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 you 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 virulent battering from internal conflicts over expanding markets and 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 rebarbative 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 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 and 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 detranscendentalize the whole concept of race, to tender it provisional and contingent, a significance that many young people today, white and black, who lackadaisically capitalize it today, 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 accounting of tales such as the above tends to obviate and, as it were, put to sleep—is: 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 attended 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 were 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 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 socioeconomic 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.
At this year’s Readercon, my friend of a decade’s standing, Eric Van, had charge of 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 cour
se, 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—”
I reiterate: Racism is a system. As such, it is fueled as much by chance as by hostile intentions and equally by 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 socioeconomic 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 track 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 the 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 Tananarive 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 socially construct a race. But as long as racism functions as a system, it is still fueled by 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 cyberpunk 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 Gibson, 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-à-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 have to 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 prejudgment—in this case, the prejudgment that the ways 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 socioeconomic pressures on such social groups to reproduce the old system of racism inside new systems by 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.
Readercon is certainly as good a place as any, not to start but to continue.
WHY BLACKS SHOULD READ (AND WRITE) SCIENCE FICTION
Charles R. Saunders
(2000)
More than twenty years ago, I wrote a screed/rant/plea entitled “Why Blacks Don’t Read Science Fiction.” It was a rant and screed in the sense that i
t expressed my dissatisfaction with the endemic paucity of black characters and themes in a genre that purported to transcend convention and stereotype. And because I still enjoyed reading science fiction and fantasy despite that lack, it was a plea for inclusion—a plea clad in late-1970s remnants of the militancy of the sixties.
At that time, I was a dedicated fan of the genre: immersed in its strengths and weaknesses, attending conventions at which mine was often the only black face—although some attendees in costume painted their skin green or blue or polka-dot. Now, I’m more of a semi-detached observer, having retreated from fandom and greatly reduced my reading in the field. But I still read sf and fantasy, and in retrospect, even though I stand by what I wrote in the context of 1978, I think blacks should not only read in both genres, but write in them as well.
When I wrote “Why Blacks Don’t Read Science Fiction,” I believed most blacks shunned sf and fantasy because there was little for us to identify with in the content. And what little there was tended (with, of course, some exceptions) to conform to the negative stereotypes of blacks endemic to other literary genres and, indeed, other media. A literature that offered mainstream readers an escape route into the imagination and, at its best, a window to the future, could not bestow a similar experience for black and other minority readers.
For all those complaints, however, I still saw potential in sf. A few black writers were breaking into the field, and black themes were finding their way into the work of nonblack writers. At that time, I was engaged in a personal crusade to add black content to the genre with my own writing, which was fantasy rather than science fiction, and to bring more awareness of black issues to the forefront of the field in essays.
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