Blog Post 12
And by presenting racism as an insanity that burned itself out, or as the obvious folly of the ignorant and impoverished who would be left behind by the genre’s brave new futures, sf avoids confronting the structures of racism and its own complicity in them. (p. 180)
This small quote is packed full of meaning. People present racism as something that is burned out. Once Afrofuturism is expressed in sf, then some ignorant people who choose not to see and read or watch this new future and/or futures. So sf just in general tries to avoid even confronting the racism and all the complicity.
There are plenty of examples that represent this idea. To begin, 500 Women Scientists Leadership’s article “Silence Is Never Neutral; Neither Is Science” addresses how scientific “progress” is built on racism. They say “The pervasive silence on racism across science is actively discouraged and where Black, Latino/a and Indigenous scientists cannot bring their whole selves to their work. It also means science may not even be asking the right questions in the first place.” One more example from this article would be where they explained how if scientists don’t “explicitly say #BlackLivesMatter, if they don’t speak up on justice and social issues, they risk overlooking solutions, discarding talent, and perpetuating toxic power dynamics.”
Another great article to talk about is White Supremacy Culture by Tema Okun. A good word to start with is defensiveness. Bringing this genre’s brave new futures, people would become defensive. This article explains defensiveness as “people respond to new or challenging ideas with defensiveness, making it very difficult to raise these ideas.” Okun also says “White people spend energy defending against charges of racism instead of examining how racism might actually be happening.” Another word/phrase of this article would be “fear of open conflict.” This article says this means “people in power are scared of expressed conflict and try to ignore it or run from it.” When an issue comes up that may be out of comfort to talk about, their natural response is blame. “Blame the person for raising the issue rather than to look at the issue which is actually causing the problem.”
The feminist Standpoint Theory is also a good one to help explain this quote. Feminist standpoint theory is a theory that “feminist social science should be practiced from a standpoint of women or particular groups of women, as some scholars say that they are better equipped to understand some aspects of the world.” This is a good one because this also address a conflict that people don’t want to address, although it has gotten better. People feel like women are not “smart” enough or even “liable” enough because of too much emotion. When you get into Black people not being expressed in sf this also relates. People don’t want to “dip their toes in” and try something different that can and will change everything. Just because of the people’s ignorance this cannot stop the changes that need to be made (and even some that are happening).
