in SF" first appeared in volume form
in Darkmatter, edited by Sheree R. Thomas, Warner Books: New York, 2000.
Posted by Permission of Samuel R. Delany. Copyright © 1998 by Samuel R. Delany.
Racism for me has
always appeared to be first and foremost a system, largely supported by
material and economic conditions at work in a field of social traditions. Thus,
though racism is always made manifest through individuals’ decisions, actions,
words, and feelings, when we have the luxury of looking at it with the longer
view (and we don’t, always), usually I don’t see much point in blaming people
personally, white or black, for their feelings or even for their specific
actions—as long as they remain this side of the criminal. These are not what
stabilize the system. These are not what promote and reproduce the system.
These are not the points where the most lasting changes can be introduced to
alter the system.
For better or for
worse, I am often spoken of as the first African-American science fiction
writer. But I wear that originary label as uneasily as any writer has worn the
label of science fiction itself. Among the ranks of what is often referred to
as proto-science fiction, there are a number of black writers. M. P. Shiel,
whose Purple Cloud and Lord of the Sea are still read, was a
Creole with some African ancestry. Black leader Martin Delany (1812–1885—alas,
no relation) wrote his single and highly imaginative novel, still to be found
on the shelves of Barnes & Noble today, Blake, or The Huts of America
(1857), about an imagined successful slave revolt in Cuba and the American
South—which is about as close to an sf-style alternate history novel as you can
get. Other black writers whose work certainly borders on science fiction
include Sutton E. Griggs and his novel Imperio Imperium (1899) in which
an African-American secret society conspires to found a separate black state by
taking over Texas, and Edward Johnson, who, following Bellamy’s example in Looking
Backward (1888), wrote Light Ahead for the Negro (1904), telling of
a black man transported into a socialist United States in the far future. I
believe I first heard Harlan Ellison make the point that we know of dozens upon
dozens of early pulp writers only as names: They conducted their careers
entirely by mail—in a field and during an era when pen-names were the rule
rather than the exception. Among the “Remmington C. Scotts” and the “Frank P.
Joneses” who litter the contents pages of the early pulps, we simply have no
way of knowing if one, three, or seven or them—or even many more—were not
blacks, Hispanics, women, native Americans, Asians, or whatever. Writing is
like that.
Toward the end of the
Harlem Renaissance, the black social critic George Schuyler (1895–1977)
published an acidic satire Black No More: Being an Account of the Strange
and Wonderful Workings of Science in the Land of the Free, A. D. 1933–1940
(The Macaulay Company, New York, 1931), which hinges on a three-day treatment
costing fifty dollars through which black people can turn themselves white. The
treatment involves “a formidable apparatus of sparkling nickel. It resembled a
cross between a dentist chair and an electric chair.” The confusion this causes
throughout racist America (as well as among black folks themselves) gives
Schuyler a chance to satirize both white leaders and black. (Though W. E. B. Du
Bois was himself lampooned by Schuyler as the aloof, money-hungry hypocrite Dr.
Shakespeare Agamemnon Beard, Du Bois, in his column “The Browsing Reader” [in The
Crisis, March ’31] called the novel “an extremely significant work” and “a
rollicking, keen, good-natured criticism of the Negro problem in the United
States” that was bound to be “abundantly misunderstood” because such was the
fate of all satire.) The story follows the adventures of the dashing black Max
Dasher and his sidekick Bunny, who become white and make their way through a
world rendered topsy-turvy by the spreading racial ambiguity and deception.
Toward the climax, the two white perpetrators of the system who have made
themselves rich on the scheme are lynched by a group of whites (at a place
called Happy Hill) who believe the two men are blacks in disguise. Though the term
did not exist, here the “humor” becomes so “black” as to take on elements of
inchoate American horror. For his scene, Schuyler simply used accounts of
actual lynchings of black men at the time, with a few changes in wording:
The two men . . . were
stripped naked, held down by husky and willing farm hands and their ears and
genitals cut off with jackknives . . . Some wag sewed their ears to their backs
and they were released to run . . . [but were immediately brought down with
revolvers by the crowd] amidst the uproarious laughter of the congregation . .
. [Still living, the two were bound together at a stake while] little boys and
girls gaily gathered excelsior, scrap paper, twigs and small branches, while
their proud parents fetched logs, boxes, kerosene . . . [Reverend McPhule said
a prayer, the flames were lit, the victims screamed, and the] crowd whooped
with glee and Reverend McPhule beamed with satisfaction . . . The odor of
cooking meat permeated the clear, country air and many a nostril was guiltily
distended . . . When the roasting was over, the more adventurous members of
Rev. McPhule’s flock rushed to the stake and groped in the two bodies for
skeletal souvenirs such as forefingers, toes and teeth. Proudly their pastor
looked on (217–218).
Might this have been
too much for the readers of Amazing and Astounding? As it does
for many black folk today, such a tale, despite the ’30s pulp diction, has a
special place for me. Among the family stories I grew up with, one was an
account of a similar lynching of a cousin of mine from only a decade or so
before the year Schuyler’s story is set. Even the racial ambiguity of
Schuyler’s victims speaks to the story. A woman who looked white, my cousin was
several months pregnant and traveling with her much darker husband when they
were set upon by white men (because they believed the marriage was miscegenous)
and lynched in a manner equally gruesome: Her husband’s body was similarly
mutilated. And her child was no longer in her body when their corpses, as my father
recounted the incident to me in the ’40s, were returned in a wagon to the
campus of the black episcopal college where my grandparents were
administrators. Hundreds on hundreds of such social murders were recorded in
detail by witnesses and participants between the Civil War and the Second World
War. Thousands on thousands more went unrecorded. (Billy the Kid claimed to
have taken active part in a more than half a dozen such murders of “Mexicans,
niggers, and injuns,” which were not even counted among his famous twenty-one
adolescent killings.) But this is (just one of) the horrors from which racism
arises—and where it can still all too easily go.
In 1936 and 1938,
under the pen name “Samuel I. Brooks,” Schuyler had two long stories published
in some 63 weekly installments in The Pittsburgh Courier, a black
Pennsylvania newspaper, about a black organization, lead by a black Dr.
Belsidus, who plots to take over the world—work that Schuyler considered “hokum
and hack work of the purest vein.” Schuyler was known as an extreme political
conservative, though the trajectory to that conservatism was very similar to
Heinlein’s. (Unlike Heinlein’s, though, Schuyler’s view of science fiction was
as conservative as anything about him.) Schuyler’s early socialist period was
followed by a later conservatism that Schuyler himself, at least, felt in no
way harbored any contradiction with his former principles, even though he
joined the John Birch Society toward the start of the ’60s and wrote for its
news organ American Opinion. His second Dr. Belsidus story remained
unfinished, and the two were not collected in book form until 1991 (Black
Empire, by George S. Schuyler, ed. by Robert A. Hill and Kent Rasmussen,
Northeastern University Press, Boston), fourteen years after his death.
Since I began to
publish in 1962, I have often been asked, by people of all colors, what my
experience of racial prejudice in the science fiction field has been. Has it
been nonexistent? By no means: It was definitely there. A child of the political
protests of the ’50s and ’60s, I’ve frequently said to people who asked that
question: As long as there are only one, two, or a handful of us, however, I
presume in a field such as science fiction, where many of its writers come out
of the liberal-Jewish tradition, prejudice will most likely remain a slight
force—until, say, black writers start to number thirteen, fifteen, twenty
percent of the total. At that point, where the competition might be perceived
as having some economic heft, chances are we will have as much racism and
prejudice here as in any other field.
We are still a long
way away from such statistics.
But we are certainly
moving closer.
After—briefly—being my
student at the Clarion Science Fiction Writers’ Workshop, Octavia Butler entered
the field with her first story, “Crossover,” in 1971 and her first novel, Patternmaster,
in 1976—fourteen years after my own first novel appeared in winter of ’62. But
she recounts her story with brio and insight. Everyone was very glad to see
her! After several short story sales, Steven Barnes first came to general
attention in 1981 with Dreampark and other collaborations with Larry
Niven. Charles Saunders published his Imaro novels with DAW Books in the
early ’80s. Even more recently in the collateral field of horror, Tannanarive
Due has published The Between (1996) and My Soul to Keep (1997).
Last year all of us except Charles were present at the first African-American
Science Fiction Writers Conference sponsored by Clarke-Atlanta University. This
year Toronto-based writer Nalo Hopkinson (another Clarion student whom I have
the pleasure of being able to boast of as having also taught at Clarion)
published her award-winning sf novel Brown Girl in the Ring (Warner, New
York, 1998). Another black North American writer is Haitian-born Claude-Michel
Prévost, a francophone writer who publishes out of Vancouver, British Columbia.
Since people ask me regularly what examples of prejudice have I experienced in
the science fiction field, I thought this might be the time to answer,
then—with a tale.
With five days to go
in my twenty-fourth year, on March 25, 1967, my sixth science fiction novel, Babel-17,
won a Nebula Award (a tie, actually) from the Science Fiction Writers of
America. That same day the first copies of my eighth, The Einstein
Intersection, became available at my publishers’ office. (Because of
publishing schedules, my seventh, Empire Star, had preceded the sixth
into print the previous spring.) At home on my desk at the back of an apartment
I shared on St. Mark’s Place, my ninth, Nova, was a little more than
three months from completion.
On February 10, a
month and a half before the March awards, in its partially completed state Nova
had been purchased by Doubleday & Co. Three months after the awards
banquet, in June, when it was done, with that first Nebula under my belt, I
submitted Nova for serialization to the famous sf editor of Analog
Magazine, John W. Campbell, Jr. Campbell rejected it, with a note and phone
call to my agent explaining that he didn’t feel his readership would be able to
relate to a black main character. That was one of my first direct encounters,
as a professional writer, with the slippery and always commercialized form of
liberal American prejudice: Campbell had nothing against my being black, you
understand. (There reputedly exists a letter from him to horror writer Dean
Koontz, from only a year or two later, in which Campbell argues in all
seriousness that a technologically advanced black civilization is a social and
a biological impossibility. . . .). No, perish the thought! Surely there was
not a prejudiced bone in his body! It’s just that I had, by pure happenstance,
chosen to write about someone whose mother was from Senegal (and whose father
was from Norway), and it was the poor benighted readers, out there in America’s
heartland, who, in 1967, would be too upset. . . .
It was all handled as
though I’d just happened to have dressed my main character in a purple brocade
dinner jacket. (In the phone call Campbell made it fairly clear that this was
his only reason for rejecting the book. Otherwise, he rather liked it. . . .)
Purple brocade just wasn’t big with the buyers that season. Sorry. . . .
Today if something
like that happened, I would probably give the information to those people who
feel it their job to make such things as widely known as possible. At the time,
however, I swallowed it—a mark of both how the times, and I, have changed. I
told myself I was too busy writing. The most profitable trajectory for a
successful science fiction novel in those days was for an sf book to start life
as a magazine serial, move on to hardcover publication, and finally be reprinted
as a mass market paperback. If you were writing a novel a year (or, say, three
novels every two years, which was then almost what I was averaging), that was
the only way to push your annual income up, at the time, from four to five
figures—and the low five figures at that. That was the point I began to realize
I probably was not going to be able to make the kind of living (modest enough!)
that, only a few months before, at the Awards Banquet, I’d let myself envision.
The things I saw myself writing in the future, I already knew, were going to be
more rather than less controversial. The percentage of purple brocade was only
going to go up.
The second installment
of my story here concerns the first time the word “Negro” was said to me, as a
direct reference to my racial origins, by someone in the science-fiction
community. Understand that, since the late ’30s, that community, that world had
been largely Jewish, highly liberal, and with notable exceptions leaned well to
the left. Even its right-wing mavens, Robert Heinlein or Poul Anderson (or,
indeed, Campbell), would have far preferred to go to a leftist party and have a
friendly argument with some smart socialists than actually to hang out with the
right-wing and libertarian organizations which they may well have supported in
principal and, in Heinlein’s case, with donations. April 14, 1968, a year
and—perhaps—three weeks later, was the evening of the next Nebula Awards
Banquet. A fortnight before, I had turned twenty-six. That year my eighth novel
The Einstein Intersection (which had materialized as an object on the
day of the previous year’s) and my short story, “Aye, and Gomorrah . . .” were
both nominated.
In those days the
Nebula banquet was a black tie affair with upwards of a hundred guests at a midtown
hotel-restaurant. Quite incidentally, it was a time of upheaval and uncertainty
in my personal life (which, I suspect, is tantamount to saying I was a
twenty-six-year-old writer). But that evening my mother and sister and a
friend, as well as my wife, were at my table. My novel won—and the presentation
of the glittering Lucite trophy was followed by a discomforting speech from an
eminent member of SFWA.
Perhaps you’ve heard
such disgruntled talks: They begin, as did this one, “What I have to say tonight,
many of you are not going to like . . .” and went on to castigate the
organization for letting itself be taken in by (the phrase was, or was
something very like) “pretentious literary nonsense,” unto granting it awards,
and abandoning the old values of good, solid, craftsmanlike story-telling. My
name was not mentioned, but it was evident I was (along with Roger Zelazny, not
present) the prime target of this fusillade. It’s an odd experience, I must
tell you, to accept an award from a hall full of people in tuxedos and evening
gowns and then, from the same podium at which you accepted it, hear a half-hour
jeremiad from an eminence gris declaring that award to be worthless and
the people who voted it to you duped fools. It’s not paranoia: By count I caught
more than a dozen sets of eyes sweeping between me and the speaker going on
about the triviality of work such as mine and the foolishness of the
hundred-plus writers who had voted for it.
As you might imagine,
the applause was slight, uncomfortable, and scattered. There was more coughing
and chair scraping than clapping. By the end of the speech, I was drenched with
the tricklings of mortification and wondering what I’d done to deserve them.
The master of ceremonies, Robert Silverberg, took the podium and said, “Well, I
guess we’ve all been put in our place.” There was a bitter chuckle. And the
next award was announced.
It again went to
me—for my short story, “Aye, and Gomorrah . . .”. I had, by that time,
forgotten it was in the running. For the second time that evening I got up and
went to the podium to accept my trophy (it sits on a shelf above my desk about
two feet away from me as I write), but, in dazzled embarrassment, it occurred
to me as I was walking to the front of the hall that I must say something in my
defense, though mistily I perceived it had best be as indirect as the attack.
With my sweat soaked undershirt beneath my formal turtle-neck peeling and
unpeeling from my back at each step, I took the podium and my second trophy of
the evening. Into the microphone I said, as calmly as I could manage: “I write
the novels and stories that I do and work on them as hard as I can to make them
the best I can. That you’ve chosen to honor them—and twice in one night—is
warming. Thank you.”
I received a standing
ovation—though I was aware it was as much in reaction to the upbraiding of the
nay-sayer as it was in support of anything I had done. I walked back down
toward my seat, but as I passed one of the tables, a woman agent (not my own)
who had several times written me and been supportive of my work, took my arm as
I went by and pulled me down to say, “That was elegant, Chip . . . !” while the
applause continued. At the same time, I felt a hand on my other sleeve—in the
arm that held the Lucite block of the Nebula itself—and I turned to Isaac
Asimov (whom I’d met for the first time at the banquet the year before),
sitting on the other side and now pulling me toward him. With a large smile,
wholly saturated with evident self-irony, he leaned toward me to say: “You
know, Chip, we only voted you those awards because you’re Negro . . . !” (This
was 1968; the term ‘black’ was not yet common parlance.) I smiled back (there
was no possibility he had intended the remark in any way seriously—as anything
other than an attempt to cut through the evening’s many tensions. . . . Still,
part of me rolled my eyes silently to heaven and said: Do I really need to hear
this right at this moment?) and returned to my table.
The way I read his
statement then, and the way I read it today; indeed, anything else would be a
historical misreading, is that Ike was trying to use a self-evidently tasteless
absurdity (he was famous for them) to defuse some of the considerable anxiety
in the hall that night; it is a standard male trope, needless to say. I think
he was trying to say that race probably took little or no part in his or any
other of the writer’s minds who had voted for me.
But such ironies cut
in several directions. I don’t know whether Asimov realized he was saying this
as well, but as an old historical materialist, if only as an afterthought, he
must have realized that he was saying too: No one here will ever look at you,
read a word your write, or consider you in any situation, no matter whether the
roof is falling in or the money is pouring in, without saying to him- or
herself (whether in an attempt to count it or to discount it), “Negro . . .”
The racial situation, permeable as it might sometimes seem (and it is, yes,
highly permeable), is nevertheless your total surround. Don’t you ever forget
it . . . ! And I never have.
The fact that this
particular “joke” emerged just then, at that most anxiety-torn moment, when the
only-three-year-old, volatile organization of feisty science fiction writers
saw itself under a virulent battering from internal conflicts over shifting
aesthetic values, meant that, though the word had not yet been said to me or
written about me till then (and, from then on, it was, interestingly, written
regularly, though I did not in any way change my own self presentation: Judy
Merril had already referred to me in print as “a handsome Negro.” James Blish
would soon write of me as “a merry Negro.” I mean, can you imagine anyone at
the same time writing of “a merry Jew”?), it had clearly inhered in every step
and stage of my then just-six years as a professional writer.
Here the story takes a
sanguine turn.
The man who’d made the
speech had apparently not yet actually read my nominated novel when he wrote
his talk. He had merely had it described to him by a friend, a notoriously
eccentric reader, who had fulminated that the work was clearly and obviously
beneath consideration as a serious science fiction novel: Each chapter began
with a set of quotes from literary texts that had nothing to do with science at
all! Our naysayer had gone along with this evaluation, at least as far as
putting together his rubarbative speech.
When, a week or two
later, he decided to read the book for himself (in case he was challenged on
specifics), he found, to his surprise, he liked it—and, from what embarrassment
I can only guess, became one of my staunchest and most articulate supporters,
as an editor and a critic. (A lesson about reading here: Do your share, and you
can save yourself and others a lot of embarrassment.) And Nova, after
its Doubleday appearance in ’68 and some pretty stunning reviews, garnered what
was then a record advance for an sf novel paid to date by Bantam Books (a
record broken shortly thereafter), ushering in the twenty years when I could
actually support myself (almost) by writing alone.
(Algis Budrys, who
also had been there that evening, wrote in his January ’69 review in Galaxy,
“Samuel R. Delany, right now, as of this book, Nova, not as of some
future book or some accumulated body of work, is the best science fiction
writer in the world, at a time when competition for that status is intense. I
don’t see how a science fiction writer can do more than wring your heart while
telling you how it works. No writer can. . . .” Even then I knew enough not to
take such hyperbole seriously. I mention it to suggest the pressures around
against which one had to keep one’s head straight—and, yes, to brag just a
little. But it’s that desire to have it both ways—to realize it’s meaningless,
but to take some straited pleasure nevertheless from the fact that, at least,
somebody was inspired to say it—that defines the field in which the dangerous
slippages in your reality picture start, slippages that lead to that monstrous
and insufferable egotism so ugly in so many much-praised artists.)
But what Asimov’s quip
also tells us is that, for any black artist (and you’ll forgive me if I stick
to the nomenclature of my young manhood, that my friends and contemporaries,
appropriating it from Dr. Du Bois, fought to set in place, breaking into
libraries through the summer of ’68 and taking down the signs saying Negro
Literature and replacing them with signs saying “black literature”—the small
“b” on “black” is a very significant letter, an attempt to ironize and
de-transcendentalize the whole concept of race, to render it provisional and
contingent, a significance that many young people today, white and black, who
lackadaisically capitalize it, have lost track of), the concept of race
informed everything about me, so that it could surface—and did
surface—precisely at those moments of highest anxiety, a manifesting brought
about precisely by the white gaze, if you will, whenever it turned, discommoded
for whatever reason, in my direction. Some have asked if I perceived my
entrance into science fiction as a transgression.
Certainly not at the
entrance point, in any way. But it’s clear from my story, I hope (and I have
told many others about that fraught evening), transgression inheres, however
unarticulated, in every aspect of the black writer’s career in America. That it
emerged in such a charged moment is, if anything, only to be expected in such a
society as ours. How could it be otherwise?
A question that I am
asked nowhere near as frequently—and the recounting of tales such as the above
tends to obviate and, as it were, put to sleep—is the question: If that was the
first time you were aware of direct racism, when is the last time?
To live in the United
States as a black man or woman, the fact is the answer to that question is
rarely other than: A few hours ago, a few days, a few weeks . . . So, my
hypothetical interlocutor persists, when is the last time you were aware of
racism in the science fiction field per se. Well, I would have to say,
last weekend I just spent attending Readercon 10, a fine and rich convention of
concerned and alert people, a wonderful and stimulating convocation of high
level panels and quality programming, with, this year, almost a hundred
professionals, some dozen of whom were editors and the rest of whom were writers.
In the Dealers’ room was an Autograph Table
where, throughout the convention, pairs of writers were assigned an hour each
to make themselves available for book signing. The hours the writers would be
at the table was part of the program. At 12:30 on Saturday I came to sit down
just as Nalo Hopkinson came to join me.
Understand, on a
personal level, I could not be more delighted to be signing with Nalo. She is
charming, talented, and I think of her as a friend. We both enjoyed our hour
together. That is not in question. After our hour was up, however, and we went
and had some lunch together with her friend David, we both found ourselves more
amused than not that the two black American sf writers at Readercon, out of
nearly eighty professionals, had ended up at the autograph table in the same
hour. Let me repeat: I don’t think you can have racism as a positive system
until you have that socio-economic support suggested by that (rather arbitrary)
twenty percent/eighty percent proportion. But what racism as a system does is
isolate and segregate the people of one race, or group, or ethnos from another.
As a system it can be fueled by chance as much as by hostility or by the best
of intentions. (“I thought they would be more comfortable together. I thought
they would want to be with each other . . .”) And certainly one of its
strongest manifestations is as a socio-visual system in which people become
used to always seeing blacks with other blacks and so—because people are used
to it—being uncomfortable whenever they see blacks mixed in, at whatever
proportion, with whites.
My friend of a
decade’s standing, Eric Van, had charge at this year’s Readercon of the
programming the coffee klatches, readings, and autograph sessions. One of the
goals—facilitated by computer—was not only to assign the visiting writers to
the panels they wanted to be on, but to try, when possible, not to schedule
those panels when other panels the same writers wanted to hear were also
scheduled. This made some tight windows. I called Eric after the con, who
kindly pulled up grids and schedule sheets on his computer. “Well,” he said,
“lots of writers, of course, asked to sign together. But certainly neither you
nor Nalo did that. As I recall, Nalo had a particularly tight schedule. She
wasn’t arriving until late Friday night. Saturday at 12:30 was pretty much the
only time she could sign—so, of the two of you, she was scheduled first. When I
consulted the grid, the first two names that came up who were free at the same
time were you and Jonathan Lethem. You came first in the alphabet—and so I put
you down. I remember looking at the two of you, you and Nalo, and saying: Well,
certainly there’s nothing wrong with that pairing. But the point is, I wasn’t
thinking along racial lines. I probably should have been more sensitive to the
possible racial implications—”
Let me reiterate:
Racism is a system. As such, it is fueled as much by chance as by hostile
intentions and equally the best intentions as well. It is whatever
systematically acclimates people, of all colors, to become comfortable with the
isolation and segregation of the races, on a visual, social, or economic
level—which in turn supports and is supported by socio-economic discrimination.
Because it is a system, however, I believe personal guilt is almost never the
proper response in such a situation. Certainly, personal guilt will never
replace a bit of well-founded systems analysis. And one does not have to be a
particularly inventive science fiction writer to see a time, when we are much
closer to that 20 percent division, where we black writers all hang out
together, sign our books together, have our separate tracks of programming, if
we don’t have our own segregated conventions, till we just never bother to show
up at yours because we make you uncomfortable and you don’t really want us; and
you make us feel the same way . . .
One fact that adds its
own shadowing to the discussion is the attention that has devolved on Octavia
Butler since her most deserved 1995 receipt of a MacArthur “genius” award. But
the interest has largely been articulated in terms of interest in
“African-American Science Fiction,” whether it be among the halls of MIT, where
Butler and I appeared last, or the University of Chicago, where we are
scheduled to appear together in a few months. Now Butler is a gracious,
intelligent, and wonderfully impressive writer. But if she were a jot less
great-hearted than she is, she might very well wonder: “Why, when you invite
me, do you always invite that guy, Delany?”
The fact is, while it
is always a personal pleasure to appear with her, Butler and I are very
different writers, interested in very different things. And because I am the
one who benefits by this highly artificial generalization of the literary
interest in Butler’s work into this in-many-ways-artificial interest in
African-American science fiction (I’m not the one who won the MacArthur, after
all), I think it’s incumbent upon me to be the one publicly to question it. And
while it provides generous honoraria for us both, I think that the nature of
the generalization (since we have an extraordinarily talented black woman sf
writer, why don’t we generalize that interest to all black sf writers, male and
female) has elements of both racism and sexism about it.
One other thing allows
me to question it in this manner. When, last year, there was an
African-American Science Fiction Conference at Clark-Atlanta University, where,
with Steve Barnes and Tanananarive Due, Butler and I met with each other,
talked and exchanged conversation and ideas, spoke and interacted with the
university students and teachers and the other writers in that historic black
university, all of us present had the kind of rich and lively experience that
was much more likely to forge common interests and that, indeed, at a later
date could easily leave shared themes in our subsequent work. This aware and
vital meeting to respond specifically to black youth in Atlanta is not,
however, what usually occurs at an academic presentation in a largely white
University doing an evening on African-American sf. Butler and I, born and
raised on opposite sides of the country, half a dozen years apart, share many
of the experiences of racial exclusion and the familial and social responses to
that exclusion which constitute a race. But as long a racism functions as a
system, it is still fueled from aspects of the perfectly laudable desires of
interested whites to observe this thing, however dubious its reality, that
exists largely by means of its having been named: African-American science
fiction.
To pose a comparison
of some heft:
In the days of
cyberpunk, I was often cited by both the writers involved and the critics
writing about them as an influence. As a critic, several times I wrote about
the cyberpunk writers. And Bill Gibson wrote a gracious and appreciative
introduction to the 1996 reprint of my novel Dhalgren. Thus you might
think that there were a fair number of reasons for me to appear on panels with
those writers or to be involved in programs with them. With all the attention
that has come on her in the last years, Butler has been careful (and accurate)
in not claiming that I am any sort of influence on her. I have never written
specifically about her work. Nor, as far as I know, has she ever mentioned me
in print.
Nevertheless:
Throughout all of cyberpunk’s active history, I only recall being asked to sit
on one cyberpunk panel with Bill, and that was largely a media-focused event at
the Kennedy Center. In the last ten years, however, I have been invited to
appear with Octavia at least six times, with another appearance scheduled in a
few months and a joint interview with the both of us scheduled for a national
magazine. All the comparison points out is the pure and unmitigated strength of
the discourse of race in our country vis-Ã -vis any other. In a society such as
ours, the discourse of race is so involved and embraided with the discourse of
racism that I would defy anyone ultimately and authoritatively to distinguish
them in any absolute manner once and for all.
Well, then, how does
one combat racism in science fiction, even in such a nascent form as it might
be fibrillating, here and there. The best way is to build a certain social
vigilance into the system—and that means into conventions such as Readercon:
Certainly racism in its current and sometimes difficult form becomes a good
topic for panels. Because race is a touchy subject, in situations such as the
above mentioned Readercon autographing session where chance and propinquity
alone threw blacks together, you simply ask: Is this all right, or are there
other people that, in this case, you would rather be paired with for whatever
reason—even if that reason is only for breaking up the appearance of possible
racism; since the appearance of possible racism can be just as much a factor in
reproducing and promoting racism as anything else: Racism is as much about
accustoming people to becoming used to certain racial configurations so that
they are specifically not used to others, as it is about anything else. Indeed,
we have to remember that what we are combatting is called prejudice: prejudice
is pre-judgment—in this case, the prejudgment that the way things just happen
to fall out are “all right,” when there well may be reasons for setting them up
otherwise. Editors and writers need to be alerted to the socio-economic
pressure on such gathering social groups to reproduce inside a new system by
the virtue of “outside pressures.” Because we still live in a racist society,
the only way to combat it in any systematic way is to establish—and repeatedly
revamp—anti-racist institutions and traditions. That means actively encouraging
the attendance of nonwhite readers and writers at conventions. It means
actively presenting nonwhite writers with a forum to discuss precisely these
problems in the con programming. (It seems absurd to have to point out that
racism is by no means exhausted simply by black/white differences: indeed, one
might argue that it is only touched on here.) And it means encouraging dialogue
among, and encouraging intermixing with, the many sorts of writers who make up
the sf community.
It means supporting
those traditions.
I’ve already started
discussing this with Eric. I will be going on to speak about it with the next
year’s programmers.
