Een Zwarte President

Interessant interview met sciencefictionschrijver Samuel R. Delany, met daarin veel aandacht voor ras en identiteit. In het onderstaande citaat brengt hij de "zwarte president als sciencefiction voorspelling" ter sprake (die ik terloops in De Toekomst Hervonden aankaart.) Ik was helemaal vergeten dat dit idee in Camp Concentration zit (geweldig boek trouwens, 334 ook):

In 1967, when I first read Camp Concentration in its New Worlds serialization, after it had failed to find a US publisher, I can think of two things that were then inconceivable: The first is that 50 years later, we would have a black president. But by 2005, it was very thinkable. Morgan Freeman had played the current president of the United States in Deep Impact, with at least two other black actors representing the POTUS on various running series—so that, if anything, when Obama got in in ’08, today hindsight makes it look more inevitable than surprising.

And in the early ’70s [in “Angouleme,” from 334, published in 1972], Disch was the first science-fiction writer to conceive of gay marriage as lying in a foreseeable future. I wasn’t. I’d already worked through all my interest in marrying anyone and was pretty sure it was not an institution for me. I still am.

Verder is Obama meer een product van Harvard dan zwart. En zoals Thomas Pynchon laat opmerken in Gravity's Rainbow: "Harvard's there for other reasons. The "educating" part of it is just sort of a front."

Het interview sluit trouwens af met een prachtige anekdote. Dat boek moet ik dan ook herlezen, want die scène ben ik compleet vergeten.