Today SF Signal put up a post titled, “Where Are All The People of Color in Sci-Fi/Fantasy?”. It’s a crappy title, but a decent article that has some good stats on just how badly people of color are excluded by the genre publishing industry.
The comments, on the other hand, produced an absolute classic of pompous, ignorant nonsense. If you don’t want to click through and read the whole thing, here’s a taster:
Based on what I’ve said, other cultures/races, seem primitive as they tend to be “grounded†on Earth. That mixed with the tendency for many ethnic groups being associated with crime, low tech living, and a lack of interesting folk history makes white people dismiss their existence and see it as a “primitive†remnant of Earth. Thus, they don’t tend to have evolved into the future in countless stories, but likely died out somewhere in the distant past.
You could probably write an entire thesis on racism just based on that comment, but I don’t have time to do that. I’m even going to be generous and note that lots of Americans are ignorant about countries beyond their borders, so the commenter isn’t that unusual in that respect. But he claims to be an expert on African-American culture, and he claims that African-American people have no interest in science fiction or fantasy.
I rest my case.
Not very sophisticated SF, but in E. C. Tubb’s Dumarest Saga series, our galaxy is inhabited by descendants of Earth humans pretty much, and a subgroup described as ‘ebon’ and named Hausas IIRC, were traders and reputed to be fair-minded, conducting their transactions with integrity.
-Jim
Seeing Sun Ra and his Arkestra was unforgettable, no one who did could miss his interest in science fiction. How did the pompous snail explain writers like Delany and Butler to name two of the most obvious (definitely a rhetorical question)? People can be so full of slug slime.