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 undersigned, respectfully request that NASA and he Goodard Institute of Space Studies refrain from including unproven remarks in public releases and websites.” What do the “unproven remarks” refer to? The undersigned was against “Global warming and catastrophic forecasts.”
By identifying Mr. Bolden with global warning, the ex-NASA scientists are able to both dismiss Bolden as an Affirmative Action hire and as an enemy of global warming theories.
In his story, Bradbury predicted this kind of argument too.
Just before the Blacks head for the space ship to Mars, the banks of the Mississippi overflow; and a river flows down the center of town. He draws graphic metaphor of the tide of black people surging towards the space ships, the “levee” breaking, and the “black, warm waters descended and engulfed the town.”
Samuel Teece wouldn’t believe it. ‘Why, hell, where’d they get the transportation? How they goin’ to get to Mars?’
‘Rockets,’ said Grandpa Quartermain.
‘…Where’d they get rockets?”
“Saved their money and built them.”
Apparently this is what the Obama administration did, too. Because of the budget crisis and the grounding of the shuttle program, Obama was forced to dig deeper into his cultural resources. By appointing a man qualified to do the exceptional task- and to do without congressional funds.
But the NASA-naysayers were just as negative about Obama and Bolden. At the end of the letter, under a picture of Charles Bolden was the caption, “Don’t expect much for him.”
Yet a few months later, the world was praising Bolden for his brilliant Mars landing.
“What you gonna name [the space ship],” Teese yelled to one of the black boys headed to the ship, “Elijah and the Chariot, The Big Wheel and the Little Wheel, Swing Low and Sweet Chariot? Faith, Hope and Charity, eh?”
He could have added “Curiosity.”
Although not known for his progressive politics, Bradbury, one the greatest science fiction writers of the century, knew how deeply American racism went. He knew the origins of the feelings that whites had about 