Friday Discussion: Prejudice Free Worlds

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Bigotry, prejudice and privilege saturate our society. Sometimes it’s big and flashy, screamed hatred and slurs, violence, blatant discrimination and exclusion. Sometimes it’s more subtle and insidious - endless micro-aggressions and assumptions that so often stigmatise, ‘other’, exclude and demean marginalised people every day. And all too often it’s inherently structural, our law, our culture, our entire society has been built on a foundation of prejudiced assumption that make merely navigating in daily life a trial.

It’s no surprise then, given this constant barrage, that when it comes to fiction some authors strive to create worlds where these prejudices do not exist. After all, if you’ve got a world where vampires, werewolves, witches et al actually exist, then why shouldn’t it also be a world where prejudice doesn’t?

This is a point we’ve made repeatedly before - a fictional world doesn’t HAVE to be a certain way. No author is forced to perpetuate the same bigoted tropes from the real world into a fictional setting. Regardless of what innumerable Game of Thrones fans think, it is not more realistic to have a setting with dragons or an economy where sex worker and soldier are the only professions than it is to have POC in Westeros or women who are not raped.

So your world doesn’t have to contain prejudice (but nor is containing prejudice inherently wrong) and this sounds like a wonderful way to avoid all kinds of pain for reader and author alike which is a definite plus. But all too often the implementation is lacking particularly since too many don’t stop to think about what an entirely prejudice free world looks like

Take the far future where mankind has either evolved past racism or have devolved to a level where racism is the least of their worries. What would a future without racial prejudice look like? Where every race is truly equal in opportunity (even if that opportunity is to be scabbling a subsistence living in the irradiated ruins of the future)?

Well, while it’s hard to track world population by race (because it’s a somewhat nebulous concept - though it is tracked by ethnicity), on a global scale it’s clear that White people are most certainly not the majority (Han Chinese people alone make up for 18% of the global population and the next two largest ethnicities are also non-white) and when we look at demographic changes, White people are going to become even less prevalent in the future, not more (as many frothing racist screaming in despair and horror).

Out by Laura Preble

I was extremely wary about picking up this book. I have yet to read a discrimiflip novel that worked and didn’t end up being really appropriative and offensive. I find it doubtful they can work due to the inherent nature of making minorities the evil perpetrators of the very crimes committed against them. Still, I’m told it is possible, people assured me it was possible, so I picked up this book when it was released to see if it actually managed it.

So we have the story of Chris. A straight boy living in a world where, it seems, just about everyone is gay. Being straight is considered sick and wrong, condemned by both the church and the state (which are closely entwined). He tries to navigate this discrimination, as the son of a minister, and try to find freedom with the woman he loves.

And no, this discrimiflip did not manage it. Not even close. In fact, I’m sorely tempted to put a trigger warning for homophobia simply for having to discuss the contents of this book.

The author has appropriated every aspect of homophobic oppression imaginable. We have child bullying, we have demeaning dehumanisation from the pulpit, we have a horrific description of conversion therapy, we have chemical castration; we even have concentration camps, actual concentration camps.

All of these are extreme examples of oppression that have constantly been used to persecute and destroy gay people and they’re all used in this book – often graphically – but flipped. The victims of this torture and even this genocide are now made the villains. Those who inflicted them are now the victims. It is unbelievably offensive and enraging to see these despicable crimes that were – and continue to be – inflicted on gay people depicted with gay people as the perpetrators and straight people as the innocent victims. Even some of the basic language of anti-gay oppression have been callously appropriated by this straight author: we even have straight people being called “queer”. The book's even called "Out"! There really is no limits to the appropriation in this book and the extent to which gay people are presented as inflicting exactly the same cruel persecutions that, in reality, gay people have endured and died from.

To take the history of gay persecution, to take all of these horrendous things that have been used to victimise gay people and then mangle them to make gay people the villains makes me choke with rage. I have no words to describe how offensive this is. I had to stop reading several times because the book was so painfully offensive to read I couldn't keep going

The actual depiction of someone living with a closeted sexuality is also ridiculously shallow, especially for a young person. Chris finds out he likes a girl (note: A girl. Not girls. Just the one twu luv that follows the endlessly dull love at first sight meme that I’d complain more about if it weren’t such a tiny problem compared to the gross offensiveness of this book), it’s a shocking discovery. Within the hour he seeks out his friend to tell her. No, really.

In this society where being straight is illegal and demonised universally from birth, he couldn’t even keep it a secret for an hour. In fact, he goes home and his sister – in this ultra gay-normative society – already knows he’s straight! She even has some subversive literature for him! Yes, within a day of realising he’s straight, he already has a support net in this overwhelmingly gay world where heterosexuality is constantly demonised from the highest echelons of government. As an extra bonus, he meets Carmen, his love interest and she tells him she is straight in their first ever conversation, in a public café no less. They’re complete strangers, straight people are tortured and killed with the full blessing of the theocratic government but she’s going to spill her secret. I boggle how it can even be called a secret if 5 minutes acquaintance are sufficient for the big reveal.