Tim Hsu

Earlier this year, Lupita Nyong'o was added to the cast of the upcoming Star Wars film, marking the second time that a black woman will appear in the franchise's 37-year history. Femi Taylor appeared in Return of the Jedi, but she wore green makeup and prosthetics, and she played Jabba's dancing slave.

It's strange to see the series only pass that milestone now. But Star Wars is far from the only mainstream science fiction work that has an unrealistic and sometimes telling concept of race. Blade Runner saw a slummy, undesirable world run by Asians. And Her, which took place in a future Los Angeles (though parts of the movie were actually shot in Shanghai), didn't really feature any people of color.

This infographic shows a bigger story:

Infographic by Lee & Low books (Lee & Low Books)

Science fiction is all about possibility. It has the freedom to create worlds where the cultural rules and norms we live with don't apply. But the genre also metaphorically explores stories about our history and our present. In the 1960s, for instance, Star Trek explored gender discrimination and race, while Battlestar Galactica tackled topics like civil rights, police states, and genocide 10 years ago.

And perhaps that's why the genre can be so frustrating. Despite all of this potential and all of this imagination, our mainstream cultural gatekeepers — the people choosing which movies get made and who gets cast in them — are still prone to ignoring non-white and female characters.

What is science fiction?

It seems likely the main reason we've had a lack of diversity in our science fiction stories is because of the way the genre has been defined.

Rob Latham, an English professor who's a part of the University of California — Riverside's Science and Technoculture studies program, says that the genre suffers from its narrow scope. Science fiction, many people believe, developed from pulp magazines in the 1930s. White men, many of whom were practicing scientists, were the authors for those magazines. Star Wars, Latham says, is an homage to those stories, which tend to be monolithic and dominated by white males.

The trouble with using what came out of these pulp magazines as the working definition of science fiction, which we do, is that it ignores rich storytelling that wasn't in those magazines. Stories that didn't fit this mold of science fiction weren't considered, and people of color and women told stories like that.

Latham believes science fiction existed outside of these magazines in books, other types of fiction, and even more mainstream magazines. W.E.B. Du Bois's apocalyptic story The Comet; George S. Schuyler's Black No More, a tale featuring a machine that could change someone's race; and Pauline Hopkins's Of One Blood are examples of science fiction stories appearing outside of pulp magazines.

"Once you've expanded it that way, there were a lot more women and a lot more people of color writing science fiction," Latham said.  "And people's interest in what science meant was also a lot more diverse." Latham and his colleagues won a $175,000 Sawyer Seminar grant in July to build on that idea and explore unacknowledged science fiction by people of color.

This hasn't always gone smoothly.

"What I hear all the time [from certain science fiction fans], is that you're bringing stuff that isn't really science fiction," Latham explained. "But I think if you define [science fiction] in a certain way that it privileges you, the kind of person you are in the world, there's a problem with that."

How non-white people and women have been depicted in science fiction

As the infographic above shows, there have been many times when non-white people haven't been depicted at all in science fiction and fantasy films. That's harder to get away with, considering the effects of globalization and the fact that around 36 percent (and rising) of Americans are minorities.

"My friend Ian Hagemann once said … that when he reads or watches science fiction that inexplicably has no people of color in it, he wonders when the race war happened in the story that killed the majority of the human race, and why the writer hasn't seen fit to mention it, " Nalo Hopkinson, a colleague of Latham's and an author, said.

Some people, possibly the same critics who are resistant to Latham's and Hopkinson's program, try to skirt the question by citing a "color-blind future" or a future where race doesn't matter. Latham and Hoopkinson don't buy that.

"The standard excuse in science fiction is that in the future, there won't be any racism or classism, or we won't have any races because we'll all interbreed and be, I dunno, beige," Hopkinson said. "Perhaps so, but so often, those are really excuses for lazy characterization that erases ethnocultural specificities and differences in experience. Plus, we've been interbreeding for millennia. It's a beautiful thing, but it hasn't yet created the perfect world."

"It's a way of ignoring and erasing the question," Latham added.

This isn't to say that non-white people are never in science fiction and in mainstream sci-fi movies. But that's still a learning process too. In series like Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon, Asian people (or white actors in yellow-face) are the villains, like Ming the Merciless:

Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek, which debuted in 1966, is still considered the ground-breaking standard for including characters like Sulu (George Takei) and Uhura (Nichelle Nichols) in its ensemble. But these characters weren't nearly as well developed as the three (white, male) leads, and there's also the problem of Uhura, who largely does secretarial work.

What Roddenberry did was bold and progressive for his time. Star Trek's vision of diversity may have tilted toward tokenism and chauvinism at times, but the real power of Roddenberry's vision of the future was that he fearlessly addressed the taboo of racial integration by making it the fundamental reality of humanity's future.

"Star Trek, despite all of its flaws, was different. Roddenberry's idea was to have a racially diverse crew," Latham said. "That's an attempt to broaden what it means for people of color to be in the future."

Roddenberry's idea created the foundation for subsequent Star Trek series featuring even more diverse casts. Though the current movie franchise has its questionable casting decisions (like Khan being played by Benedict Cumberbatch), characters like Uhura (now Zoe Saldana) and Sulu (John Cho) are featured prominently.

The genre's sometimes clunky depictions of non-white characters aren't usually done out of ill-will, Hopkinson explains. "In the publishing industry, there are more writers of color being published, and we're generally better at writing from our own experience," she said. "[That's] not to say that white writers can't write characters of color. Some very much can."

Some stories are offering diverse representation. The Hunger Games imagines a world where characters have different skin tones and characters are described as mixed race. Gravity features a female astronaut. Orphan Black is pushing the genre in interesting places. And David Mack, who writes Star Trek books, recently made news by defending his portrayal of a lesbian Vulcan love story.

Representation in mainstream science fiction has improved since Roddenberry's time, but it's still a work in progress.

Why non-white sci-fi matters

If science fiction is about depicting the future, and that future features only white people, then it sends a message to non-white audiences that there's no place for them in the future.

"It must seem to kids that 'I have no place in this future,'" Latham told me.

In a sense, this large, non-white audience for sci-fi has shown that the allure of the genre and its possibilities can outweigh its exclusionary history. Further, there are non-white writers who are pursuing filmmaking, producing, and writing careers in the genre, which is the most important solution to getting more non-white representation on screen. Having more non-white people making decisions — a theme that is true for any industry, really — means more opportunities for non-white characters on screen and non-white stories being told.

The team at UCR points to themes of  colonialism and racial struggle — something seen in author Octavia Butler's work and in pieces of Afrofuturism. Conquering or exploring a new world is a running theme in science fiction. Someone who is Native American or black, or someone who grew up in any country affected by waves of colonialism might have a different view than someone who has white, European descendants might.

"To the writers of the '30s and '40s, conquering a new world was a doctrine of manifest destiny," Latham said. "Conquering a new world means something different to people who were brought to the country in chains or were displaced or subject to genocide."

That's why Latham's study could prove so important. Examining non-white sci-fi writers and female writers opens up the possibility of new perspectives and adding depth to well-trodden stories. This also could inspire future writers of color and women to write themselves into the future.

Latham and his colleagues are hoping to study more of these voices when the grant goes into effect next fall.

The Charles Koch Institute — one of the nonprofit advocacy groups associated with the Republican/libertarian multimillionaire Koch brothers — is trying to start a conversation about the impact of prison on racial minorities.

Check this post the Institute is sponsoring on Facebook (screencapped from a phone):

The event the Kochs are promoting is a forum they're holding tomorrow night in Austin, Texas, called "How the Criminal Justice System Impacts Well-Being." The panel features the President of the Texas NAACP. They'll be livestreaming the event at the link.

Conservatives, libertarians, and Republicans, including the Kochs, have been involved in the movement for criminal justice reform; the director of Families Against Mandatory Minimums says that Charles' brother, David Koch, is a longtime supporter of the group. But it's bold that the Kochs are hosting a panel with an NAACP officer, and openly talking about the link between criminal justice and race.

In 1988, I. Beck introduced the notion of a zero-divisor graph of a commutative rings with $1$. There have been several generalizations in recent years. In particular, in 2007 J. Coykendall and J. Maney developed the irreducible divisor graph. Much work has been done on generalized factorization, especially $\tau$-factorization. The goal of this paper is to synthesize the notions of $\tau$-factorization and irreducible divisor graphs in domains. We will define a $\tau$-irreducible divisor graph for non-zero non-unit elements of a domain. We show that by studying $\tau$-irreducible divisor graphs, we find equivalent characterizations of several finite $\tau$-factorization properties.

I'm entering into the portion of the Postwar that deals with the early days of the Cold War. Terms like "evil" are overused, but it takes some mental gymnastics to watch Stalin bend Czechoslovakia, war with Tito, choke Bulgaria, pilfer Hungary and not construe the U.S.S.R as "an evil empire." If there's any problem with that phrase it's that it's redundant. I've yet to come across an empire that isn't "evil." Empires emerge from conquest, degradation, and mass existential violence. I don't know how you look at what the British did in Kenya, what the Belgians did in the Congo, what the French did in Algeria and conclude that empire is ever anything but "evil." 

But this shouldn't obscure the point. There's a long history of African-American communism that deserves a longer treatment than I offer here. Some of my heroes rank among these folks--Robeson and Du Bois immediately coming to mind. I was talking to my buddy William Jelani Cobb about this. Jelani did his doc researching black anti-communists. He pointed out that part of the attraction for people like Robeson was the fact that the Soviets had no colonies in Africa. 

But the U.S.S.R. was ultimately as much a colonizer, as much an imperial power,  as any other European power. The difference was that Russia colonized white people:

The Czech case is a particularly striking one. Before World War Two, the Czech regions of Bohemia and Moravia (already the industrial heartland of the Austro-Hungarian Empire before 1914) had a higher per capita output than France, specializing in leather goods, motor vehicles, high-tech arms manufacture and a broad range of luxury goods.

Measured by industrial skill levels, productivity, standard of living and share of foreign markets, pre-1938 Czechoslovakia was comparable to Belgium and well ahead of Austria and Italy. By 1956, Communist Czechoslovakia had not only fallen behind Austria, Belgiumand the rest of Western Europe, but was far less efficient and much poorer than it had been twenty years earlier. In 1938, per capita car ownership in Czechoslovakia and Austria was at similar levels; by 1960 the ratio was 1:3.

Even the products in which the country still had a competitive edge—notably small arms manufacture—no longer afforded Czechs any benefit, since they were constrained to direct their exports exclusively to their Soviet masters. As for the establishment of manufacturing mammoths like the Gottwald Steelworks in Ostrava, identical to steelworks in Poland, the German Democratic Republic, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria and the USSR, these represented for the Czechs not rapid industrialization but enforced backwardness (crash programs of industrialization based on the manufacture of steel were pursued in spite of Czechoslovakia’s very limited resources in iron ore).

Following the one-time start-up benefits from unprecedented growth in primary industries, the same was true for every other satellite state. By the mid-fifties, Soviet Eastern Europe was already beginning its steady decline into ‘planned’ obsolescence.

The U.S.S.R. extracted reparations from Hungary and made each of subservient nations trade with them first, not each other. At the center of it all was the pirate Stalin:

Stalin had emerged from his victory over Hitler far stronger even than before, basking in the reflected glory of ‘his’ Red Army, at home and abroad. The personality cult around the Soviet dictator, already well advanced before the war, now rose to its apogee. Popular Soviet documentaries on World War Two showed Stalin winning the war virtually single-handed, planning strategy and directing battles with not a general in sight. In almost every sphere of life, from dialectics to botany, Stalin was declared the supreme and unchallenged authority.

Soviet biologists were instructed to adopt the theories of the charlatan Lysenko, who promised Stalin undreamed-of agricultural improvements if his theories about the inheritability of acquired characteristics were officially adopted and applied to Soviet farming—as they were, to disastrous effect.50 On his 70th birthday in December 1949 Stalin’s image, picked out by searchlights hung from balloons, lit the night sky over the Kremlin. Poets outdid one another in singing the Leader’s praises—a 1951 couplet by the Latvian poet V. Lukss is representative:  

Like beautiful red yarn into our hearts we wove/Stalin, our brother and father, your name.  

This obsequious neo-Byzantine anointing of the despot, the attribution to him of near-magical powers, unfolded against a steadily darkening backdrop of tyranny and terror. In the last years of the war, under the cloak of Russian nationalism, Stalin expelled east to Siberia and Central Asia a variety of small nations from western and south-western border regions, the Caucasus in particular: Chechens, Ingush, Karachays, Nalkars, Kalmyks, Crimean Tatars and others, in the wake of the Volga Germans deported in 1941. This brutal treatment of small nations was hardly new—Poles and Balts had been exiled east by the hundreds of thousands between 1939 and 1941, Ukrainians in the 1930s and others before them, back to 1921.

More than anyone, Stalin is the most fascinating figure in the early chapters of Postwar. I can't get a handle on him. He bumbles constantly. When Stalin goes to subjugate Poland, he is crippled by the fact that he's purged an entire generation of Polish communists. He was caught totally by surprise when Hitler invaded. And yet somehow Stalin does not just hold on to power he increases his power.

The politics at work in this era of Central\Eastern Europe remind me of the politics at work during in the early 17th century. There's that same sense of chaos and shifting alliances. As history, it is totally gripping. I have argued, repeatedly, that white people have never done anything to black people they haven't done to themselves. You see this in the Stalin's empire--right down to the slave ships.

Judt is just now describing Stalin's anti-Semitism and the show trials orchestrated against Jewish communists. More on that soon. 

We find explicit subdivision rules for all special cubulated groups. A subdivision rule for a group produces a sequence of tilings on a sphere which encode all quasi-isometric information for a group. We show how these tilings detect properties such as growth, ends, divergence, etc. We include figures of several worked out examples.

TMZ It was nice to be some thousands of miles away when the verdict in the George Zimmerman trial came down. I confess to being about as skeptical of a guilty verdict as I was of the predictions of mass violence in response. But being back and having thought about this a bit, I think something needs to be pointed out. There is this horrible idea out there that we should bracket off murder; that Trayvon Martin was a victim of racism but Derrion Albert and Hadiya Pendleton were not. The thinking holds that black people are concerned about the violence done to them by people who aren't black, and forgiving of violence done to them by people who are. But Derrion Albert and Hadiya Pendleton are no less victims of racism than Trayvon Martin. The neighborhoods in which these two young people were killed are a model of segregation funded and implemented by private citizens, realtors, business interests, the city of Chicago, the state of Illinois and the federal government. This segregation is not a mistake but the desired outcome of racist social engineering. Beryl Satter's Family Properties helps us here: Restrictive covenants were introduced in the 1920s. By the 1940s, Chicago led the nation in their use. Racial deed restrictions covered approximately half of the city's residential neighborhoods. Together, the bombings, "neighborhood improvement associations," realtors' sales policies, and restrictive covenants helped create Chicago's first all-black ghetto on the city's South Side. As historian Allan H. Spear explains, the ghettoization of Chicago's blacks "was not the result chiefly of poverty; nor did Negroes cluster out of choice. The ghetto was primarily the product of white hostility..." The FHA embraced these biases. It collected detailed maps of the present and likely future location of African Americans, and used them to determine which neighborhoods would be denied mortgage insurance. Since banks and savings and loan institutions often relied upon FHA rating maps when deciding where to grant their mortgages, the FHA's appraisal policies meant that blacks were excluded by definition from most mortgage loans. The FHA's Underwriting Manual also praised restrictive covenants as "the surest protection against undesirable encroachment" of "inharmonious racial groups." The FHA did not simply recommend the use of restrictive covenants but often insisted upon them as a condition for granting mortgage insurance. Those black families that somehow overcame state-mandated segregation and attempted to leave the ghetto were greeted by "Improvement" organizations founded to resist "the invasion of white residence districts by the Negroes." The tactics endorsed by these improvement associations were nonviolent--until they weren't. Airport Homes, Cicero, Fernwood all testify to the fact that the borders of the ghetto were patrolled not just by government policy but by the willingness of individual white citizens to resort to violence. Policies have consequences. The hands that forged the American ghettoes are ours--and they are blood-stained. To claim that the ghettoes of Chicago, and all the violent deaths that flow from them, are the creation of white racism is not to make an overheated charge. It is to cite the historical record. It's not even history. Arnold Hirsch's Making The Second Ghetto opens with this chilling quote: Something is happening to lives and spirits that will never show up in the geat housing shortage of the late 40s. Something is happening to the children which migh not show up in our social record until 1970. Or 1975. That was the year that the term "black-on-black" crime was born. The phrase is a deceptive restating of basic truth--people tend to kill the people they live around. Black people are among the most hyper-segregated group in the country. The fact that black killers tend to kill other black people is not refutation of American racism, but the ultimate statement of American racism. Like so many other lost black boys, Trayvon Martin was killed close to home. He was killed by someone whom he lived around. His hoodie marked him, as surely as any gang color ever marked anyone. He was watched by George Zimmerman in the exact same way that I, and all my friends, were watched when we strayed into some other neighborhood. Indeed, one thinks of George Zimmerman's attitude and can't help but hear the moans of Kendrick Lamar ("Where your grandma stay, huh, my nigga?") And finally Martin was killed in a way that is very familiar to a lot of us: a sucker goes looking for trouble, finds it, and shoots his way out of an ass-kicking. There are no fair ones in America. Recent events have born this out. Here is George Zimmerman speeding through town. Here is George Zimmerman touring the company that allowed him to take your son's life. Smile for the cameras, George. Here is George Zimmerman menacing his wife and then smashing the evidence. George Zimmerman claims his wife's father attacked him. Someone is always attacking George Zimmerman. Black people see the relationship here. Jesse Jackson marched for Trayvon Martin--and then he marched for Hadiya Pendleton. It's worth listening to Hadiya Pendleton's mother, Cleopatra Cowley-Pendleton: "I have a son that I am raising in this environment, under these circumstances. So now I have a youth that is not at risk because I'm raising him with certain value systems, but he is at risk of being viewed a certain kind of way," Cowley-Pendleton told MSNBC during an anti-gun violence summit in Chicago on Friday, sponsored by the Congressional Black Caucus. "I have to do things and be boisterous to protect him before he gets to where he's going to go independently, walking down a street on his own with certain privileges and being misidentified as someone else. Right now he's 11. The Martins have already suffered and that's an awareness for the rest of us." That would be Trayvon Martin's parents. The story was written by Trymaine Lee, a black man, and a stellar journalist, who reported on Trayvon Martin and Hadiya Pendleton. There's no separation for us. We can't afford it. We've been talking about the plague of modern gun violence since the days of "Self-Destruction." People who are late to this, who do not know this, or who ignore this, are not filled with a sudden concern for Hadiya Pendleton so much as a sudden need to change the subject.