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Apologies if this has been linked before!
Anyway, found Kali Tal's "The Unbearable Whiteness of Being: African American Critical Theory and Cyberculture" while researching for school stuff, and thought this paragraph in particular resonated:
I'm reminded of a science fiction workshop I took in 1976. Ted Sturgeon, a great teacher, assigned us to write a science fiction story that answered the question, "Why don't black people write science fiction?" Ted was progressive, a good man. He asked the question honestly. We all wrote stories about how the day-to-day struggle for survival left black folks no time or energy to construct fantasies. I took Ted's word that there were no black science fiction writers. But Ted was wrong, and I was wrong, and it took me a long time to understand that white publishers and the white science fiction establishment, and white critics simply couldn't see African-American science fiction, just like the white guy who bumps into Ellison's Invisible Man can't see him, even as the Invisible Man beats the crap out of him. George Schuyler wrote science fiction back in the 1930s. Ralph Ellison wrote it in the 1950s. Sam Greenlee wrote it in the 1960s. Octavia Butler, Sam Delany, Toni Bambara, Toni Morrison, and Ishmael Reed have been writing it for the last couple of decades. The work is out there, but nobody talking about cyberspace pays the least bit of attention to it.
Full text
Anyway, found Kali Tal's "The Unbearable Whiteness of Being: African American Critical Theory and Cyberculture" while researching for school stuff, and thought this paragraph in particular resonated:
I'm reminded of a science fiction workshop I took in 1976. Ted Sturgeon, a great teacher, assigned us to write a science fiction story that answered the question, "Why don't black people write science fiction?" Ted was progressive, a good man. He asked the question honestly. We all wrote stories about how the day-to-day struggle for survival left black folks no time or energy to construct fantasies. I took Ted's word that there were no black science fiction writers. But Ted was wrong, and I was wrong, and it took me a long time to understand that white publishers and the white science fiction establishment, and white critics simply couldn't see African-American science fiction, just like the white guy who bumps into Ellison's Invisible Man can't see him, even as the Invisible Man beats the crap out of him. George Schuyler wrote science fiction back in the 1930s. Ralph Ellison wrote it in the 1950s. Sam Greenlee wrote it in the 1960s. Octavia Butler, Sam Delany, Toni Bambara, Toni Morrison, and Ishmael Reed have been writing it for the last couple of decades. The work is out there, but nobody talking about cyberspace pays the least bit of attention to it.
Full text