Ezekiel saw that wheel
Way up in the middle of the air
Now Ezekiel saw that wheel
Hurling way in the middle of the air
— traditional spiritual
On the day that Ray Bradbury died, June 5, I had assigned his story about Blacks landing on Mars to my class. I had waited years to teach “Way Up In the Middle of the Air,” part of the The Martian Chronicles (1950), since I read it back in the 60s.
It is a hilariously funny short story yet poignant depiction of racial prejudice. Set in the segregated South of 30, Blacks leaving American on a space ship that they had apparently designed, built, and launched. This story is a slice of the main theme of the Martian Chronicles a book that replays issues of colonialism and race relations through the human invasion of and eventual settlement on Mars.
The satire is focalized through the eyes of Samuel T. Teece, a white southerner, who cannot believe that Blacks had the scientific ability to sent a rocket to Mars.
“Did you hear about it?”
“The niggers, the niggers!!”
“What about ’em?”
“Them leaving, pulling you, going away…”
“Just a couple?”
“Where they going- Africa?”
“Yo mean the planet Mars?”
“I can’t believe it! Why are they doing this to us? How did they lean how they learn how to do that!”
Last week, when the Curiosity landed, I thought of the Bradbury story again. Yet the media was so enthralled by a white man wearing a mohawk that they completely ignored an ever more impressive fact: the leader of the expedition, Charles Bolden, was a Black man.
As equally impressive, if not more so, is the fact that another black man, President Obama, appointed him. When Obama appointed Bolden to be the first black man to lead NASA, he did it in his usual quiet, cool style.
Despite the haters, Bolden was clearly the best man for the job. When the Curiosity landed on Mars, he called him up and gave him a verbal high-five. “I just wanna say, that was quite something.”
I give my students the Bradbury story to read, explaining that there few examples of science fiction with blacks in them. In science fiction, which is about the future, there are no black people. One of the few writers to ever imagine blacks in the future, Bradbury actually imagines them creating the future. He also reveals, ipso facto, that there is as much white racism against that idea today, in 2012, as there was in 1950 when he published the story in a pulp magazine, The Other.
Science fiction is—and Bradbury had this right too–just another way to look at the present. He said so himself. “Science fiction pretends to look into the future,” he told the editor of Paris Review, “but it’s really looking at a reflection of what is already in front of us.”
What’s in front of us is Whites refusals to accept Black’s leadership in science.
“Science is always white,” Professor John Winslesky, author of “Science and Race,” told me in his office at Stanford University, “Blacks are not capable of science, and therefore there is a reluctance to believe they can do science.”
To celebrate the Mars Landing, NASA officials invited Nichelle Nichols, who played Uhura, on the original Star Trek to celebrate the event the event with young African American girls. This was an effort to bridge the gap between Blacks and science, to encourage young African American women to study science.
Yet little was made of the fact that it was a Black president who appointed another black man to run NASA.
When Obama appointed Charles Bolden, to lead the NASA, the reaction from some white scientists was as racist as Mr. Teese, the fictional character drawn by Bradbury fifty years ago. Blogger Dave Blount groaned: for him, Obama’s appointment had reduced the NASA–“one of the very few government agencies that have inspired pride in the American people–to a “pathetic farce devoted to advancing liberal ideology.”
Dave Blount printed a letter from “fifty top astronauts, scientists and engineers at NASA” signed calling Bolden a “perversion-promoting Affirmative Action clown appointed to head the agency [NASA].
The letter was addressed to “Dear Charlie.”
“Dear Charlie: We, the