Sci-Fi Authors Don’t Always Get it Right

Robert Heinlein was one of the “big three” American science fiction writers of the 20th Century, along with Arthur C. Clark and Isaac Asimov.  Like so many others of my (baby-boomer) generation, I loved his Stranger in a Strange Land.

On many matters, however, I disagree with him; at left is one.

Until recently, elementary school text books made it clear to young readers that the United States was a “melting pot,” meaning that immigrants from all around the globe could come here looking for a better life.  Of course, that was not a guarantee that all would be immediately accepted–quite to the contrary.

Throughout the 19th and 20th Centuries, the United States saw an influx of emigres from Ireland, Italy, and Germany, not to mention China and elsewhere in Asia, none on of whom were warmly welcomed, and all of whom were exploited.

Of course, this followed  the enslavement and subsequent emancipation (250 years later) of the Africans, who faced and continue to deal with an enormity of hate that is still hard for us to believe possible.  When, in the 1920s, after a colored man in the Deep South had done something unacceptable, the local whites captured him and tortured him by dangling him by a rope hung over a branch of the largest tree in the town square, dropping him into and pulling him out of a fire that slowly roasted him to death, to the sheer delight of the onlookers.  Law enforcement (the mayor) said famously, “Do whatever you want to the nigger, just be damn sure you don’t harm that tree.”

Such horrors are now less commonplace. though we still have the occasional execution-by-torture of young black men by police, and, of course, broadspread discrimination and exclusion of Blacks for our wealth-creating apparatus.  That said, there is no doubt that things have improved greatly for the people of African descent who have been systemically mistreated, in one form or another, for more than 400 years.

Going back to Heinlein’s statement: It’s unrealistic to expect that any of these groups, certainly black people, are going to start thinking of themselves as “Americans” and forget about their heritage.