White Males Become Slaves for the Black Race

[emasculateme (imported)]

While i am one who seeks slavery, i am turned off by any reference to one group, whether it be race, gender, religion, or whatever, enslaved by another...it is not the title so much that bothers me, since in and of itself it tells me not to bother with reading the story, but the subject of it.

Boy!! I feel as if a mountain fell on me!:(Any recommendations for a title change? I certainly DIDN'T mean to turn off anyone on the site!!! Is the story still O.K.? Thanks for your comment.

[Slammr (imported)]

I hope you'll take the criticism constructively, using it to write better stories. Many authors explain too much, as I think you did in this story. Sometimes, it's better to only hint at what's going on. Let the reader discover new things as he reads the story. As I said before, you told the whole story in the title, giving the reader no reason to read the rest of it, and all your title did, it appears, was to keep people from reading the story at all.

When I write a story, I like to make things logical, and I have a problem with your using the Whites as beasts of burden, "ponyboys," you call them. Nothing in the story tells us why they would be used so inefficiently. What happened to the cars, trucks, and tractors? It was a biological war in which whites were killed. How would that have affected mechanical and electronic devices?

As far as we can tell, horses weren't killed, and they would pull plows and buggies much more efficiently than men would. I could envision a world in which Blacks would make slaves of the surviving Whites, and in which they would castrate them, but I don't get hooking them to plows and buggies. Even in the South, when Blacks were slaves, they weren't used so inefficiently.

Also, you kill off all white females and all males under the age of puberty and castrate all the remaining White males, effectively ending the White race after this generation, but other than in that one line, you never mention it again.

And, since you mention that Dennis had a wife and son, whom we can suppose are dead, why don't we find out how Dennis feels about their loss? It doesn't have to be part of the story, but if you didn't want it to be, why mention them at all? It's then useless data, which could have been better left out. If you mention them, the reader expects them to have some impact on the story.

Maybe it's just me, but I like to get inside the heads of my characters. I have no idea how Dennis felt about the end of the White race, the loss of his wife and son, the loss of his balls, or becoming a slave, except that he decided at the end of the story to become the best "ponyboy" he could be.

Unlike others, I have no problem with the theme of the story, but you raise more questions than you answer. If Dennis has been chained to a stake in a barn for the last 2-4 weeks, how is it he's still alive? He would have needed to be fed intravenously, which he obviously wasn't. Also, would all the Blacks in the USA have united and have decided to make slaves out of the remaining Whites during that 2-4 weeks? I don't think so.

I must admit I couldn't have told the story in a couple of pages. My version of it would have stretched to 15 or 16 chapters, at least.

[transward (imported)]

abo

Boy!! I feel as if a mountain fell on me!:(Any recommendations for a title change? I certainly DIDN'T mean to turn off anyone on the site!!! Is the story still O.K.? Thanks for your comment.

First take a deep breath, step back and try not to take it personally. What you are feeling is pretty much what every author goes through when s(he) first puts his baby out for public inspection. It's hard not to take it personally, but if you want to write you have to get past it. I could show you a few rejection notices that felt like a knife in the gut, but I got over it.

When a painter starts a painting he first makes a sketch, outlining the basic structure and plot of the painting, then takes and fills in details, skin color, shape of nose, gesture and so on, transforming a crude outline into a finished painting. What you have presented is pretty much the writer's equivalent of that preliminary sketch. Generic white guy, generic black guy, sketch of a situation, general title, no more. This works fine for a masturbatory fantasy, but for a story you need more. You need to take the generic white and black guys and make them individuals that you can picture in your mind. Maybe the white guy is a racist manager or CEO, maybe the black guy was a janator who was unfairly fired. Or maybe the black guy was a small businessman unfairly treated by the white guy. The possibilities are endless. And the title, while crude is fine for a sketch to remind yourself of where you want the story to go, but it's too much the whole plot and totality of the story. It's an extremely popular fantasy; (the stereotypes of black male sexuality go back at least a thousand years) witness the amount of black on white S&M porn. But for an actual title you need something with more zing-more irony. "Turnabout's a Bitch. Now I am Too" or "Payback Sucks"

So, don't despair; keep writing. Your writing will improve with practice, Good luck.

[IbPervert (imported)]

Try to tell the story from a different perspective.

One example would be a history teacher telling his class about the great race riot, and as a result part of the population became slaves to the others. Then in the last paragraph (or so) you drop the big bomb that the whites were slaves to the blacks. This is how the Original Planet of the Apes ended, the movie made you think that you were on another planet but were actually on earth.

Example - the last white a person tells his story for the record. Perhaps as a warning to another race that is trying to stay free from the dominant race.

The hero of the story always has to have something to overcome. Perhaps he dis obeys his new Owner at every turn and is rebellious through most of the story thus getting tortured all the time. Then perhaps his Owner manages to purchase the mans son and starts to torture the boy.

Instead of pulling the wagon he should be pulled by it thus being forced to keep up or be dragged behind it.

A writing teacher once suggested to write the first two chapters then toss the first chapter thus eliminating much introduction crap and getting right to the story.

[sailorboy (imported)]

I have never heard of the "Farnhams" book, but it sounds interesting. Thank you to all who responded and especially those who offered great constructive criticism because through you all I saw the weaknesses in my work, both in character development and in letting the reader imagine things.

Thanks again!

[Slammr (imported)]

I have never heard of the "Farnhams" book, but it sounds interesting.

Thanks again!

You can find a pretty good description of the book here (http://www.troynovant.com/Stoddard/Hein ... ehold.html).

What is Heinlein's real story here?

Robert Heinlein's fiction often provoked violent disagreement from its readers; his willingness to present controversial ideas ensured this. Both Starship Troopers and Stranger in a Strange Land still provoke debate, decades after their original publication and their Hugo Awards. But one of Heinlein's books provokes very little debate. The racist implications of Farnham's Freehold, with its society of cannibalistic black Muslims ruling white slaves, are apparently more than even Heinlein enthusiasts want to defend.

But this isn't really what's going on in this book at all. Read carefully, it's not a racist work, but a work attacking racism. Heinlein carefully led his readers down the garden path and over the precipice — so carefully that, to his misfortune, hardly any of them noticed the fall.

This may seem a paradoxical reading. But the evidence for it is in the actual text; many readers have simply gone right past it.

Waking after the war

The basic situation is this: A suburban Colorado family, with their house guest and their black servant, take refuge in a bomb shelter when a nuclear war begins. There is a massive impact — and they come out in a pastoral land with a near-tropical climate, despite having the same terrain features as present-day Colorado, which thoroughly confuses Heinlein's characters.

Halfway through the book, they are discovered by the land's inhabitants, a technologically advanced black society that maintains the area as a wilderness preserve. This society holds whites as slaves; indeed, it actually views them as a different species, less than fully human, and uses them as meat animals — though it also uses them as sexual partners. Its rulers are not even sadistic brutes; they are calmly certain that they are giving the best possible care for their human domesticated animals. The scenario is one to awaken the worst fears of a paranoiac white racist. To add to the anxiety, the black rulers are Muslims, in a novel written when the Black Muslims were a newly visible movement in American society.

All other things being equal —

But there's a logical corollary to this. If the institutionalized racism of Heinlein's future society, and its degradation of white people to subhuman status, is an evil, then the less severe degradation of black people to subhuman status in the United States of 1964, when Heinlein published Farnham's Freehold, is evil in exactly the same kind, though not in the same measure.

Heinlein was trained in mathematics; "all other things being equal" is a classical mode of mathematical argument. The hypothetical white racist reader of Farnham's Freehold has his face rubbed in the idea, This is what it feels like to be on the bottom in a racially oppressive society. Heinlein may have overestimated the intellectual sophistication of such readers by expecting them to see the logical symmetry — but he makes the point explicitly, more than once.

For one example, in Chapter 22, Barbara Wells asks Hugh Farnham

"How many white men of today could be trusted with the power Ponse had and use it with as much gentleness as he did use it?"

Farnham accepts the point, objecting only that

"Color doesn't enter into it."

In fact, he goes on to say that he himself could not be trusted with that kind of power, and that his own earlier actions (portrayed in previous chapters) show that he was capable of abusing power.

A mirror of bigotry

For a more emotional example, in Chapter 17, Farnham is speaking with his former houseboy, Joseph, now a member of the ruling class in the future society, and pleased by the change. Farnham objects to Joseph that he was not a slave but a decently treated employee. Joseph answers,

"Hugh, have you ever made a bus trip through Alabama? As a 'nigger'? ... Then shut up. You don't know what you are talking about."

Heinlein clearly expects the reader, even while seeing Joseph's accommodation to the black-ruled society as corrupt, to empathize with the bitter resentment of white racism that motivates it. Heinlein doesn't emphasize the point as much, but when Joseph remarks to Farnham on his past treatment by Farnham's wife and son, the implication is that Farnham too has made his own accommodations with racism, choosing to keep the peace with his family rather than confront them. This explicit use of black and white as each other's mirrors is profoundly subversive of racist beliefs in dissimilarity.

Note also the scene where Farnham's son Duke says to him "There never was a nigger bastard that wouldn't rape a white woman if he had a chance." Farnham describes this as "poisonous, insane nonsense," and when Duke starts to argue, tells him "Shut up!" This kind of reaction is rare in Heinlein's fiction, but one previous occurrence was in "If This Goes On —", in a scene where the hero, having seen the lynching of a Jew, provokes his older, more knowledgeable roommate to rage by wondering why the Jews won't accept Christianity as the true faith, since the Christians have told them it is so often. That is, Heinlein finds it natural to show his sympathetic characters becoming personally offended, even enraged, by racial bigotry.

Abuse of power in any form

At a deeper level, the novel isn't only about racism; it's about the abuse of power in any form. In Starship Troopers, Heinlein put forth the theory that in a properly functioning system of institutions, authority balances responsibility; the person who makes a decision pays its costs. This same equation underlies the political theory of Farnham's Freehold, or its negation does. In a relationship of ruler and subject, the ruler has all the authority and none of the responsibility, and the subject has all the responsibility and none of the authority — and both are corrupted by the experience, a point this novel illustrates in a variety of ways. In this novel's specific case, everyone in a racist society is corrupted by its racism.

In the 18th Century, Jonathan Swift published "A Modest Proposal", advocating that the English rulers of Ireland should relieve Irish poverty by fattening up Irish babies for their own dinner tables, creating a new industry and a new culinary delicacy. Most readers now get the point that Swift was not advocating cannibalism, but using it in a brutal satire on English rule.

Heinlein's satire of American racism is equally brutal; but since he invites his readers to imagine themselves, not as cannibals, but as victims of cannibalism, it's possible to take his book as a simple expression of fear of blacks, and not as an ethical warning against unequal power in any form. But the alternative reading offers a richer understanding of Farnham's Freehold, one that takes account of passages in the text that a white racist interpretation can only pass over in silence.

Worldbuilding for the Chosen

The portrayal of the Chosen as Muslims has also drawn accusations of axe-grinding: since they were Muslims, and since they were black, they were taken as Heinlein's portrayal of the Black Muslims. There's no way to prove that this interpretation wasn't in Heinlein's mind, of course — since this would involve proving a negative. But the Islam of the Chosen doesn't much resemble the Islam of the Black Muslims — or any other form of Islam existing in the 20th Century. Heinlein makes a point of having his protagonist find major differences between the two.

In fact, the Islam of the Chosen is a fairly ingenious piece of worldbuilding. It's logical to have a largely African-descended culture adopt some version of Islam as its faith; but Heinlein has also given the Chosen a matrilineal descent system (very different from the enhanced patriarchal values that the Black Muslims supported), with theological adjustments to follow, such as giving God ("Uncle the Mighty") an older sister, too holy even to be prayed to or sworn by. The implications of this matrilineality are worked out quite carefully; I remember finding their logic fascinating when I first read this book in my teens, shortly after it was originally published. If Heinlein's goal were to portray the Chosen as melodramatic villains, there was no need for him to go to the trouble of giving their culture an internal logic so elaborately traced, or so different from that of 20th century America.

This kind of worldbuilding is one of the things traditionally admired in science fiction, and Farnham's Freehold offers a respectable example of it, which readers put off by its surface are missing.

Realistic characterization & conflict

They are also missing some of Heinlein's most complex characterization. Hugh Farnham is a man with a variety of practical skills, but he's also a man with many flaws, trapped in an unrewarding life. The Farnham household is not an idealized 1950s family, but a group of troubled people in deep conflict with each other, much like characters in the "realistic" fiction of the 1950s and 1960s.

And its willingness to explore harsh realities goes beyond most of what Heinlein had written previously, or wrote subsequently. This book might have been the seed of a Heinlein who would do for adults what his classic juveniles did for adolescents, had it fallen on less stony ground.

(http://www.troynovant.com/Stoddard/Hein ... ehold.html)

[A-1 (imported)]

As the author of the aforementioned story, I wish that readers will post feedback for me about the story. Did you like it? Did you hate it? Was it detailed enough? This is a very different story than the first story I posted

on E.A.

Thank you for your help in critiquing this story.

Well,

Only works for me if Jennifer Beals (http://abagond.files.wordpress.com/2008 ... -beals.jpg) or Halle Berry (http://halleberry.celebden.com/wp-conte ... -berry.jpg) chains me to their bed and unmercifully uses me for their sexual pleasure.

...and leave the black males out of it...

[A Wanderer (imported)]

Hello everybody.

Just a passing reader, I find the story by Sailorboy received an unjustly harsh treatment here. I am not at ease with lines of reasoning starting from 'The whole topic offenses me'. That is not 'constructive criticism', I see it rather as pure bigotry (sorry, that's like that: it offenses me). 'Racism is bad': what a news! But wake up: castrating people against their will is also very bad, and perhaps worth than racism! Many people would be 'offended' by THAT topic, by the simple idea of somebody castrating somebody else, with or without racial issue. Of course, one has the right to be offended (one has the right to think whatever he wants and to read or refuse to read whatever he wants), but what is the sense to use such assertion in a discussion about a fiction? It's pure tautology: if someone is offended by such topic, then obviously stories on such topic are not for him, and if the topic is explicit in the title, that's even better so he just doesn't have to bother to read it. Same for a discussion in a bulletin board where such topic is explicit in the title: no use to take part in it, except of course if the intention is just to attack bluntly the writer who asked for some feedback, perhaps with the philanthropic purpose to help him to stop to write stories on topics which offend you. So there will be only stories on topics which don't offend you (even if they offend some other people without good reasons) and the world will be better.

An other point. Some here have suggested that the story was not well written and too simplistic. I must agree: for me also it was not what the title had made me anticipated (yeah, the topic fuckingly arouses me, sorry guys: I must be one of those creepy crypto racists). However, some of the alternative plots suggested are very complex. I have nothing against literature and I assure of my sympathy all those who look for literary qualities in sex stories. However I look for something else (porn material to say it bluntly), and I am not alone in that case, and it often works better with simpler, shorter stories, which say little more than the general argument contained in the title, just spiced by some descriptions of hot bodies, humiliating details, and manly names (and not too much butchery please, I'm not into castration and I know what you will say: what are you doing here then?). There is some room for those kind of 'stories' no?

Sailorboy, please continue to write even if it is difficult and if you receive few positive feedback (even mine, in some way, is not so much). I like the topic: as a fiction it's hot. I don't like stories with murders, but I don't suspect all those who like them to be murderers. Sailorboy, if you like stories with racial issues that does not mean you are a racist or will be read only by racists. In fact, I suspect many racists would be no less offended by your little peace of work than some people here.

To Slammr: thanks for Heinlein's book. Sounds interesting, although perhaps a bit overdemonstrative. For me however Heinleins means above all 'Starship Troopers' which means Casper's naked ass and hot whipping session.

Now I hope none will be offended by my intrusion.

[A-1 (imported)]

Well,

Only works for me if Jennifer Beals (http://abagond.files.wordpress.com/2008 ... -beals.jpg) or Halle Berry (http://halleberry.celebden.com/wp-conte ... -berry.jpg) chains me to their bed and unmercifully uses me for their sexual pleasure.

...and leave the black males out of it...

O.K., O.K., leave the WHITE and the Poka-dotted males out of it, too...

...genius is never appreciated it its own time... write AWAY!

[Unregistered (imported)]

I like the theme!Hopefully you `ll write more of it.Maybe you can tell us in d e t a i l s how the white beasts of burden were treatet pulling wagons,plows , carriages .... under the whip of their mistresses , daughters , masters......

Thanks anyway for your work!

regards

Christian