Viridians 1

 

Subject: Viridian racism

 

Here's a science-fiction series that I'd like to see:

 

One of the extraterrestrial races on the show is the Viridians. That's the Human name for them; their own translates to "The Only Intelligent Beings". Their skin is colored green. There's variation; some are dark olive green, some are light lime green, most are in the middle. The Viridians themselves impose a sharp boundary on this continuum; they call the olive-green Viridians "Black" and the lime-green Viridians "White"; and all in between are put into one of these two categories, though the difference is arbitrary, and often missed by Humans. In fact some of the 'White" Viridians are in fact optically more olive than some of the 'Black' Viridians.

 

The Viridians make a sharp distinction because they are racists. Centuries ago some of the olive-green Viridians enslaved some of the lime-green Viridians; to justify this crime against viridianity, the slave-holding "Black" Viridians insisted that the enslaved "White" Viridians are a genetically inferior race who need to be "guided for their own good". That theory is pseudoscience; genetically the distinction is skin-deep; by any scientific measure the Viridian race is one. The prejudice continues, partly because of stupid tribalism, and mostly because it remains profitable for the Viridian oligarchs - most of whom are olive-green "Blacks" - to maintain an oppressed class of lime-green "Whites",  to keep the Viridian working class divided by skin tint, and thus suppress working-class wages.

Comments:

BJ:

On humans not seeing or recognizing ethnic distinctions on other planets, I guess you've seen the Star Trek episode where one group is black on the left side and white on the right side and the other is the reverse.

 

NH:

Oh yes, I remember. I consider that episode to be a noble effort, but alas it's lame-o. Stark black and stark white are not natural colors, on this planet at least, and a sharp dividing line ditto. Making the extraterrestrials stark black or stark white, even juxtaposed, buys into the false narrative that there _are_ black people or white people.

I propose green, a natural-looking color. The distinction, on the Star Trek show, between black/white and white/black is binary; whereas I propose a continuum of green, arbitrarily divided by pseudoscience.

 

BJ:

Please remember that one of the reasons we fought against the Barbary Coast pirates in the Jefferson Administration was the enslavement of Europeans by these Muslim pirates.  Some were kept in North Africa but many, ironically, were sold into slavery in sub-Saharan Africa.  This enslavement involved millions of Europeans.  I did a report on Jefferson in 4th Grade (we had a portrait of him in our living room next to our front door) which was how I learned about another of our undeclared wars.  The Island of Gozo in Malta was entirely depopulated by just one raid in 1551. I'll send you a youtube.  I'm not saying "turnabout is fair play" merely that "boys will be boys."

 

NH:

The way I phrase that sentiment is, "My critique is of the species."

Once I argued away a charge of unPC inappropriateness by telling the dean that I am not a misogynist; I am a misanthrope; I hate everyone equally.

 

 

NH:

The racism is systematic, and is periodically refreshed by violent assaults upon "White" Viridians by the "Black"-controlled government. The lime-green "White" Viridians respond to their oppression partly in fruitful ways, by mutual aid through religion, and by cultural creativity; but they also respond in self-destructive ways, by broken families, and by crime. Lime-green disfunctionality is cited by the "Black" Viridians as proof of "White" inferiority; lime-green cultural creativity is noticed by the olive-greens only to appropriate without credit.

 

The Humans are baffled by this. To most of them, Viridians all look alike; for they are indeed all green; none of them are in fact white, nor black, if by white you mean white, and by black you mean black. It will be a running gag in the series for Humans to mess up the distinction between White and Black, especially for the ones in the middle of the continuum. This will exasperate Viridians of all skin-tints, for even the oppressed "Whites" unconsciously buy into the racism, as a matter of identity politics. They will accuse the Humans of racism for their confusion, even though that confusion is precisely the Human's failure to be properly racist.

The Viridians retort that Humans are all brown to them. Viridians money is brown, roughly the tint of Caucasian Human skin, so they call it 'the long brown'.

Of course this is all a Brechtian alienation technique. Science fiction is good at that sort of thing; take some social injustice and translate it to an alien context, to make the injustice unfamiliar and therefore visible, and risible. Thus green for brown, but also swap the roles of 'black' and 'white', just to mess with the viewer's head, and force them to think. Also their names should be messed up, with mixed black/white signifiers. Thus Bradford Django for an olive-green, and Tupac Anderson for a lime-green.

For added fun: that universe has Star-Trekkian universal translators, which are programmed to bleep out all obscenities. Thus we the audience get to hear bleeps all the time, especially when the more deplorable Viridian racists discuss politics with the Humans, and argue in bad faith, by insulting to dominate, rather than reasoning to learn. For even more fun: on one of the shows, we learn that the 'bleep' noise it itself a Viridian curse word, so the robotic censorship is a complete failure. The Humans try to reprogram the censor program, but the best they can do is replace the 'bleep' sound with a dull robotic 'faaaak' noise. The Humans put up with this until the end of the show, then change it back.

 

One story arc involves a political movement demanding reparations. A Human smells a rat, and after investigation, proves to an astonished lime-green Viridian that the movement was funded and organized by the JJJ, a deeply racist terrorist gang of deeply olive-green Viridians. The reparations were ostensibly meant to pay a one-time pittance to all lime-green Viridians, but the JJJ actually wanted to justify compiling a database of all Viridians, giving names, addresses, and precise 'lime-itude factor'. The lime-itude factor would be defined by racist pseudo-science, for lime-itude is not a scientifically valid concept; and the JJJ consciously intended to use that database later on, to officially implement discriminatory policies.