ALTERNATIVE PERSPECTIVE: “RACE” AS A LITERARY CONSTRUCT IN SCIENCE FICTION

Until recently, science fiction has been a field that many readers thought of as being written primarily for, and by, white men. A similar assumption is that race could not be a major focus of this literature, and thus not an area for analysis. Newer critical theories have brought questions of gender and ethnicity to the discussion of science fiction. Earlier writers, readers, and critics of science fiction, fantasy, and horror have been mostly Anglo-American, or “white.” Critical perception and public memory of the earlier decades of science fiction, especially those decades referred to as a genre’s golden age (the 1940s and perhaps the 1950s), is of “whiteness.” Until recently, “whiteness” was considered the normal situation, not needing to be marked by any specific terminology. Author Toni Morrison argues that the concept of “whiteness” depends on “blackness” to define it, that whiteness can only be understood in terms of its “opposite” in America.

In Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, Morrison encourages critics to reexamine earlier texts and analyze their interlocking constructions of “whiteness” and “blackness.” A later anthology, Criticism and the Color Line: Desegregating American Literary Studies, takes on the challenge by analyzing authors such as Mark Twain, Frederick Douglass, Fanny Fern, Anna Julia Cooper, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and other major literary figures, as well as slave narratives. As important as this anthology is, it neglects the marginalized literature of science fiction. However, questions about how “whiteness” and “blackness” define the American literary landscape are applicable to popular and genre fiction as well as to the more elite literatures.

The Illustrated Man appeared in 1951. While critics have noted that the book can be analyzed in the historical context of McCarthyism and the Cold War, a review of what was happening in the Civil Rights movement of this time can provide another kind of historical context that is not always considered in relation to science fiction because of the presumption of “whiteness” being the norm. The focus on the history of whites (Anglo-Europeans) and the major military/political conflicts of this period can be modified by a brief review of some of the important (but often invisible because not taught) civil rights events of the period. Some important events noted in Timelines of African American History: 500 Years of Black Achievement in 1950–51 are as follows:

Four thousand delegates attended the National Emergency Civil Rights Conference in Washington, D.C.;

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) filed suit to integrate elementary and secondary schools in districts in Kansas, South Carolina, Virginia, and Washington, D.C., eventually leading to the 1954 Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka;

The Supreme Court ruled against segregation in dining cars on trains (Henderson v. United States), and ordered law schools in Texas, Virginia, and Louisiana to admit African-American students;

For the first time, an African American won the Nobel Peace Prize (Ralph Bunche, for his work in Palestine);

For the first time, an African American won a Pulitzer Prize for literature (Gwendolyn Brooks, for Annie Allen);

African Americans in general continued a long-standing tradition of fighting for equal rights and access in such diverse areas as politics, religion, education, literacy, the military, and sports. (Cowan 215–19)

Morrison argues that one useful strategy for breaking down the national and literary assumptions that African Americans were not present (invisible) in politics, culture, and literature is studying the “Africanist” presence in American literature. By this she does not mean African Americans. Instead, Morrison uses the term to mean “the denotative and connotative blackness that African peoples have come to signify, as well as the entire range of views, assumptions, readings, and misreadings that accompany Eurocentric learning about these people” (Morrison 7). The assumptions that Morrison challenges are those made by literary scholars, not by the actual writers of literature. These scholars, Morrison charges, ignore the presence of African-American characters in the works of white (canonical) writers as completely as they ignore the works of African-American writers.

Three of Bradbury’s stories include African Americans (using the term “blacks”) as major characters: “The Big Black and White Game” (from The Golden Apples of the Sun), “Way in the Middle of the Air” (in earlier editions of The Martian Chronicles), and “The Other Foot” (from The Illustrated Man). Although the first two stories are told from the perspectives of white male characters, “The Other Foot” is told from the point of view of an African-American couple, Hattie and Willie Johnson.

The Johnsons are two of the original colonists on Mars in a future where the only colonists are “Negro” (the word used in the story). The only characters in the story are white and black, specifically American characters. Most of the people on Earth have died in a third world war; the (white) messenger in the rocket says, “I don’t think there are more than five hundred thousand people left in the world, all kinds and types” (35). The survivors have built one rocket to come ask the colonists to use their original rockets to return to Earth and rescue the survivors.

The first response of the men is to recreate Jim Crow segregation — separate water fountains, schools, housing — and to threaten the recreation of lynching. Women, and the children born since colonization, react differently, but it is only the messenger’s assurance that the towns and cities where the adults suffered oppression are completely destroyed that makes Willie and the other men rethink their original impulse. While the positive ending to the story may be considered overly idealistic by some readers, Bradbury’s creation of a future Mars settled entirely by African Americans is an image of “blackness,” of an Africanist presence in the future, that is striking for the time in which he wrote the story.

Wayne Johnson may be the only critic to acknowledge Bradbury’s stories dealing with minorities to any extent. In a chapter discussing Bradbury’s treatment of “Mexico, Ireland, Homosexuals…Blacks, China,” Johnson notes that “The Other Foot” is a role-reversal story common in science fiction (Johnson 133). Johnson praises the realistic story published in 1945, “The Big Black and White Game,” in which a twelve-year-old white boy watches a baseball game between white hotel guests and the black servants. “Way in the Middle of the Air,” set in the South in 2003 before the events of “The Other Foot,” describes whites watching all the town’s blacks leaving for a rocket to Mars. Johnson notes that the stories are dated, since the social and political changes taking place in 1950 make it unlikely that Jim Crow segregation could survive for another fifty years, until 2003. However, he notes the extent to which Bradbury’s stories are still unusual for science fiction (or other literature) of the time.

Questioning the way race and power are associated in American literature brings attention to other outsiders in Bradbury’s work: Ettil, the Martian character who comes reluctantly to Earth; the children who, as Lahna Diskin argues in “Bradbury on Children,” are presented as a separate race, hostile and antagonistic to their parents in “The Veldt” and “Zero Hour” (Diskin 152). These stories all present views of how minority populations or less powerful individuals experience possible futures described by Bradbury.

Fahrenheit 451 (1953):

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