N.K. Jemisin's The City We Became: How the best author in science fiction went so very wrong (again)
Back to science fiction. This... is a hard post to write. The word, "fanboy," would not be an inappropriate description, given my rantings and ravings about Nora K. Jemisin. In my opinion, the Broken Earth trilogy is one of the greatest pieces of science fiction ever written. I'll put it up against the best works of Asimov, Herbert, Butler, Stephenson... take your pick. It is so great that it has overshadowed the still very worthy Inheritance trilogy and the Dreamblood duology. Her compilation of short stories, How Long 'Til Black Future Month?, included some works that were, in some ways, rough drafts. One was even a sketch for The Fifth Season, but Jemisin is so good that even her authorial napkin sketches beat to hell a mortal author's magnum opus. Yes, I really like N.K. Jemisin's work.
Yet, I find nothing tastier than a sacred cow (as yesterday's post on Ruth Bader Ginsburg demonstrated), and the best compliment anyone has ever paid me was to call me an "iconoclast." The literal translation of "iconoclast," when we break it down, is a destroyer of icons. I see an icon, and Hulk smash! Hulk take graven images commandment very seriously.
Last year, Jemisin published a story called "Emergency Skin," which was interesting, but I found it to be... unintentionally eugenicist, and I explained why in a post some time ago. I stand by those critiques. Looking back, I think that Jemisin was taking an ideology to an extreme without thinking through the implications of what she was writing.
That interpretation received further support by her behavior during the Isabel Fall incident. Without belaboring the point yet again, the short version of the Isabel Fall incident is that a trans woman wrote a short story using a science fiction metaphor about the process of transitioning. She was not yet out of the closet, and she wrote under the pseudonym, Isabel Fall. A group of "social justice warriors" read the title of the story, but not the story itself, and decided that she was trolling them. They piled on, forcing a retraction of the story, and forcing Fall to come out before she was ready, traumatizing her in the process. All they had to do to avoid this ugliness was read the story, but... they didn't. Jemisin joined the pile. She didn't read the story. She just joined the pile. Ug. Ly.
So. That's the prologue. But of course, I have written enough times that art and artist must be considered separately. There was no way that was going to stop me from reading her next book. No way.
Enter The City We Became. When the book was announced, I was quite happy to see what Jemisin was doing. One of the best stories in How Long... was "The City Born Great." The premise was that a city that reaches a certain point becomes a living organism, but must be midwived, and face an attack from a Lovecraftian enemy. It was a cool story, with a cool concept, but like so many of Jemisin's stories, it felt like a novel idea. As in, it should have been a novel. She is, after all, a novelist. I wanted more. She rushed through a concept for which she needed to take her time.
My plot-based disappointment with The City We Became is that, instead of expanding the short story, she basically took the short story as prologue, and wrote a novel to follow it. Of course, the story still grabbed me so much that I really wanted a novel, so... you know. That's not exactly a fatal flaw. She had me at, "yeah, this'll be a novel." More than any other story in that compilation, that's the one that needed it, in my opinion.
Unfortunately, I think the novel fails in some critical ways. Critical ways related to Jemisin's central goal. The City We Became is fundamentally different from Jemisin's previous novels. Jemisin's previous novels were set in other worlds. Personally, I read the Broken Earth trilogy as the distant future of this planet, but that's maybe just me. Still, even if my interpretation is correct, it is far enough in the future that it may as well be another world. The Dreamblood duology and the Inheritance trilogy are other worlds entirely. The City We Became is about New York. Our New York. (Or, some close parallel universe equivalent.)
And within those trilogies (and duology), she tackles social issues. Very effectively. In my opinion, better than any other author. Including Butler. Shifting to our world shifted her focus, and her goal. The City We Became, unlike "The City Born Great," is almost purely about race and racism, with some sideline lectures on homophobia, transphobia, sexism, and the other things you would predict given those topics. But, it addresses racism much less effectively than, say, the Broken Earth trilogy. Not close. Not. At. All. She moved from using metaphor with subtlety and depth, to something that is far less sophisticated and less accurate in social scientific terms because she is both blunt and ham-handed in how she characterizes race in what is unmistakably our world.
I'm frustrated. Jemisin can do so much better than this.
So let's get into that. Social science and science fiction. I'm all about that. For reference, let's start with how good she can be with a brief discussion of race in the Broken Earth trilogy, (The Fifth Season, The Obelisk Gate, and The Stone Sky). The basic premise is that the Stillness is a tectonically unstable world, and some of the people living there are "orogenes," who have the ability to manipulate kinetic energy, which includes the movement of tectonic plates. However, they basically just move energy around. Moving some heat over here leaves bitter cold over there. So, they do some stuff, and they wind up icing the area around them. That can kill. In fact, there are lots of ways that they can kill, and it is a real risk if they lose control.
Orogenes are an oppressed minority, both feared for what happens if they lose control, and exploited because on a tectonically unstable world, no society can function without orogenes quelling tectonic activity. Hence, you see these complicated views of race. Needed, exploited, and feared for the same kind of understandable reasons as some of the mutants in X-Men, which is the obvious touchstone here. (See what I did there? Touch... stone? Hey! You try being funny before you start throwing stones at me!) And like with the X-Men, that means we get orogenes as a metaphor for any other, and societal fear creating a feedback loop of ugliness and oppression.
The greatest expression of the conflict is the character of Alabaster, who may be the coolest character I have ever read. He is not only the most powerful orogene. He is a deep thinker, whose clear-eyed view of oppression and the social dynamics of the world make him the lens through whom you view the world, even though he isn't your POV character. ("POV," actually being kind of complicated, if you've read The Fifth Season. But that's a whole other thing.)
Yet, in the first scene in the book, Alabaster tears open a rift in the crust of the planet that basically destroys the world. He kills a lot of people. A lot. I have assigned this book, and the last time I did, I asked students to think of comparable characters, in terms of body counts. They came up with... Darth Vader, and the destruction of Alderaan.
When the system is that oppressive, and that corrupt, what do we think of a character who takes it that far?
This. This is thinking deeply. Alabaster. Jemisin can give us Alabaster. And I'm only scratching the surface, in a couple of paragraphs. You absolutely need to read these books, if you have not yet read them. They are amazing.
But the Broken Earth trilogy was a sci-fi/fantasy trilogy, in which Jemisin addressed race, racism, oppression and a whole slew of other things through metaphor, which is really the point of science fiction and fantasy anyway. The Stillness was another world. (In my interpretation, our distant-future Earth, but that's functionally the same thing anyway.) The City We Became takes place in what is functionally our world, so the manner in which it addresses race is not metaphor. Are there metaphors? Of course. However, Jemisin's primary objective is not to write through the metaphor of science fiction counterfactuals. Instead, her objective is to show race and racism directly, along with sexual orientation (a lot of the characters are LGBTQ) and so forth. So we aren't in metaphor territory. We are in social science territory, much more directly. You better get your social science right.
Alas, Jemisin doesn't. So let's have some discussion about where the social science research is on race these days. There is a lot, and I can't come anywhere near to summarizing a field, or rather, set of fields, plural, in a blog post that is mostly about some novels, but here are the biggest points that are backed by rigorous, replicated, empirical research. Depending on your readings, you will be familiar with these concepts anyway.
First, implicit bias. Look, there are people we can casually describe as "racist" without doing too much damage to empirical reality, but the idea of dividing the population between the racists and the not-racists is not really a scientifically useful taxonomy. In fact, we can distinguish between several aspects of how people think about race. One would be affect. Do you feel positively or negatively towards any given racial group? That's not only difficult to measure at the individual level, it is not the only meaningful aspect of how people think about race. The other aspect of race is that simply by living in a society in which race, however it is socially constructed, is socially constructed with various stereotypes and expectations will mean that you are cognitively affected by having been inundated by years of exposure to those stereotypes and expectations. They can affect how you think at a subconscious level even if you don't attach any negative emotions to any particular racial or ethnic group at any kind of a conscious level. Tests of implicit bias are actually pretty creepy. Show people faces of African-Americans, and they will respond differently to word association prompts than if you show them white faces. Even African-Americans will have their responses affected. This stuff is creepy, and it is far more subtle than simply feeling negatively about minorities. After all, it affects minorities.
Next, two related terms: "systemic racism," and, "structural racism." I'm not going to go into detail parsing terms here because in my opinion, it's splitting hairs. Here's the basic point, though. It comes out of legal doctrine. Civil rights laws have a tough time with racial discrimination. Why? Consider the literacy test. On its face, the idea has some appeal. Wouldn't you like voters to be educated? Personally, I'd prefer it if voters were literate and educated. It might, in principle, inoculate them against idiotic lies! And as a general rule, the type of person who reads an N.K. Jemisin book is less likely to vote for the kind of candidate who tells you to inject bleach or spout QAnon bullshit. Just sayin'...
Anyway, there's nothing on its face racial about a literacy test, rrrright? Of course, if you know anything about the history of literacy tests, you know that they were very much about race, and literacy tests weren't the only example. There have been plenty of policies throughout history that have had nothing about race anywhere in the text, and yet have been "about" race. If we are to prohibit racial discrimination, how do we handle this?
The key legal term here is "disparate impact." A policy, regardless of the wording or intent, can affect racial groups differently. And, since we cannot legally "prove" (a word I assiduously avoid, in most contexts) intent in many contexts, it is often more useful and even more important to examine the effect of a policy. Consider one that continues to baffle me. We fund schools primarily through property taxes, which means that school districts in poor areas, with low property values, have poorly funded schools. You know what's correlated with property values?
Statistically, a white kid is more likely to attend a well-funded school than a black kid, given the funding scheme we use. That constitutes a disparate impact, in my "legal" opinion, with "legal" put in quotes because my degree is a Piled Higher & Deeper rather than a Juris Drivel. Translation: I can't for the life of me figure out how our system justifies the property tax-based school funding system given the racial disparities it creates under the disparate impact standard.
Except for the fact that our legal system is a total joke, which you hopefully already knew.
But that's not my point. Today. My point today is the concept of "disparate impact." You can have a policy which, on its face, and even perhaps in its intent, has nothing to do with race. Yet, it helps to perpetuate racial inequities. It doesn't matter, then, whether the people who created or defend the property tax-based system do so because of race. What matters, from the disparate impact perspective, is that there is a disparate impact.
The point is to look, not at individuals, but at structures. Laws. Systems. How do they work? What outcomes do they create? You can't read peoples' minds. What you can do, social-scientifically, is examine the effects of laws, institutions and social structures.
Let's combine all of this and be a little sloppy with our terminology, to put it under the rubric of "systemic racism." Systems can have racially disparate impacts, regardless of any individual. And I, as a social scientist, can compare one law or system to another, to see how varying systems affect different racial groups. What kinds of systems create racial inequality? What kinds ameliorate racial inequality? There, we're in modern social science territory.
This perspective can be taken to an extreme. That would be "critical race theory," which is distinct from merely analysis of systemic racism. I'm not even going to touch "critical race theory." But, you don't need to. You just need to understand that you can study the effects of laws and institutions separately from any individual. This, broadly speaking, is kind of where research is on race in its most scientifically grounded form. Along with implicit bias and associated concepts at the individual level.
There is, of course, research on fringe groups, like militia groups and the various manifestations of the white power movement, but these groups remain fringe groups. Instead, research focuses on implicit bias and systems precisely because for the most part, people do not (at least, openly) express the kinds of attitudes that fringe groups still occasionally espouse. Even Trump's "suburban housewives" and "affordable housing" stuff, for all the clarity of its intent, is still coded. Yes, we all got that secret decoder ring in our cereal boxes when we were kids, so everybody knows what he means, but if you can stomach it, compare his actual words to the actual words of his 2016 campaign supporter, David Duke and the organization he once headed. There is a difference. Even though we know what Trump means, the fact that he still has to dress it up tells you something.
So. That's where we are, here, in the real world.
And now, after much digressing, we come to The City We Became.
I did not like this book. I was hoping for an expanded version of the short story, "The City Born Great," but instead, it was a novel-length sequel, and it was Jemisin's dud. Here's the deal, before I pick apart what's bugging me.
In "The City Born Great," a street kid becomes the avatar of New York, as it is coming into being, as an entity. When this happens, a Lovecraftian beastie attacks, to try to prevent the city from becoming a living thing. Why? I'll get to that. It's actually a) kind of cool, but b) a big missed opportunity (so far). The street kid beats the squamous, eldritch beastie, so New York becomes a living city.
But not quite fully. Each burough gets its own avatar, and the kid falls into a kind of coma, while the Enemy gets a foothold in New York to try to take it down. The avatars of the five boroughs need to get together to find and wake the kid, who is the "primary," or, the avatar of New York itself, so that he can finish the job. It's not much of a plot, but it's not about plot. It's about place, and social commentary.
Mainly, race, with a big side-helping of LGBTQ. Of the five-plus-one New York avatars, half are gay. (That's in comparison to about 5% of the population. Also, two other city avatars make appearances. Sao Paolo and Hong Kong, and it is heavily implied that Sao Paolo is gay.) One is white.
One turns, motivated by her own xenophobia.
Care to guess which one?
That's the white one. Staten Island. She's stupid, racist and easily manipulated.
And this brings us to how Jemisin handles her primary goal in The City We Became. Race and racism. The book does not address implicit bias, systemic racism, or anything like that. The closest it comes is a throwaway line in which Brooklyn-- a former rapper-- tells the Bronx that her husband died. The Bronx asks if it has something to do with drugs, thinking about the subject of Brooklyn's rap lyrics. Brooklyn replies, no, cancer. Bronx-- the avatar of political correctness-- excoriates herself for the assumption. Given Brooklyn's rap lyrics, though, her presumption was based on something other than race. Bronx (Bronca) is just very, very, very politically correct.
Really, though, the book doesn't touch implicit bias. Nor systemic racism.
Instead, it's just blunt, old-fashioned, kkk-style racism. From every white character you meet, save two, and I'll get to them. But here. Let me set a scene for you. Bronca (the Bronx) runs an art museum, and "the Enemy" comes for the museum by using a group called "the Alt Artistes." Here's their schtick. They have a set of grossly racist paintings and sculptures. Just totally over-the-top stuff. They take it to galleries, run by women and people of color so that they can be turned away, and then put up videos on social media to claim anti-white-male bias, dox the people who run the galleries, and so forth. This is the kind of person you see in the book, when you see a white person.
When the representative of the group shows up at the museum, she turns to Bronx, and actually, seriously says, "hi, I'm White!" With a card, introducing herself as "Dr. White." In fact, "the Enemy"-- the Lovecraftian beastie-- always appears as a white woman. The Woman in White. If you read enough Jemisin, you get the impression that she really hates white women, especially, but there's actually something vaguely interesting going on here. Or, it would be interesting if Jemisin were more self-aware.
During a rare moment of introspection, Staten Island realizes that the Woman in White is manipulating her through appearance. The Woman in White is neither a woman, nor white. It is just an extradimensional beastie. Why appear white? Because black is dangerous. Staten Island is racist. (Personally, I've never been to that burough, but I bet they have some not-kind words for Jemisin.) But... Staten Island understands that she is being manipulated by the expectation! Why appear as a woman? Because men, to Staten Island, are dangerous. See what Jemisin does there? This is cool! This is Jemisin actually understanding that some pc bullshit is pc bullshit. Yes, there are dangerous men. And there are dangerous men in the book, including Conall, who tries to rape Staten Island. That... doesn't work out so well for him. Women, though, can be evil too. Oh, can women be evil! Men and women can be decent, and men and women can be evil. Everything else is prejudicial bullshit. Staten Island comes to this understanding, and the understanding that she is being manipulated by expectation. By prejudice. And Jemisin is making the point! Jemisin is making the point that you can't just assume women=good, men=bad. That's the whole point of having a Lovecraftian beastie appear as a woman! To play on your expectations of safety and danger. This is Jemisin doing her cool, badass Jemisin thing. Cutting through prejudice, whether pc or otherwise.
OK, now connect that to the "white" part. The thing is... Jemisin writes in such a way that you should assume that white=evil. Yeah, Staten Island assumes white=good and black=bad, but Jemisin so consistently has white characters be over-the-top racist, that Jemisin's portrayal of whiteness is of evil.
Remember, though, that I said there are two white characters who aren't over-the-top racists. One is Jess, Bronx's museum manager buddy. But, she's jewish. To a lot of people, that's not white, and in fact, Jemisin makes the point that she attracts some male attention that turns away from her when they find out she's jewish. So she gets a pass, and is allowed to be cool because she's a form of "other." Then, there's Kendra, Staten Island's mother. But, she's "black Irish." For a long time, Irish immigrants weren't considered "white," and "black Irish" allows Jemisin to put Kendra into another category. Why? Matthew Houlihan, Staten Island's father, was racist enough that he wasn't going to marry anyone who couldn't in some way, be considered "white." Yet, Jemisin wanted to give Kendra a way to be "other" so that she could make Kendra cool because if you're not "other," you can't be cool in this book. She split the difference by making Kendra Irish, since Matthew would only marry an Irish woman, but black Irish.
Nice, Nora.
And with both Jess and Kendra given "other" categories, every other white person you see in this book is an over-the-top bigot. Not someone who demonstrates implicit bias, not someone who has benefited from a system that can be characterized by the term, "systemic racism," and either knowingly or unknowingly perpetuates it. Just an over-the-top bigot, like Matthew Houlihan, or the Alt Artistes.
This is an authorial choice. So how do you write implicit bias? I honestly don't know. I'm not a novelist. I know how to write scholarly books and articles. Whether or not I can write them well is another matter. I can write weekend ramblin's. Whether or not I can write them well is another matter. I don't know how to novel-ize implicit bias. However, to omit the "implicit" part, and just go right for having all of the white people look like Matthew Houlihan and the Alt Artistes just misses the social science.
How do you novel-ize systemic racism? Again, I don't know. I can't write a novel! Have I ever tried? (Not sayin'. If I ever did try, and it sucked, I wouldn't admit it to anyone else. But, I would, hypothetically, think that I'd have enough self awareness to recognize how badly it would suck, and go back to things at which I do not inherently suck.)
Hypothetically. Oops. Forgot the parentheses.
All of this leads to the basic problem that Jemisin is taking a set of complex issues and dumbing them down so much as to be nothing more than disdain for... well, white people. And she can do better! She has done better! In the Broken Earth trilogy, the "stills" (the commonly used term for non-orogenes) weren't intrinsically bigoted. Many of them were quite cool. Why do this?
Why leave this on the floor? Particularly when there is such a cool twist laying unexplored. And here it is. The "Enemy?" That Lovecraftian beastie who appears in white? It's... kind of the good guy. Here's what I mean. When a city comes into being, all of the parallel universes nearby collapse, and every living thing in them goes poof. The reason the Lovecraftian beastie keeps trying to stop cities from coming into being, and keeps trying to destroy them first is that it is the cost of preventing countless universes from blinking out of existence, along with every living thing in them. By Vulcan principles, it's the good guy.
So explore that, Nora! To be fair, there are sequels coming, so maybe that will be explored, but even within this book, the character who gets the most page-time is the Bronx, who is Native American. So, one can take two metaphors here. Either the hunter/predator metaphor, or the stolen land metaphor. In the first case, yeah, they have to die so that we can live. That's how it works. Or... we now live on stolen land. What do we do now? Come on, Nora! Explore that latter one! You have a Native American avatar of political correctness who has to accept that she is the one living on stolen land! You wrote that! Explore!
Again, sequels are coming, so maybe this is going to be explored, but it still leaves me with the basic issue that you have a Lovecraftian beastie which is arguably the good guy, arguments unexplored, and it for some reason decides to work through... racism. The best explanation is that exploiting division can break down a social structure, so that's there, but not handled as well as it could be. But if you're going to do that, do it fully and not with this ham-handed characterization of white people as unreconstructed, kkk-style racists.
The most favorable interpretation we can give to Jemisin's portrayal of whiteness is that it is taking Lovecraft, and flipping it upside-down. Lovecraft was, at this point, famously racist. As I understand it, there is even some tele-watchamacallit show about it. Lovecraftian horror is a clear reference point throughout the novel. Where Lovecraft portrayed minorities negatively because that's how he saw them, one may take the novel as flipping this upside-down and portraying whiteness as the enemy/Enemy in order to reverse the Lovecraftian tropes. This would be a literary decision, akin to the old cliche of "a-AH! Here, you see, the women oppress the men! Aren't you impressed with my authorial cleverness?!" How many times has that one been done?
Anyway, there are several problems with this, should we take this interpretation of The City We Became. Mostly, they turn on timing. The City We Became was published in 2020. Lovecraft has been dead for almost a century, and in that century, rather a lot has changed. A lot has changed about literature, politics and society. Suppose Ralph Ellison or Richard Wright had written this, sometime last century. OK, weird choice of writers. Try this. Suppose Octavia Butler had done it, post-Le Guin. When the debate was the concept of civil rights rather than either the implementation or the current state, such a reversal of Lovecraft would have been subversive.
Today? It isn't subversive. Lovecraft is long dead. The style of racism he espoused is so out of date that, for all our talk about the rise of white nationalism, only a small corner of the country today sounds anything like Lovecraft himself. Yes, there are the Proud Boys and other such groups, and yes, Trump is racist. But, go read Lovecraft's letters. Trump is doing the "the suburbs..." thing. That is qualitatively different from the kind of thing Lovecraft wrote. And that's Trump-- the modern avatar of white grievance and racism. Yet, whiteness in The City We Became is beyond even Trump. This isn't subversiveness. It's regressiveness.
And the alternative would have been writing about race in a social science-compatible way. Implicit bias. Systemic racism. Hell, even "critical race theory" would have been more scholarly than The City We Became. Simply characterizing all white people as unreconstructed, kkk-style racists (unless they have some other "other" designation) is... not especially different from how Jemisin treated Isabel Fall.
This is not how racism works. And if you go around looking for racism of this type, you're going to miss what matters. School funding discrepancies. Sentencing guidelines. Implicit bias and its effect on even minorities.
Look, you just read all of this. I'm writing about implicit bias, and systemic racism, and how important it is for us to grapple with them. I'm also a Jemisin fanboy. If I'm saying Jemisin is writing about white people in a... weird way, somethin's up.
Yet, I find nothing tastier than a sacred cow (as yesterday's post on Ruth Bader Ginsburg demonstrated), and the best compliment anyone has ever paid me was to call me an "iconoclast." The literal translation of "iconoclast," when we break it down, is a destroyer of icons. I see an icon, and Hulk smash! Hulk take graven images commandment very seriously.
Last year, Jemisin published a story called "Emergency Skin," which was interesting, but I found it to be... unintentionally eugenicist, and I explained why in a post some time ago. I stand by those critiques. Looking back, I think that Jemisin was taking an ideology to an extreme without thinking through the implications of what she was writing.
That interpretation received further support by her behavior during the Isabel Fall incident. Without belaboring the point yet again, the short version of the Isabel Fall incident is that a trans woman wrote a short story using a science fiction metaphor about the process of transitioning. She was not yet out of the closet, and she wrote under the pseudonym, Isabel Fall. A group of "social justice warriors" read the title of the story, but not the story itself, and decided that she was trolling them. They piled on, forcing a retraction of the story, and forcing Fall to come out before she was ready, traumatizing her in the process. All they had to do to avoid this ugliness was read the story, but... they didn't. Jemisin joined the pile. She didn't read the story. She just joined the pile. Ug. Ly.
So. That's the prologue. But of course, I have written enough times that art and artist must be considered separately. There was no way that was going to stop me from reading her next book. No way.
Enter The City We Became. When the book was announced, I was quite happy to see what Jemisin was doing. One of the best stories in How Long... was "The City Born Great." The premise was that a city that reaches a certain point becomes a living organism, but must be midwived, and face an attack from a Lovecraftian enemy. It was a cool story, with a cool concept, but like so many of Jemisin's stories, it felt like a novel idea. As in, it should have been a novel. She is, after all, a novelist. I wanted more. She rushed through a concept for which she needed to take her time.
My plot-based disappointment with The City We Became is that, instead of expanding the short story, she basically took the short story as prologue, and wrote a novel to follow it. Of course, the story still grabbed me so much that I really wanted a novel, so... you know. That's not exactly a fatal flaw. She had me at, "yeah, this'll be a novel." More than any other story in that compilation, that's the one that needed it, in my opinion.
Unfortunately, I think the novel fails in some critical ways. Critical ways related to Jemisin's central goal. The City We Became is fundamentally different from Jemisin's previous novels. Jemisin's previous novels were set in other worlds. Personally, I read the Broken Earth trilogy as the distant future of this planet, but that's maybe just me. Still, even if my interpretation is correct, it is far enough in the future that it may as well be another world. The Dreamblood duology and the Inheritance trilogy are other worlds entirely. The City We Became is about New York. Our New York. (Or, some close parallel universe equivalent.)
And within those trilogies (and duology), she tackles social issues. Very effectively. In my opinion, better than any other author. Including Butler. Shifting to our world shifted her focus, and her goal. The City We Became, unlike "The City Born Great," is almost purely about race and racism, with some sideline lectures on homophobia, transphobia, sexism, and the other things you would predict given those topics. But, it addresses racism much less effectively than, say, the Broken Earth trilogy. Not close. Not. At. All. She moved from using metaphor with subtlety and depth, to something that is far less sophisticated and less accurate in social scientific terms because she is both blunt and ham-handed in how she characterizes race in what is unmistakably our world.
I'm frustrated. Jemisin can do so much better than this.
So let's get into that. Social science and science fiction. I'm all about that. For reference, let's start with how good she can be with a brief discussion of race in the Broken Earth trilogy, (The Fifth Season, The Obelisk Gate, and The Stone Sky). The basic premise is that the Stillness is a tectonically unstable world, and some of the people living there are "orogenes," who have the ability to manipulate kinetic energy, which includes the movement of tectonic plates. However, they basically just move energy around. Moving some heat over here leaves bitter cold over there. So, they do some stuff, and they wind up icing the area around them. That can kill. In fact, there are lots of ways that they can kill, and it is a real risk if they lose control.
Orogenes are an oppressed minority, both feared for what happens if they lose control, and exploited because on a tectonically unstable world, no society can function without orogenes quelling tectonic activity. Hence, you see these complicated views of race. Needed, exploited, and feared for the same kind of understandable reasons as some of the mutants in X-Men, which is the obvious touchstone here. (See what I did there? Touch... stone? Hey! You try being funny before you start throwing stones at me!) And like with the X-Men, that means we get orogenes as a metaphor for any other, and societal fear creating a feedback loop of ugliness and oppression.
The greatest expression of the conflict is the character of Alabaster, who may be the coolest character I have ever read. He is not only the most powerful orogene. He is a deep thinker, whose clear-eyed view of oppression and the social dynamics of the world make him the lens through whom you view the world, even though he isn't your POV character. ("POV," actually being kind of complicated, if you've read The Fifth Season. But that's a whole other thing.)
Yet, in the first scene in the book, Alabaster tears open a rift in the crust of the planet that basically destroys the world. He kills a lot of people. A lot. I have assigned this book, and the last time I did, I asked students to think of comparable characters, in terms of body counts. They came up with... Darth Vader, and the destruction of Alderaan.
When the system is that oppressive, and that corrupt, what do we think of a character who takes it that far?
This. This is thinking deeply. Alabaster. Jemisin can give us Alabaster. And I'm only scratching the surface, in a couple of paragraphs. You absolutely need to read these books, if you have not yet read them. They are amazing.
But the Broken Earth trilogy was a sci-fi/fantasy trilogy, in which Jemisin addressed race, racism, oppression and a whole slew of other things through metaphor, which is really the point of science fiction and fantasy anyway. The Stillness was another world. (In my interpretation, our distant-future Earth, but that's functionally the same thing anyway.) The City We Became takes place in what is functionally our world, so the manner in which it addresses race is not metaphor. Are there metaphors? Of course. However, Jemisin's primary objective is not to write through the metaphor of science fiction counterfactuals. Instead, her objective is to show race and racism directly, along with sexual orientation (a lot of the characters are LGBTQ) and so forth. So we aren't in metaphor territory. We are in social science territory, much more directly. You better get your social science right.
Alas, Jemisin doesn't. So let's have some discussion about where the social science research is on race these days. There is a lot, and I can't come anywhere near to summarizing a field, or rather, set of fields, plural, in a blog post that is mostly about some novels, but here are the biggest points that are backed by rigorous, replicated, empirical research. Depending on your readings, you will be familiar with these concepts anyway.
First, implicit bias. Look, there are people we can casually describe as "racist" without doing too much damage to empirical reality, but the idea of dividing the population between the racists and the not-racists is not really a scientifically useful taxonomy. In fact, we can distinguish between several aspects of how people think about race. One would be affect. Do you feel positively or negatively towards any given racial group? That's not only difficult to measure at the individual level, it is not the only meaningful aspect of how people think about race. The other aspect of race is that simply by living in a society in which race, however it is socially constructed, is socially constructed with various stereotypes and expectations will mean that you are cognitively affected by having been inundated by years of exposure to those stereotypes and expectations. They can affect how you think at a subconscious level even if you don't attach any negative emotions to any particular racial or ethnic group at any kind of a conscious level. Tests of implicit bias are actually pretty creepy. Show people faces of African-Americans, and they will respond differently to word association prompts than if you show them white faces. Even African-Americans will have their responses affected. This stuff is creepy, and it is far more subtle than simply feeling negatively about minorities. After all, it affects minorities.
Next, two related terms: "systemic racism," and, "structural racism." I'm not going to go into detail parsing terms here because in my opinion, it's splitting hairs. Here's the basic point, though. It comes out of legal doctrine. Civil rights laws have a tough time with racial discrimination. Why? Consider the literacy test. On its face, the idea has some appeal. Wouldn't you like voters to be educated? Personally, I'd prefer it if voters were literate and educated. It might, in principle, inoculate them against idiotic lies! And as a general rule, the type of person who reads an N.K. Jemisin book is less likely to vote for the kind of candidate who tells you to inject bleach or spout QAnon bullshit. Just sayin'...
Anyway, there's nothing on its face racial about a literacy test, rrrright? Of course, if you know anything about the history of literacy tests, you know that they were very much about race, and literacy tests weren't the only example. There have been plenty of policies throughout history that have had nothing about race anywhere in the text, and yet have been "about" race. If we are to prohibit racial discrimination, how do we handle this?
The key legal term here is "disparate impact." A policy, regardless of the wording or intent, can affect racial groups differently. And, since we cannot legally "prove" (a word I assiduously avoid, in most contexts) intent in many contexts, it is often more useful and even more important to examine the effect of a policy. Consider one that continues to baffle me. We fund schools primarily through property taxes, which means that school districts in poor areas, with low property values, have poorly funded schools. You know what's correlated with property values?
Statistically, a white kid is more likely to attend a well-funded school than a black kid, given the funding scheme we use. That constitutes a disparate impact, in my "legal" opinion, with "legal" put in quotes because my degree is a Piled Higher & Deeper rather than a Juris Drivel. Translation: I can't for the life of me figure out how our system justifies the property tax-based school funding system given the racial disparities it creates under the disparate impact standard.
Except for the fact that our legal system is a total joke, which you hopefully already knew.
But that's not my point. Today. My point today is the concept of "disparate impact." You can have a policy which, on its face, and even perhaps in its intent, has nothing to do with race. Yet, it helps to perpetuate racial inequities. It doesn't matter, then, whether the people who created or defend the property tax-based system do so because of race. What matters, from the disparate impact perspective, is that there is a disparate impact.
The point is to look, not at individuals, but at structures. Laws. Systems. How do they work? What outcomes do they create? You can't read peoples' minds. What you can do, social-scientifically, is examine the effects of laws, institutions and social structures.
Let's combine all of this and be a little sloppy with our terminology, to put it under the rubric of "systemic racism." Systems can have racially disparate impacts, regardless of any individual. And I, as a social scientist, can compare one law or system to another, to see how varying systems affect different racial groups. What kinds of systems create racial inequality? What kinds ameliorate racial inequality? There, we're in modern social science territory.
This perspective can be taken to an extreme. That would be "critical race theory," which is distinct from merely analysis of systemic racism. I'm not even going to touch "critical race theory." But, you don't need to. You just need to understand that you can study the effects of laws and institutions separately from any individual. This, broadly speaking, is kind of where research is on race in its most scientifically grounded form. Along with implicit bias and associated concepts at the individual level.
There is, of course, research on fringe groups, like militia groups and the various manifestations of the white power movement, but these groups remain fringe groups. Instead, research focuses on implicit bias and systems precisely because for the most part, people do not (at least, openly) express the kinds of attitudes that fringe groups still occasionally espouse. Even Trump's "suburban housewives" and "affordable housing" stuff, for all the clarity of its intent, is still coded. Yes, we all got that secret decoder ring in our cereal boxes when we were kids, so everybody knows what he means, but if you can stomach it, compare his actual words to the actual words of his 2016 campaign supporter, David Duke and the organization he once headed. There is a difference. Even though we know what Trump means, the fact that he still has to dress it up tells you something.
So. That's where we are, here, in the real world.
And now, after much digressing, we come to The City We Became.
I did not like this book. I was hoping for an expanded version of the short story, "The City Born Great," but instead, it was a novel-length sequel, and it was Jemisin's dud. Here's the deal, before I pick apart what's bugging me.
In "The City Born Great," a street kid becomes the avatar of New York, as it is coming into being, as an entity. When this happens, a Lovecraftian beastie attacks, to try to prevent the city from becoming a living thing. Why? I'll get to that. It's actually a) kind of cool, but b) a big missed opportunity (so far). The street kid beats the squamous, eldritch beastie, so New York becomes a living city.
But not quite fully. Each burough gets its own avatar, and the kid falls into a kind of coma, while the Enemy gets a foothold in New York to try to take it down. The avatars of the five boroughs need to get together to find and wake the kid, who is the "primary," or, the avatar of New York itself, so that he can finish the job. It's not much of a plot, but it's not about plot. It's about place, and social commentary.
Mainly, race, with a big side-helping of LGBTQ. Of the five-plus-one New York avatars, half are gay. (That's in comparison to about 5% of the population. Also, two other city avatars make appearances. Sao Paolo and Hong Kong, and it is heavily implied that Sao Paolo is gay.) One is white.
One turns, motivated by her own xenophobia.
Care to guess which one?
That's the white one. Staten Island. She's stupid, racist and easily manipulated.
And this brings us to how Jemisin handles her primary goal in The City We Became. Race and racism. The book does not address implicit bias, systemic racism, or anything like that. The closest it comes is a throwaway line in which Brooklyn-- a former rapper-- tells the Bronx that her husband died. The Bronx asks if it has something to do with drugs, thinking about the subject of Brooklyn's rap lyrics. Brooklyn replies, no, cancer. Bronx-- the avatar of political correctness-- excoriates herself for the assumption. Given Brooklyn's rap lyrics, though, her presumption was based on something other than race. Bronx (Bronca) is just very, very, very politically correct.
Really, though, the book doesn't touch implicit bias. Nor systemic racism.
Instead, it's just blunt, old-fashioned, kkk-style racism. From every white character you meet, save two, and I'll get to them. But here. Let me set a scene for you. Bronca (the Bronx) runs an art museum, and "the Enemy" comes for the museum by using a group called "the Alt Artistes." Here's their schtick. They have a set of grossly racist paintings and sculptures. Just totally over-the-top stuff. They take it to galleries, run by women and people of color so that they can be turned away, and then put up videos on social media to claim anti-white-male bias, dox the people who run the galleries, and so forth. This is the kind of person you see in the book, when you see a white person.
When the representative of the group shows up at the museum, she turns to Bronx, and actually, seriously says, "hi, I'm White!" With a card, introducing herself as "Dr. White." In fact, "the Enemy"-- the Lovecraftian beastie-- always appears as a white woman. The Woman in White. If you read enough Jemisin, you get the impression that she really hates white women, especially, but there's actually something vaguely interesting going on here. Or, it would be interesting if Jemisin were more self-aware.
During a rare moment of introspection, Staten Island realizes that the Woman in White is manipulating her through appearance. The Woman in White is neither a woman, nor white. It is just an extradimensional beastie. Why appear white? Because black is dangerous. Staten Island is racist. (Personally, I've never been to that burough, but I bet they have some not-kind words for Jemisin.) But... Staten Island understands that she is being manipulated by the expectation! Why appear as a woman? Because men, to Staten Island, are dangerous. See what Jemisin does there? This is cool! This is Jemisin actually understanding that some pc bullshit is pc bullshit. Yes, there are dangerous men. And there are dangerous men in the book, including Conall, who tries to rape Staten Island. That... doesn't work out so well for him. Women, though, can be evil too. Oh, can women be evil! Men and women can be decent, and men and women can be evil. Everything else is prejudicial bullshit. Staten Island comes to this understanding, and the understanding that she is being manipulated by expectation. By prejudice. And Jemisin is making the point! Jemisin is making the point that you can't just assume women=good, men=bad. That's the whole point of having a Lovecraftian beastie appear as a woman! To play on your expectations of safety and danger. This is Jemisin doing her cool, badass Jemisin thing. Cutting through prejudice, whether pc or otherwise.
OK, now connect that to the "white" part. The thing is... Jemisin writes in such a way that you should assume that white=evil. Yeah, Staten Island assumes white=good and black=bad, but Jemisin so consistently has white characters be over-the-top racist, that Jemisin's portrayal of whiteness is of evil.
Remember, though, that I said there are two white characters who aren't over-the-top racists. One is Jess, Bronx's museum manager buddy. But, she's jewish. To a lot of people, that's not white, and in fact, Jemisin makes the point that she attracts some male attention that turns away from her when they find out she's jewish. So she gets a pass, and is allowed to be cool because she's a form of "other." Then, there's Kendra, Staten Island's mother. But, she's "black Irish." For a long time, Irish immigrants weren't considered "white," and "black Irish" allows Jemisin to put Kendra into another category. Why? Matthew Houlihan, Staten Island's father, was racist enough that he wasn't going to marry anyone who couldn't in some way, be considered "white." Yet, Jemisin wanted to give Kendra a way to be "other" so that she could make Kendra cool because if you're not "other," you can't be cool in this book. She split the difference by making Kendra Irish, since Matthew would only marry an Irish woman, but black Irish.
Nice, Nora.
And with both Jess and Kendra given "other" categories, every other white person you see in this book is an over-the-top bigot. Not someone who demonstrates implicit bias, not someone who has benefited from a system that can be characterized by the term, "systemic racism," and either knowingly or unknowingly perpetuates it. Just an over-the-top bigot, like Matthew Houlihan, or the Alt Artistes.
This is an authorial choice. So how do you write implicit bias? I honestly don't know. I'm not a novelist. I know how to write scholarly books and articles. Whether or not I can write them well is another matter. I can write weekend ramblin's. Whether or not I can write them well is another matter. I don't know how to novel-ize implicit bias. However, to omit the "implicit" part, and just go right for having all of the white people look like Matthew Houlihan and the Alt Artistes just misses the social science.
How do you novel-ize systemic racism? Again, I don't know. I can't write a novel! Have I ever tried? (Not sayin'. If I ever did try, and it sucked, I wouldn't admit it to anyone else. But, I would, hypothetically, think that I'd have enough self awareness to recognize how badly it would suck, and go back to things at which I do not inherently suck.)
Hypothetically. Oops. Forgot the parentheses.
All of this leads to the basic problem that Jemisin is taking a set of complex issues and dumbing them down so much as to be nothing more than disdain for... well, white people. And she can do better! She has done better! In the Broken Earth trilogy, the "stills" (the commonly used term for non-orogenes) weren't intrinsically bigoted. Many of them were quite cool. Why do this?
Why leave this on the floor? Particularly when there is such a cool twist laying unexplored. And here it is. The "Enemy?" That Lovecraftian beastie who appears in white? It's... kind of the good guy. Here's what I mean. When a city comes into being, all of the parallel universes nearby collapse, and every living thing in them goes poof. The reason the Lovecraftian beastie keeps trying to stop cities from coming into being, and keeps trying to destroy them first is that it is the cost of preventing countless universes from blinking out of existence, along with every living thing in them. By Vulcan principles, it's the good guy.
So explore that, Nora! To be fair, there are sequels coming, so maybe that will be explored, but even within this book, the character who gets the most page-time is the Bronx, who is Native American. So, one can take two metaphors here. Either the hunter/predator metaphor, or the stolen land metaphor. In the first case, yeah, they have to die so that we can live. That's how it works. Or... we now live on stolen land. What do we do now? Come on, Nora! Explore that latter one! You have a Native American avatar of political correctness who has to accept that she is the one living on stolen land! You wrote that! Explore!
Again, sequels are coming, so maybe this is going to be explored, but it still leaves me with the basic issue that you have a Lovecraftian beastie which is arguably the good guy, arguments unexplored, and it for some reason decides to work through... racism. The best explanation is that exploiting division can break down a social structure, so that's there, but not handled as well as it could be. But if you're going to do that, do it fully and not with this ham-handed characterization of white people as unreconstructed, kkk-style racists.
The most favorable interpretation we can give to Jemisin's portrayal of whiteness is that it is taking Lovecraft, and flipping it upside-down. Lovecraft was, at this point, famously racist. As I understand it, there is even some tele-watchamacallit show about it. Lovecraftian horror is a clear reference point throughout the novel. Where Lovecraft portrayed minorities negatively because that's how he saw them, one may take the novel as flipping this upside-down and portraying whiteness as the enemy/Enemy in order to reverse the Lovecraftian tropes. This would be a literary decision, akin to the old cliche of "a-AH! Here, you see, the women oppress the men! Aren't you impressed with my authorial cleverness?!" How many times has that one been done?
Anyway, there are several problems with this, should we take this interpretation of The City We Became. Mostly, they turn on timing. The City We Became was published in 2020. Lovecraft has been dead for almost a century, and in that century, rather a lot has changed. A lot has changed about literature, politics and society. Suppose Ralph Ellison or Richard Wright had written this, sometime last century. OK, weird choice of writers. Try this. Suppose Octavia Butler had done it, post-Le Guin. When the debate was the concept of civil rights rather than either the implementation or the current state, such a reversal of Lovecraft would have been subversive.
Today? It isn't subversive. Lovecraft is long dead. The style of racism he espoused is so out of date that, for all our talk about the rise of white nationalism, only a small corner of the country today sounds anything like Lovecraft himself. Yes, there are the Proud Boys and other such groups, and yes, Trump is racist. But, go read Lovecraft's letters. Trump is doing the "the suburbs..." thing. That is qualitatively different from the kind of thing Lovecraft wrote. And that's Trump-- the modern avatar of white grievance and racism. Yet, whiteness in The City We Became is beyond even Trump. This isn't subversiveness. It's regressiveness.
And the alternative would have been writing about race in a social science-compatible way. Implicit bias. Systemic racism. Hell, even "critical race theory" would have been more scholarly than The City We Became. Simply characterizing all white people as unreconstructed, kkk-style racists (unless they have some other "other" designation) is... not especially different from how Jemisin treated Isabel Fall.
This is not how racism works. And if you go around looking for racism of this type, you're going to miss what matters. School funding discrepancies. Sentencing guidelines. Implicit bias and its effect on even minorities.
Look, you just read all of this. I'm writing about implicit bias, and systemic racism, and how important it is for us to grapple with them. I'm also a Jemisin fanboy. If I'm saying Jemisin is writing about white people in a... weird way, somethin's up.
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