Racial Dystopia
22nd January 2019
David Cole explores an interesting question.
The point is, there’s no shortage of writers who’ve envisioned a future in which sex, sexism, and other gender-related issues continue to exist.
But you know what’s conspicuously missing from the dystopia genre? Race. No one likes to write stories of a future world in which race is still a thing. Why? Why is it easy to believe that the battle of the sexes will continue after a nuclear war or a devastating plague, but racial tensions will somehow vanish? It’s the Lathe of Heavenprinciple, the belief that in the future we’ll still have every current social ill except racism (in The Lathe of Heaven, author Ursula Le Guin presents an ashy future in which all humans have become the color gray).