Scientific Racism in Sci Fi

     In the reading we went over this week, Adilifu Nama discussed the the representation (or lack thereof) of blackness in sci-fi films over the last several decades. One point of his that interested me were the ways in which sci-fi films often will often substitute representations of black people within the narrative or ideology of the film with aliens, robots, or other-than-human beings. He provides several not-so-subtle examples, including the robot Box in the movie Logan's Run or the Morlocks—a splintered evolution of humans in the distant future—in the 60s adaptation of H.G. Wells' The Time Machine.

Box, a robot in Logan's Run that prevent the Runners from escaping the ecodome.

    

The Morlocks, a race of humans in the distant future that are portrayed as  "stout, cannibalistic, blue-skinned, facially deformed, troll-like creatures with oversized lips and pig-like noses," as Nama states.

    In the process of portraying blackness or black people within these films as removed from the otherwise white casts and characters that surround them, these sci-fi movies effectively "otherize" blackness by representing it through other-than-human characters. By representing blackness through these essentialized depictions—including the hard-wired mechanics of a robot like Box or the visually immutable characteristics of the Morlocks—these films bring to mind the history of scientific racism, wherein arguments for racist policies are justified by co-opting the authority of science in order to argue for white biological superiority on the basis the some supposed "inherent" racial characteristics and physiognomy.

   Scientific racism employed the phrenology of a human skull in order to argue for the supposed "inherent" mental capacities of human races based on this physical characteristic.

    One example of this scientific racism took the form of "polygenism," which argued that the human races were, in fact, different species. Pseudo-scientific methods like craniometry (measuring the size of human skulls) were employed in an attempt to use inherent physical characteristics in order to justify for racial superiority and distinction (https://library.harvard.edu/confronting-anti-black-racism/scientific-racism). The connection between polygenism and the depictions of blackness in sci-fi film becomes obvious then. In The Time Machine, conflict at the heart of film is framed as a conflict not between two groups of humans, but essentially two different species that were evolutionarily split in the wake of nuclear fallout, two distinct groups whose behaviors (whether that be vegetarianism or cannibilism, timidness or violence) are seemingly essentialized through exaggerated and stereotypical physical features, much like the use of "inherent" physical features in scientific racism in order to argue for essentialized behaviors or traits amongst the human races.

Much like these two films, whose depictions of the future offer only a place for whiteness (given that Logan's Run's only black-coded character is killed after being presented as an impediment to the future of the all-white cast of future humans and that the Morlocks are eventually killed off in The Time Machine, leaving just the all-white and all-blonde Eloi to survive), in the history of scientific racism, "early statistical health data was weaponized against Black Americans in the late 1800s, as it was used to claim they were predisposed to disease and destined for extinction" (https://library.harvard.edu/confronting-anti-black-racism/scientific-racism). By representing blackness through essentialized characteristics in other-than-human figures that are eventually wiped out in order to make way for narratives' all-white futures, these sci-fi films participate in the same ideologies that have fueled scientific racism for centuries.