science and Blacks.
Even though black men may be the ones who bring us to Mars, the white scientist and journalists are still locked in the mind set of Samuel T. Teese.
The same ridicule that accompanied the white racism in the South is now deflected in the white’s interest in the “Mohawk!” The New media is as racist as the old media, and in some ways they are more so. Where the public would be informed about something significant, they focus on a trivial detail.
Bradbury never explained to the reader how Blacks developed and built the spaceship. He leaves it to your imagination–or your lack of imagination. In other words, when it came time for white NASA scientists to appreciate the contribution of Blacks to science, some of them had to look the other way.
In the story, when Grandpa turned to Mr. Teece and pointed to the spectacular scene of blacks entering the rockets, Mr. Teece could not look. He cannot bear to look, let go his prejudice that Blacks cannot know enough science to built a spaceship to Mars.
“I don’t want to look,” he said. He might have said, “Let me look at the guy with the Mohawk again!” In a comical rebuttal to the publicity accrued by this Mohawk flap, Obama quipped that he was thinking of getting a mohawk, too.
Whites still can’t believe that Blacks are capable of science.
This was precisely Bradbury’s point in his subtle, supple story. In fact, the key to the success of the mars landing was not money, but talent: the engineering, and Mr. Bolden is a master of engineering.
Yet Blacks students are not expose to engineering in the American education system. The class I teach at U C is full of African Americans learning about New Media and Digital technology. In the Engineering School where about 700 students are admitted–only three are African American. With my course, at least 25 students at U C will know about the contribution of African Americans have made to science.
In an article titled, “Race and Ethnicity in Science Fiction” researcher Elisabeth Anne Leonard has an illuminating insight into the Bradbury story. She sees it as showing “the way in which the whites define their existence through the lives of the blacks.”
One might suspect that the whites should be happy to see Blacks leave America, she concludes, but they are not. “One might imagine that a racist white would be glad to see the blacks leave the world, “ she wrote, “but racism depends on the presence of those it hates. He and his fellow whites depend upon the blacks not just economically but also as a way to identify themselves by what they are not.”
Indeed without “a black presence, Teece has very little left of himself.“ Without Obama and Bolden, whites wouldn’t be able to celebrate the great achievement.
To reiterate, Bradbury is writing not just about the imagined future, but also about the our present situation. Blacks don’t get the credit they deserve, but the attention of the public is directed to a white guy in a mohawk.
In a way, Blacks did get to Mars. We just didn’t notice it.