Understanding whiteness part 24: What ifs, real dystopias, Chris Kaba, and the danger of stereotypes
What if?
A great way of starting a story is by asking ‘What if?’ It’s the first imaginative step towards conceiving a new reality in which a story can take place, opening doors of exploration. Any story can be reduced to this initial, inciting question. For example:
What if the children of two warring families fell in love?
What if toys could talk to each other?
What if there was a world of wizards where you had to go to wizard school?
Science-fiction is a genre of literature that lends itself to tall tales of the technological variety. The ‘What Ifs’ in science fiction often adopt a negative slant:
What if robots became clever enough to take over the world?
What if time travel took a scientist into a future where humanity had evolved into two distinct species?
What pollution made the earth uninhabitable and humanity had to evacuate into deep space?
That kind of thing. This is where the concept of dystopia comes from, coined in 1868 by the English philosopher John Stuart Mills, meaning ‘a bad place’, or an opposite to utopia; an imagined perfect world.
Welcome to dystopia
People are psychologically drawn to things going wrong. We find the disruption of normality fascinating and exciting. It’s why we laugh at jokes, humour being a disruption of expected outcomes that exhilarates the spirit, resulting in explosions of relief called ‘laughter’. It’s also why we can’t look away from the news, no matter how awful the narratives get. We have a compulsion to assess danger, witness peril and see how bad it can get before it (maybe) gets better. Fundamentally, that’s what a story gives us, and we can’t easily turn away.
Dystopias work by immersing us into a whole world gone terribly wrong. These are stories where the worst case scenario has fully happened, leaving a nightmare reality simmering with our deepest fears. George Orwell’s 1984 is one classic example, detailing a world in which Europe is at constant war, Britain has been reduced to ‘Airstrip One’ and a fascist government exercises a vice-like grip of surveillance and totalitarian control. In this world, even your very thoughts are subject to being ‘policed’ and any deviation from the state is met with brutal, unspeakable suppression. Another famous example is The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood’s 1985 dystopian novel detailing a world in which a totalitarian patriarchal state called Gilead has overthrown the US government, leading to the complete suppression of female autonomy, up to and including their reproductive rights. ‘Handmaids’ are the title given to women who are required, by law, to produce children for male ‘commanders’.
Of course, the potency of dystopias such as these lay in their proximity to the very real world that we inhabit - the reflective shards of reality reminding us how close we are to the nightmare. 1984 took its title from an inversion of 1948, with Orwell critiquing European society as it had evolved after two World Wars. Similarly, Atwood’s novel is an interrogation of Christian-patriarchal state control and the status of women in this context. Naturally, its relevance endures as western society continues to struggle with its own sexist riverbeds, hence the huge success of the 2016 TV reboot.
A living nightmare?
One of the biggest acts of deception that white supremacy has managed to achieve is in convincing successive generations that we are not living a dystopian world. When you look at the facts of racism as played out since the 17th century, there really isn’t any other way to describe it. The ‘What Ifs’ that have led to our current lived reality are horrifying:
What if humanity was divided into binary opposites in order for one group to physically and economically exploit the other?
What if the continent of Africa was decimated in the 1880s, with divisions that were then written into law?
What if racism was embedded in the very foundations of modern society, its structures, and various institutions?
Above and below
It isn’t just the pervasive horror of modern racism that makes it so dystopian. Another key feature of the genre is a division between two groups; an above the line group who are dominant but corrupt, and a below the linegroup who are subjugated but, morally, far more pure. Every dystopian story includes this distinction.
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