Viridians 2

Viridians 2

 

Here’s a science-fiction series that I’d like to see:

One of the extraterrestrial races on the show is the Viridians. That’s the Human name for them; their own translates to “The Only Intelligent Beings”. Their skin is colored green. There’s variation; some are dark olive green, some are light lime green, most are in the middle. The Viridians themselves impose a sharp boundary on this continuum; they call the olive-green Viridians “Black” and the lime-green Viridians “White”; and all in between are put into one of these two categories, though the difference is arbitrary, and often missed by Humans. In fact some of the ‘White’ Viridians are in fact optically more olive than some of the ‘Black’ Viridians.

The Viridians make a sharp distinction because they are racists. Centuries ago some of the lime-green Viridians enslaved some of the olive-green Viridians; to justify this crime against viridianity, the slave-holding “White” Viridians insisted that the enslaved “Black” Viridians are a genetically inferior race who need to be “guided for their own good”. That theory is pseudoscience; genetically the distinction is skin-deep; by any scientific measure the Viridian race is one. The prejudice continues, partly because of stupid tribalism, and mostly because it remains profitable for the Viridian oligarchs - most of whom are lime-green “Whites”- to maintain an oppressed class of olive-green “Blacks”,  to keep the Viridian working class divided by skin tint, and thus suppress working-class wages.

The racism is systematic, and is periodically refreshed by violent assaults upon “Black” Viridians by the “White”-controlled government. The olive-green “Black” Viridians respond to their oppression partly in fruitful ways, by mutual aid through religion, and by cultural creativity; but they also respond in self-destructive ways, by broken families, and by crime. Olive-green disfunctionality is cited by the “White” Viridians as proof of “Black” inferiority; olive-green cultural creativity is noticed by the lime-greens only to appropriate without credit.

The Humans are baffled by this. To most of them, Viridians all look alike; for they are indeed all green; none of them are in fact white, nor black, if by white you mean white, and by black you mean black. It will be a running gag in the series for Humans to mess up the distinction between White and Black, especially for the ones in the middle of the continuum. This will exasperate Viridians of all skin-tints, for even the oppressed “Blacks” unconsciously buy into the racism, as a matter of identity politics. They will accuse the Humans of racism for their confusion, even though that confusion is precisely the Human’s failure to be properly racist.

The Viridians retort that Humans are all brown to them. Viridians money is brown, roughly the tint of Caucasian Human skin, so they call it ‘the long brown’.

Of course this is all a Brechtian alienation technique. Science fiction is good at that sort of thing; take some social injustice and translate it to an alien context, to make the injustice unfamiliar and therefore visible, and risible. Thus green for brown, just to mess with the viewer’s head, and force them to think. Also the Viridian names should be messed up, with mixed black/white signifiers. Thus Bradford Django for an olive-green, and Tupac Anderson for a lime-green.

For added fun: that universe has Star-Trekkian universal translators, which are programmed to bleep out all obscenities. Thus we the audience get to hear bleeps all the time, especially when the more deplorable Viridian racists discuss politics with the Humans, and argue in bad faith, by insulting to dominate, rather than reasoning to learn. For even more fun: on one of the shows, we learn that the ‘bleep’ noise it itself a Viridian curse word, so the robotic censorship is a complete failure. The Humans try to reprogram the censor program, but the best they can do is replace the ‘bleep’ sound with a dull robotic ‘faaaak’ noise. The Humans put up with this until the end of the show, then change it back.

One story arc involves a political movement demanding reparations. A Human smells a rat, and after investigation, proves to an astonished olive-green Viridian that the movement was funded and organized by the JJJ, a racist terrorist gang of lime-green Viridians. The reparations were ostensibly meant to pay a one-time pittance to all olive-green Viridians, but the JJJ actually wanted to justify compiling a database of all Viridians, giving names, addresses, and precise ‘olive-itude factor’. The olive-itude factor would be defined by racist pseudo-science, for olive-itude is not a scientifically valid concept; and the JJJ consciously intended to use that database later on, to officially implement discriminatory policies.