Today we're talking about a story form Green Lantern 80 Page Giant #1, an anthology published in 1998. The framing device for this issue is Guy Gardner, John Stewart, and Alan Scott sitting around in Guy's bar after hours, trading stories from their glory days as Lanterns in the Golden and Silver Ages. The story we're focusing on this time is titled "Before I'd Be A Slave...", and is written by Denny O'neil, with art and colors by Rodolfo Damaggio, and letters by Bob Lappan.
John Stewart finds himself wandering into an unnamed city that appears to be in the Southern United States, and stumbles onto a political rally. Standing behind the podium is a politician talking about equality, claiming to love and accept black people, as long as they know their place. He thinks that black kids should go to black schools, and only learn what they need to get jobs that suit them, leaving higher education and better jobs for white people.
We’ve all herd this kind of rhetoric before, where someone will say enough nice things about you before tearing you down, just so they can plausibly deny hating you…the end result is that you get dragged through the mud while they get to pretend it was nothing personal.
But no matter what people like this claim to believe, it doesn’t change the fact that he only talks about black people in a way that others them, that treats them as a distinct group separate from white people, and his goal is to keep them separate, and treat them as lesser, all while passing the blame for inequality onto those being discriminated against.
John then does something I think we all wish we could do: he gets fed up with Humanity and leaves the Earth. At the time, Green Lanterns weren’t allowed to use their rings for anything frivolous, so John understandably thought the Guardian who appeared before him was going to scold him for going on a joyride…but instead, the Guardian acknowledged that John was using the ring to protect himself. He came to the vast emptiness of space to calm the rage in his heart, to spend hours just gazing at the natural wonders of the universe, untouched and uncorrupted by Human hatred.
Eventually, John notices a spaceship in the middle of an asteroid field. The ship was damaged and disabled, so John sets them down on a nearby planet, and goes to check on the crew. But once the doors open, John is greeted by two different races of people…one of masters, the other slaves. Those in power blame those under them for the damage to the ship, and immediately start violently punishing them. John steps in and destroys their weapons, but the slave owners insist that they’re in the right, because the law allows for everything that they’re doing. And on top of that, the slaves have never known anything other than servitude for generations, and can’t even imagine a different life with a different purpose. The system these people live in says that this is right, this is just, this is the way things should be. John disagrees. He shoves the slave owners back in their ship, alone, and sends them on their way. And he stays behind, with the small group of newly liberated people, to teach them a better way to live.
When I revisited this story, it was honestly kind of depressing how relevant it still is. You would hope that, after all this time, we would have come further, that we wouldn’t need to keep learning the same lessons over and over again. But the truth is, stories like this remain necessary, because the hateful desires expressed within are all too real. Science fiction has always been used as a way to talk bluntly about societal issues, ignoring any attempt to pretend that these issues are complicated, and instead holding up a mirror to show us what our world really looks like. The aliens rescued by John at the end of the story are exactly what the people from the beginning of the story want: a lower class that has no rights, knows their place, does what they’re told, and likes it. And there is absolutely nothing that anyone can say to spin that into something positive.
When it comes to Human rights, there is no middle ground, and there are no exceptions. If we continue to choose to have lower classes of people with fewer rights, then we’re exactly what science fiction depicts us as: just a bunch of ugly monsters oppressing other people to make ourselves feel important. These are lessons we shouldn’t need to keep learning, this should all just be common sense by now. Treat people like people, period. Doing anything less than that means that we as a society have learned nothing of value from the heroes we’ve spent our lives reading about.
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