More than any other movie genre, Science Fiction (SF) cinema has traditionally been able to explore thorny issues like class, race, and gender in a manner that is thought provoking and even profound. If one examines the genre more closely, however, a different picture emerges.

Grotesque racial stereotypes are a major feature in most SF cinema. On the face of it this seems rather strange, considering the genre is otherwise known for exploring new territory and challenging social norms.

While SF cinema can be visionary and ground-breaking, it can also expose the limits of the human imagination. The homogenous, almost exclusively white male creative environment in Hollywood is to blame for much of this blatant stereotyping. Despite Hollywood’s best efforts to “diversify,” Most films are still written, produced, and directed by white men.

It must be noted that these people also live in an exclusively white world, even in a relatively progressive city like Los Angeles. Instead of bothering to research and develop any meaningful non-white characters, they routinely choose the easy way out and create ‘card-board cut-outs’ of minorities: tokens.

They just don’t know any better.

Like everything produced in Hollywood, SF films are heavily influenced by the environment in which they are created. Let’s face it: Steven Spielberg doesn’t hang out with a whole lot of ‘brothers’ in the ‘hood. His cleaning lady is probably an illegal alien from Guatemala – but that’s about as close as he gets to immigrants on a daily basis.

If minorities are portrayed at all they are usually in subservient roles. And they’re always the FIRST to die!

Screenplay writers tend to use stereotypes simply because they are intellectually lazy. A truly thoughtful, creative producer will spend time developing a complex mix of multifaceted pan-racial characters; whereas a lazy writer will simply import easily recognizable stereotypes in place of unique individuals.

This is not specifically a failing of SF cinema; but it is a reflection of our hegemonic society: the re-imaging of the universe we inhabit, rather than the creation of an entirely new one. And so, when Hollywood reproduces notions of ‘the other,’ it does so from an existing, narrow cultural template.

SF cinema carries with it the prejudices and anxieties of contemporary culture from the viewpoint of the mostly white male community which produces it.

But there is a dichotomy here: on the one hand, SF cinema is cutting edge and transformative; it can often tell stories too provocative or challenging for mainstream films. On the other hand, SF cinema is filled with ridiculous racial stereotypes.

WTF?

In Black Space: Imagining Race in Science Fiction Film, Professor Adilifu Nama argues that the “absence of blackness’ has historically been a signature feature of the genre. As Nama points out, many of the future utopias pictured in SF cinema are exclusively for ‘whites only.’

Nama stresses that in many ways the popularity of SF cinema coincided with the political turmoil and racial unrest which pervaded the growing counterculture of late sixties and early seventies America. He draws a fascinating parallel to the characters of Box in Logan’s Run and Darth Vader in Star Wars as signifiers of mainstream America’s ambiguity toward people of color and “charismatic black speakers”: an obvious reference to great black orators of the past like Malcolm X, Huey Newton and MLK.

In Nama’s dissection of They Live [1988], he demonstrates the ways in which SF cinema creates opportunities for discussion about inequality in the present day. The Black character, Frank, doesn’t need to put on the “reality” glasses because he has no desire or need to see how the inequality of an alien-controlled America works. Frank can see with his own eyes the powerful cultural contradictions between white working-class idealism – based on the Horatio Alger myth of meritocracy – and the long-unresolved disenfranchisement of non-whites.

Hispanic stereotypes in SF cinema reflect the same kind of coping strategy for xenophobic white society’s perceived “loss of control” of their cultural hegemony. Latinos will soon outnumber whites in America. Culture wars and economic austerity are weapons deployed by the Elite in subverting the idea of racial justice in many SF films: just as they are in real life.

The historical struggles of people of color are hardly ever overtly examined as a major narrative in SF films. Instead, the SF genre, with its emphasis on technology, scientific exploration and the quest for the unknown, ends up as Aryan wish fulfillment: a universe where whites rule!

It would seem that pervasive racial stereotyping in movies can be attributed to the fact that so few minorities are actually involved in the creative process in Hollywood; especially in SF cinema. The film industry is a very insular and nepotistic world. And overwhelmingly white and male.

The “absence of blackness” is just as apparent in Beverly Hills, Malibu, and Bel Air as it is in most examples of SF cinema.

[Edited repost from 2015]