![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
Thoughts on Heinlein's handling of race in Farnham's freehold
One of the last substantive conversations I had with Morgan, before the pain got to be too much for her to converse even a little bit, was about Heinlein's Farnham's Freehold, his awful mess of an attempted anti-racism novel that manages to be incredibly racist. This is me trying to reconstruct the gist of that conversation, which might, in an alternative history, have become part of Morgan's Bibliogramma review of the novel.
Written in 1964, the novel begins with a nuclear war. Farnham, his family, his live in Negro servant, and his house guest for the evening have just enough warning to go into their fallout shelter. The last bomb to drop sends their shelter and them into another world, a green wilderness with the same landscape as their old home, but no people, no buildings. The nuclear survival novel suddenly turns into a frontier wilderness novel, and then turns into a time travel novel when they are finally found by other people and learn that they have been living in a wilderness area, and that this is the future, centuries after the war destroyed American and European civilization and left the planet in the hands of Arabic speaking, brown skinned Muslims. White people like themselves are slaves in this future world. The worst thing, Farnham discovers, is that some whites in this world are bred and slaughtered as food for their masters. The novel ends with Farnham and his new beloved (the house guest) sent by their masters back in time to just before the bombs drop. By driving like mad they manage to get out of the blast radius before the bombs drop, and set up house as after-the-bomb survivors in a new time line.
What Heinlein intended as an anti-racist "lets turn the tables and put make white people the enslaved minority" satire comes off instead as a "see how awful things would be if we gave any power to brown people" story that falls into the trap of depicting nonwhites as inherently bad, evil and cannibalistic. Farah Mendlesohn argues that it is the cannibalism that flips this book from an antiracism satire into a racist story.
Morgan had not read Mendlesohn's take. Talking with her the morning after she finished the novel, her first reaction was how, as with "Magic, Inc." and "Jerry Was a Man," once again a Heinlein story that dealt specifically with American racism vis a vis African Americans came off as incredibly tone deaf.
I think I was the one who first mentioned the problem of the character of Joe. Here's a Black man in America in the mid 60's who works as a live in servant, a job that was essentially extinct at that point. He's not given even a single line of dialogue about whether his relatives might be safe or not - every other character has family, backstory, a history - aside from knowing French, Joe seems to have been grown in a vat. He doesn't make any references to the civil right movement.
Morgan and I agreed that for a novel about racism written in 1963-64, to have an adult African American character *not* make any reference to the ongoing struggle for civil rights is a huge and glaring lacunae in the narrative, and this failure to make Joe a real character who is either engaged with current events of relevance to him as a Black man, or has a convincing reason to not be so engaged, is the real point where the novel starts to go wrong. This is even more true in light of Mendlesohn's appraisal that Joe is the novel's real protagonist, the active character who saves the day, the one approved of by cats, and Hugh Farnham is yet another Watson-like viewpoint-holding sidekick.
Mendlesohn talks about how Heinlein saw racism as colour prejudice, full stop - he had no concept of the systematic structures in institutions and in society that oppress and discriminate against non-white people. Instead. like a lot of other white moderates, he subscribed to the victim-blaming analysis (as found in Stanley Elkins' Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life, and as popularized after Farnham's Freehold was written by the Moynihan Report) that endemic Negro poverty and family instability were a legacy of slavery's warping of Negro culture, that there is such a thing as a slave mentality, and that mental outlook, rather than anything that white people needed to worry about changing in their institutions or culture, was the source of Negro immiseration.
In private letters (one to F.M. Busby, published in a preview of the limited, stupidly expensive Virginia Edition; another, very similar in content to Arthur George Smith exists in Heinlein's "story ideas" file, available for $2 from the Heinlein Archives), Heinlein expresses contempt for the Civil Rights movement, as well as for African and American Negro accomplishments and culture ("as one Negro friend pointed out to me; the lucky Negroes were the ones who were enslaved," and similar sentiments).
His (self declared) lack of colour prejudice enabled him to tell himself he wasn't a racist, unlike whites from the South who he looked down upon. Meanwhile, he looked down upon Negroes just as much if not more. And that contempt led him to think it was OK to to remain ignorant of Black people, to not read anything they were writing. Which is why Joe is such a cipher, and which is how Heinlein managed to write a novel about racism that is so utterly tone deaf, whose actual impact is so completely opposed to Heinlein's intended aims.
Written in 1964, the novel begins with a nuclear war. Farnham, his family, his live in Negro servant, and his house guest for the evening have just enough warning to go into their fallout shelter. The last bomb to drop sends their shelter and them into another world, a green wilderness with the same landscape as their old home, but no people, no buildings. The nuclear survival novel suddenly turns into a frontier wilderness novel, and then turns into a time travel novel when they are finally found by other people and learn that they have been living in a wilderness area, and that this is the future, centuries after the war destroyed American and European civilization and left the planet in the hands of Arabic speaking, brown skinned Muslims. White people like themselves are slaves in this future world. The worst thing, Farnham discovers, is that some whites in this world are bred and slaughtered as food for their masters. The novel ends with Farnham and his new beloved (the house guest) sent by their masters back in time to just before the bombs drop. By driving like mad they manage to get out of the blast radius before the bombs drop, and set up house as after-the-bomb survivors in a new time line.
What Heinlein intended as an anti-racist "lets turn the tables and put make white people the enslaved minority" satire comes off instead as a "see how awful things would be if we gave any power to brown people" story that falls into the trap of depicting nonwhites as inherently bad, evil and cannibalistic. Farah Mendlesohn argues that it is the cannibalism that flips this book from an antiracism satire into a racist story.
Morgan had not read Mendlesohn's take. Talking with her the morning after she finished the novel, her first reaction was how, as with "Magic, Inc." and "Jerry Was a Man," once again a Heinlein story that dealt specifically with American racism vis a vis African Americans came off as incredibly tone deaf.
I think I was the one who first mentioned the problem of the character of Joe. Here's a Black man in America in the mid 60's who works as a live in servant, a job that was essentially extinct at that point. He's not given even a single line of dialogue about whether his relatives might be safe or not - every other character has family, backstory, a history - aside from knowing French, Joe seems to have been grown in a vat. He doesn't make any references to the civil right movement.
Morgan and I agreed that for a novel about racism written in 1963-64, to have an adult African American character *not* make any reference to the ongoing struggle for civil rights is a huge and glaring lacunae in the narrative, and this failure to make Joe a real character who is either engaged with current events of relevance to him as a Black man, or has a convincing reason to not be so engaged, is the real point where the novel starts to go wrong. This is even more true in light of Mendlesohn's appraisal that Joe is the novel's real protagonist, the active character who saves the day, the one approved of by cats, and Hugh Farnham is yet another Watson-like viewpoint-holding sidekick.
Mendlesohn talks about how Heinlein saw racism as colour prejudice, full stop - he had no concept of the systematic structures in institutions and in society that oppress and discriminate against non-white people. Instead. like a lot of other white moderates, he subscribed to the victim-blaming analysis (as found in Stanley Elkins' Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life, and as popularized after Farnham's Freehold was written by the Moynihan Report) that endemic Negro poverty and family instability were a legacy of slavery's warping of Negro culture, that there is such a thing as a slave mentality, and that mental outlook, rather than anything that white people needed to worry about changing in their institutions or culture, was the source of Negro immiseration.
In private letters (one to F.M. Busby, published in a preview of the limited, stupidly expensive Virginia Edition; another, very similar in content to Arthur George Smith exists in Heinlein's "story ideas" file, available for $2 from the Heinlein Archives), Heinlein expresses contempt for the Civil Rights movement, as well as for African and American Negro accomplishments and culture ("as one Negro friend pointed out to me; the lucky Negroes were the ones who were enslaved," and similar sentiments).
His (self declared) lack of colour prejudice enabled him to tell himself he wasn't a racist, unlike whites from the South who he looked down upon. Meanwhile, he looked down upon Negroes just as much if not more. And that contempt led him to think it was OK to to remain ignorant of Black people, to not read anything they were writing. Which is why Joe is such a cipher, and which is how Heinlein managed to write a novel about racism that is so utterly tone deaf, whose actual impact is so completely opposed to Heinlein's intended aims.