More fodder

[james_davis_nicoll]

Nicked from the UN report, via a post of mine:

Three Earths in 2100:

                Growth Scenario

Region          Low     Medium  High

Africa          27.5%   24.9%   23.1%
Asia            52.1    55.4    57.5
Latin America
and Caribbean    7.4     8.1     8.4
North America    5.8     5.2     5.0
Europe           6.6     5.9     5.6
Oceana           0.6     0.5     0.5

Population       5.5B    9.1B   14.0B   
      

While I freely admit that migration in the past has seen small groups provide disproportionate fractions of migrants and that population models are often incorrect, this seems to me to indicate that all other considerations being equal, the pasty white with the occasional visible minority in the background model used in a lot of SF set in near future interstellar settings is likely to be wildly incorrect.

Comments

[mayaknife.livejournal.com]

What you neglect to take into account is that by that time the earth is a ghetto and all the pasty-whites have moved to the interstellar 'burbs.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Would it surprise you to learn that a Dutch bigot has been posting on rasfw suggesting White Flight as a reason to flee Earth? Including the charming phrase "smearing itself with mud" to describe current immigration policies. No howls of outrage so far, although that may be because most people on rasfw have better things to do with their time than engage the latest racist wingnut.

Also, I think bateau has successfully reduced the amount of time it takes prats to enter killfiles.

[carloshasanax.livejournal.com]

What are the racial demographics of rasfw anyway? I get the distinct impression that if you took a random sample of Information Technology people and compared it against rasfw -- a fair comparison, I think, although I suspect that the IT sample average would be richer and better educated -- it would be much more non-white, and significantly more female.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

No idea.

Just glancing over the 40 most present posters,

http://netscan.research.microsoft.com/reportcard.aspx?tp=14&sd=12/12/2005&ng=rec.arts.sf.written

I know that a number of the posters are Jewish but that seems to be the largest minority group. I am not seeing a lot of Asian names, for example. Given the history of the New World, guessing at skin colour from surnames is iffy at best but offhand I can only recall one living poster who has mentioned that they are black [1].

1: On the other hand, so few conversations about SF go "And so I think CRYPONOMICON could have been vastly improved with fewer pages and by the way I am naturally tanned." This is because Cryptonomicon is about as SFnal as Heck Ramsey.

[carloshasanax.livejournal.com]

I suspect there are many conversations about SF and race that aren't being had because the demographics of the genre approach monochrome.

[raycun.livejournal.com]

Wouldn't the better control group be 'IT people 15 years ago', given the lack of new blood on Usenet?

[carloshasanax.livejournal.com]

There's practically no barrier to entry to Usenet, so no.

[pauldrye.livejournal.com]

The barrier is even knowing it exists, I'd say.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately, no, it would not surprise me at all.

[mayaknife.livejournal.com]

It's hard to be surprised by anything on Usenet any more. It is saddening, though, to see racial intolerance on the rise in the Netherlands, since it is otherwise one of the most enlightened societies on the planet.

---

Here's a different twist on the same logic: rather than a ghetto, Earth remains the nicest place going, for humans, so the "visible minorities", who are anything but a minority, band together to kick the pasty-whites out, thus making them the predominant skin tone of the human interstellar diaspora.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Isn't that pretty close to the paranoia of the White Power types, that the non-white groups will rise up and oppress them? I don't know but that writing a story with that background, esp an SF story, would lead people to make guesses about my politics that were inaccurate.

On the other hand, a story about a Poyaisian colony that exploits such views to recruit new goobers to bilk, that could be funny. In fact, heck, just use the name Poyais so that if they survive and there's a court case, you can claim the name _clearly_ labelled the settlement as fictional.

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

> otherwise one of the most enlightened societies on the planet

I don't know how true this is, but I've heard that their enlightenment is in fact part of the problem. E.g. the Dutch being apparently one of the more gay-friendly countries on the planet, and the Muslims not being so friendly, and gays such as Pim Fortuyn being a bit worried about that. It's not clear from here that the intolerance is primarily racial as opposed to cultural (and a reaction to the perceived intolerance or non-human-rightsness of the Muslims themselves, cf. gays and also arranged marriages.)

The new guy on rasfw is pretty clearly racist, though, going on about the innately lower IQ of blacks in general.

[corruptedjasper.livejournal.com]

It's partly racial, but mostly it's cultural and language based. We have very large groups (at least compared to fifty years ago) of, in particular, Moroccans and Turks who tend to stick together, speak their own language, and a relatively high percentage with some odd ideas about gender equality etc.

Having a large group of young furriners with nothing better to do hang around the streets all day and night is one thing, but when they're talking in a language you can't understand it adds a component of fear, rational or not: "are they talking about me? What if they're coming up with a game plan to attack me?". Entirely different from hearing "so what do you think, movie today?" or something like that.

And of course we do have some real White Power style racism here, as well. Neo-nazism appears to be pretty much dead, though, which can only be a good thing.

[razorsmile.livejournal.com]

There's an SF story in here ...