The writers of the science fiction TV show The Expanse, which is enjoying a spectacular third season, though it was not renewed for a fourth season at Syfy—but might be “revived by Amazon“—could learn an important lesson about race from a brief scene in HBO’s Fahrenheit 451, which is based on the 1953 novel by Ray Bradbury, and was written and directed by Iranian-American Ramin Bahrani. But before explaining this lesson, I must first point out that Fahrenheit 451 constitutes the third film in what I call Bahrani’s ‘White America Trilogy.’
Bahrani’s first films where mostly about American immigrants: South Asian (Push Cart Man), Latinos (Chop Shop), a black African (Goodbye Solo). But in 2012, he started a fascinating series of films focused on white America. The first, At Any Price, concerned rural whites and the exploitation of big agriculture. The second, 99 Homes, concerned suburban whites in the middle of the housing crisis that followed the crash of 2008. Fahrenheit 451 is about urban whites in the Trump era of “fake news” and the “criminal deep state.” But the film also has a moment that clearly explains what makes the silence about race in The Expanse so bizarre and even frustrating (and possibly dangerous).
It happens when a black man, Michael B. Jordan—who, for a living, burns books and computer servers that contain literature—and his white boss, played by Michael Shannon, enter a room filled with books owned by an elderly white woman. As the firemen (and they are all men) wait for the media to arrive and film the burning of her books, the white boss explains to the young black man why books are so bad. They contain lots of things that are best forgotten, such as racism.
“Huck Finn, and his nigger friend?” says the white boss as he holds a copy of Mark Twain’s 19th century novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. “The whites knew that you blacks were offended so what did we do? We burned it.” When the white boss, who does not consider himself white, says “nigger,” the camera lands on the black fireman’s face. The slur goes right through it like a ghost through a wall. He does not understand what it means. What is the white boss talking about? Nigger? The reason why the black fireman can’t recognize the word that denigrated blackness for four centuries is because the US government is destroying huge sections of its past with fire.
It is this clearing with flamethrowers, the great equalizer, that has made the black man’s society post-racial. “Your grandchildren will not even understand what a book is,” says the white boss after thumbing Mein Kampf. Only the future will exist. The masters of this world, which has a white man as its leader (Martin Donovan—a major star in the cinema of Hal Hartley), have concluded that “equality by fire” will make plebeians happier, more productive, and easier to control. The film is set in Cleveland.
So, we know why Fahrenheit 451‘s society is post-racial; but what about The Expanse‘s?
How did the memory of 500 years of racial and colonial oppression vanish? Did everyone finally get over it and move on? The TV show indicates that the humans of the future were transformed, step by step, by the soul-enlightening action of humanist progress. Finally, racism expired, and the only thing left was undiluted class antagonism. And the masters in The Expanse‘s well-built world diffused class tensions (on Earth at least) with universal basic income. Fine.
But let’s think about this for a minute. Which story is more believable? That the condition of absolute post-raciality was reached by the enlightened path of humanist universalism? Or by a catastrophe similar to that which combined the burning of books, servers, and art with the mass imprisonment and elimination of those who refused not to “remember the days of slavery.”? History tells us something like Fahrenheit 451 happened in The Expanse‘s past.
But how can we be certain that the extinction of a racial society was caused by violence and destruction? Because of what we see in the world that we live now: the reliance of racism.
This week, as everyone was glued to the Trump Show, the US Supreme Court ruled “that workers may not band together to challenge violations of federal labor laws.” This was a huge blow to “workers’ rights.” This ruling is so raw, one would expect it to upset and unite almost all of the members of the US’s 99 percent. But it did not. Further more, how were the masters of our world able to pull off such a butt-naked attack on the middle and working classes? Because of racism.
There is no way Trump would have been elected (and still be in office) without the deep resources of white American racism. The hatred of all that is not white elected him, and he made Neil Gorsuch a Justice. Indeed, the Senators who blocked Obama from nominating a judge for the seat left empty by Antonin Scalia’s death were supported by a base with feelings that continue to be structured by the US’s racial history. This fact is not controversial. In fact, the celebrated French economist Thomas Piketty points out in a new and very important paper, “Brahmin Left vs Merchant Right: Rising Inequality & the Changing Structure of Political Conflict” (PDF), that the US’s entire welfare system, when compared to Europe’s, is stunted because of “racism and anti-Blacks attitudes.”
Piketty writes:
In particular, racial issues are the prime candidate explanation as to why the Democrats gradually lost a large part of the working class White voters after the Civil Rights movement (especially in the South), thereby contributing to weaken and eventually dismantle the Democratic New-Deal coalition.46 In effect, racial diversity and racial conflict have made it more complicated to keep the poor Blacks and the poor Whites in the same coalition. This can contribute to explain the transition away from the “class-based” party system of the 1950s-1960s toward the “multiple-elite” party system of the 2000s-2010s.
If racism is still extremely useful for the oppression of an entire working class in the final years of the second decade of the 21st century—over 150 years after the Emancipation Proclamation—how is it possible that it vanished 150 or so years from now, the time in which The Expanse is set? An extinction level event like one that made the dinosaurs history must have hit and vaporized American racism in the TV show’s past.
