Report from Planet Midnight

by Nalo Hopkinson

  Here are some of the other communications with which we’re having trouble:

  You say: “I’m not racist.”

  Primary translation: “I can wade through feces without getting any of it on me.”

  Secondary translation: “My shit don’t stink.”

  Our dilemma: To us, someone making this kind of delusional claim is in immediate need of the same healing treatments we offer to people who are convinced that they can fly. Such people are a danger to themselves and to others. And yet, the communications from your world are replete with this type of statement from people who do not seem to be under treatment of any kind, and few among you take any steps to limit the harm they do. We are forced to conclude that you must be as laissez-faire in your response to people who think they can fly. This can’t possibly be true, can it? Few of us are willing to visit a planet where we would clearly have to dodge plummeting bodies with every step. [FLINCH, LOOK UPWARDS]

  You say: “This story is a universal one.”

  Translation: “This story is very specifically about us, and after all, we’re the only ones who matter.”

  Our attempts at translating this one caused quite an argument in our ranks. Several feuds have started as a result, and one or two of them have gotten quite ugly. Because why would any sentient race say something that means its exact opposite? Well, one of our number did point out that we ourselves do occasionally display this regrettable habit. But that’s an us thing; you wouldn’t understand.

  You say: “That thing that you made doesn’t belong to you. It’s universal.”

  Now, this one is complicated. To make any sense of it at all, we had to proceed from statements of the previous type, in which “universal” means, approximately, “we own it.”

  Therefore, our attempt at a primary translation is this: “I like that thing you made, so I’m going to claim it’s mine. And I’m bigger than you, and nobody who counts really likes you anyway, so you can’t stop me.”

  Secondary translation, for brevity: “I think yours is prettier, so I’m just going to help myself to it.”

  You say: “Ethnic.”

  Primary translation: “Those quaint and somewhat primitive people over there.”

  Secondary translation: “Unnatural, abnormal, or, disgusting, as in your term ‘ethnic food.’”7

  You must understand that on our planet, everyone has an ethnicity. With cultural mixing, some of us have more than one. To us, “ethnic” means “the cultures of everyone.” Clearly we are missing something crucial, and “ethnic” is not the word you actually mean. We beg you to provide us with clarity.

  You say: “God, you people are so exotic.”

  Primary translation: “I, by the power vested in me as a representative of a dominant culture that needs never question its certainty that it is the centre of the universe, hereby dub you ‘the entertainment.’”

  Secondary translation: “God, you people are so ethnic.” One of our translators offered a tertiary translation: “Just take this money already and pose with my kid so I can take a picture.” But, between you and me, he’s somewhat, um, argumentative at the best of times.

  You say: “But I’m not the one who enslaved your people. That was my ancestors.”

  Primary translation: “I benefit from the inequities that were institutionalised before my birth, and I have no interest in doing anything to disrupt that comfortable state of affairs.”

  Secondary translation: “I feel really guilty about this stuff, but it’s bigger than me. I’m powerless”.

  Tertiary translation (from you-know-who): “Suck it up, bitches.”

  You say: “I don’t have any culture of my own; that’s why I want yours.”

  Primary translation: “I am wilfully unaware of or repulsed by how ubiquitous my rich and powerful culture has made itself. I’d really rather hang out with you guys.”

  Secondary translation: “I’m bored! This stuff is hard!”

  You say: “I don’t see race.”

  Primary translation: “If I keep very quiet, maybe you won’t see me and ask me to do any work.”

  Secondary translation: “I’m just a little black rain-cloud, hovering under the honey tree.”8

  You say: “Eventually this race stuff won’t matter, because we’ll all interbreed and become postracial.”

  Primary translation: “If I keep very quiet, maybe you won’t see me and ask me to do any work. Plus you might have sex with me.”

  Secondary translation: “I don’t want to do my homework! This stuff is hard! I want some cookies! Are we there yet?”

  You say: “My grandparents had a hard time too when they came to this country.”

  Primary translation: “Oh, shut up, already. Let’s talk about me some more.”

  Secondary translation: “La-la-la, I can’t hear you. That’s because I don’t see race.”

  You say: “But we can’t do that! That would be affirmative action!”

  Primary translation: “I don’t want to do something that’s proven to work, because then, well, it might work.”

  Oh, dear. The horse is coming back online. She’s putting up quite the struggle. Feisty little filly, ain’t she? So I’m going to have to take my leave of you, and before I could get my answers, too. I’m so sorry. You have my questions, though? You heard them? You can send the explanations out via the usual channels through which you’ve been sending us messages. I promise we’ll hear the …

  [BECOME NALO AGAIN]

  Wow. What happened there? Never mind, probably just nerves. [TAKE OFF T-SHIRT. UNDERNEATH IS A PLAIN BLACK DRESS. INDICATE T-SHIRT] Dunno where that ratty thing came from.

  Anyway, every few years I come up with another statement about what fantasy and science fiction do. I don’t discard my previous notions; I just add new ones for the consideration of myself and others. I don’t consider them definitive or all-encompassing, and I consider them at best only partially descriptive. But I find them fun to contemplate. The other day, our roommate told us that he’d asked his grandmother what technological invention had revolutionised her life. He thought she’d say the television, but she replied, “No, that thing destroyed my social life.”

  She told him that in fact it was the refrigerator that had changed her life. She said it freed up hours of her days, creating leisure time that allowed her to go and see a movie occasionally, and to hang out with friends.

  My roomie’s story left me thinking about just how labour-intensive it is to maintain a single human life, never mind a family of humans. We are a lot of work; really, to have any quality of life, we are more work than we can manage by ourselves.

  Time was, if you were rich, you had servants to do a lot of the drudge and administrative work for you. Hang on; that one hasn’t changed.

  If you weren’t rich, you got together in communities and shared what labour you could, and you had children to help with the rest. And that one hasn’t changed much, either.

  And if you weren’t the breeding kind, you found other ways to make yourself invaluable to the people in charge. I don’t suppose I’m saying anything about this that is news to this crowd, so please bear with me while I build my argument.

  So that’s a really glossed-over version of how the balance of labour and power has traditionally tended to play out. But as disempowered groups in society become more empowered, they begin to be able to make more choices about where they are going to place their labour efforts.

  We’ve made magic; we’ve created this near-intangible substance called “money” (it’s almost more an idea than a substance, really) which you can use—if you have enough of it—to compel or persuade others to do some of your work for you.

  In many countries of the world, women and men can now choose to have fewer children.

  Sometimes, people are able to choose to do blue-collar work over relatively unskilled labour; can get the education that allows them to do white-collar work, or even end up in the highly skilled labour pool, the one i
n which you find doctors and lawyers. If you manage to boost yourself there, you can afford to hire people to do a lot of your drudge work for you.

  But the necessity for somebody to do the hard labour to sustain human lives and communities hasn’t gone away. One way we make sure that there are always people to do that work is by deliberately keeping portions of our populations disenfranchised so that they have little choice but drudge work.

  We also create “labour-saving” devices. But as anyone who’s ever used a computer knows, in many ways, those just create new forms of work.

  We’re always imagining new ways around the dilemma. So it seems to me that one of the things that fantasy and science fiction do is to imaginatively address the core problem of who does the work.

  Science fiction looks at technological approaches to the problem, and at all the problems the solutions create. (You know, the discovery that a computer isn’t exactly a labour-saving device. Or the question of what happens when our machines become so complex that they are in effect sentient beings able to demand rights.)

  Fantasy looks at the idea of work. Instead of using technology, it uses magic. But both are labour-saving devices.

  And both fantasy and science fiction wrestle with the current and historical class inequities we maintain in order to have people to do the work.

  Especially in North America, class differences have historically become so entrenched that they are characterised as or conflated with cultural or racial differences.

  And as someone brilliant has said, “Race doesn’t exist, but it’ll kill ya.”

  So one might say that, at a very deep level, one of the things that fantasy and science fiction do is to use myth-making to examine and explore socioeconomically configured ethnoracial power imbalances.

  That’s why those of us who live in racialised bodies, and who love and read fantasy and science fiction because we relate so strongly to it, can get so bloody irritated at the level of sheer, wilful ignorance that members of the dominant community bring to the discourse about race and its real-life effects. The discussion is everywhere in the literature, but some of the people in this community can be so adamant about being blind to it, and so determined to derail, belittle, obstruct, and silence those of us for whom it can literally affect the quality of our lives!

  I’ve known for quite some time now that I’d end up on this podium, speaking on race in the fantastic. That was challenging enough, being a person of colour addressing a mostly white crowd in North America on the issue of race in anything. I was already anxious and exercised about the whole thing. But then, white people in this community instigated the disturbance in the Force that we’re now calling RaceFail ‘09, and what was already loaded became outright trigger-happy.

  I know that some of you already have your backs up because I just said that white people instigated it. So be it. I’m not going to get into defending that statement. I’m up here presumably because somebody in this organisation thinks I know what I’m talking about. My point is that writing this speech has been no doddle. I’ve been composing it in my mind for over a year now, through apprehension and anxiety. When it came down to the actual writing of it, I had to take frequent rage breaks.

  In the course of RaceFail ‘09, I have heard white people in the community who are angry at the anger displayed by people of colour in the community; people who say that we don’t deserve to be listened to if we can’t be polite. I couldn’t figure out why this statement felt wrongheaded to me, until I read a post by my colleague, writer Nora Jemisin, on RaceFail. She pointed out that discussions of race in this community have been happening, politely, for decades. And though there has been change, it has been minimal. When we people of colour started to blow up, suddenly there were more of you paying attention. That’s the thing. I’ve said that when you step on my foot once or twice, I might politely ask you to get off it. But by the thousandth time you do it, the excuse of “I didn’t see you there” starts to sound a hell of a lot like, “I don’t care enough about you to pay attention.”

  The vehement response of people of colour to RaceFail got more people paying attention, both white and of colour. It showed us people of colour that we do have a certain strength of numbers, that there are more of us than the one or two visibly of colour people you’ll usually see at a convention. People of colour in this community have started publishing ventures together as a result of RaceFail. Some white people in the community began addressing the issue and began creating forums for discussion. Some of them held fast, even when they came under attack from all sides. A small handful of them had the guts to examine their own statements and actions, perceive where they had been racist, and admit it. Without saying that they were now afraid to go to conventions because of angry brown people (in my experience, the wrath of the white majority is much more dangerous), without name-calling, baiting, or (black!)listing, and without deleting their whole blog right after posting an apology on it.

  Some of you will recognise yourselves or friends of yours, or, hell, friends of mine in the actions I’m describing. It doesn’t necessarily mean that I hate these people. Believe it or not, my default is towards friendliness. People make mistakes. People say things they haven’t thought through. People do things they later regret. People hurt other people. People propagate systemic inequities because they don’t understand or care how the system works. I know that I do all those things. I’m learning that it’s what you do after you make the mistake that counts. The people who took their courage into their own hands and apologised probably discovered that they didn’t die from it. In fact, maybe they felt a little better than before.

  More positive change that came out of RaceFail: fans of colour began daring to blog their experiences and their feelings about systemic racism in fantasy and science fiction (both in the literature and in the community) because they realised there was some backup. Fans of all stripes—and by that I mean “white people, too”—began challenging one another to read books by people of colour and review and discuss them, and they are by heaven doing it. Can I just say that I love me some fandom? Fandom is not exempt from the kind of wrongheadedness that humans display every day. But when fans conspire to do a good thing, it is most well done indeed, with verve and enthusiasm.

  The white fantasy and SF community has a culture of arrogance and entitlement that is infuriating. It became clear last year just how patronizing some of you could be, just how little you trusted us to have any insight into our own experience, an experience about which many of you are proud to say that you’re blind. If I’d ask one thing of you, it’d be to demonstrate your own impulses to equity and fairness—I know they’re there—by beginning from the assumption that people of colour probably know whereof we speak on issues of race and racism.

  It also became clear that many of the white people who are able to make that collegial leap of equality and respect are so mired in guilt and trying to take the fall for the rest of you that they are somewhat paralysed. That doesn’t help either, and I’m not sure what the solution is. I think you could stand to talk amongst yourselves about that one.

  One of the things I really wanted to say from this podium: people of colour in this community, I love allyou. I love allyou can’t done. I love how you stepped up to the plate in this past year; I kept feeling that love even when rage led to regrettable actions from some of you. I love how you looked out for each other; I love how you got energised. It’s bloody terrifying to be up on this podium right now, but you give me the courage to keep going, and for that, I thank you. When RaceFail first began to happen, I was dismayed. I didn’t think the Internet with its trolls and incendiaries was the place to have the discussion. I was wrong. Tempest Bradford, I was wrong, and I love you for holding strong, for keeping your sense of humour, and for speaking hard truths while being honest with and generous to pretty much everyone (by “everyone” I mean, “white folks, too”).

  There are so many names to be named of people who did the rig
ht thing through all this. I cannot name them all. Because I’ll tell you, people, I tired. Oonuh, I tired to rass. I get seen as one of the go-to people when it comes to race in this community. I spent most of the last two years homeless and couch-surfing with my partner, recovering from illness and fighting a still ongoing struggle to get enough to eat from day to day. I simply didn’t have the energy to take RaceFail on the way I wanted to. And when I began to hear from some of the more arrogantly obstructive white people in the community who were all of a sudden being friendly to me without acknowledging their actions and the reasons for their overtures, I saw red. Allyou think I just come off the banana boat or what? That is one of the oldest tricks in the book, and my mother didn’t raise no stupid children. I am not your tame negress. I mean, I know I’m published by a mainstream house and have achieved some recognition. I know I’m in the house, people. But house negroes get a bad rap for being inherently complicit with Massa. There were and are freedom fighters among them, too. I know that a large part of the reason I’m up here has to do with the brave actions of people on the inside, of all colours, at the IAFA. And I thank you all profusely for it.

  By the way, to the people in the community who have coined and are using the term “failfandom” to mock people of colour who dare to call you on your racism, that’s using derision, minimizing, and discrediting as tactics of suppressing dissent. And we see you coming a mile away.

  Sure I’m angry. I also love this community and this genre to pieces. This literature and some of the people in this community have kept me alive; in these past four years, sometimes literally so. That’s why, as much as I can, I keep fighting for and with the community to be the best it can be, to live up to its own visions of worlds in which no one is shut out. I’m very, very happy to be here, and happy to have been offered a podium from which to talk to this group of people on this topic. Any space created in this community for people of colour, and any space we can make for ourselves makes it possible for more of us to find it easier to be ourselves, to speak up; makes it easier to write, or possible to write at all. That is true when we do it for any disenfranchised group of people within the larger fantasy and science fiction community: women, disabled people, queer people, poor and working class people, chronically ill people, old people. I’d lay odds that everyone in this room experiences at least one of those disen-franchisements. Making room makes room for all of us. It makes the possibility for even more great writing in a field where we are already blessed with so much of it. How wonderful would that be? And come right down to it, the writing is why we are all here, nah true?