Save the Pearls WTF: Chapter Three

I keep meaning to get on with this and then other stuff happens. But tonight no other stuff is happening, so let's proceed with chapter three. If you recall, at the end of chapter two, Eden's awful, bullying, arrogant, prejudiced, Coal boss, Bramford displays extreme prejudice against racial-slur-hurling Eden by suspending her from her job. It was so sad, you guys. But it was okay because her "dark prince" Jamal is going to see her later.

Right! Where are we?



Eden leaves the lab, having been suspended, and passes by a robot scanner that...I don't really know what it's for. It studies the chip in her head which has all her genetic information on it, but it's not really clear why you would do that. It's basically an excuse for Eden to angst over how nobody ever sees the Real Eden Newman, possibly because she's, you know, HIDDEN BEHIND THE FUCKING BLACKFACE. The robot is built to look like a Coal. I haven't mentioned it before, but Eden always thinks of Coals as Them. Italicised, capitalised Them. So nice bit of "othering" there, Foyt.

Eden heads to the employee quarters, noting on the way that Bramford's logo is everywhere. She views this as him marking his territory "like an animal." So, here's our black hero being compared to an animal. Remember that...Oh wait, you don't need to, because (spoiler) Eden never thinks of Bramford in any other way. This is Foyt tackling racism.

Eden's World-Band (don't ask, because it's never explained. From what I can gather it's like a bracelet that tells you what to do) tells Eden her oxy levels are low. I'm assuming, because Eden exposits that oxy is "the happy drug" that oxy here means oxytocin, but again, it's never explained, and the description Foyt gives of oxy's effects don't really match oxytocin. People just get it pumped into them to keep them content. Obviously Eden is vastly underdosed. Eden rushes back to her living unit and meets her dog, Austin, who is like her only friend in the world ever. She reflects that the unit is too small for them both and that "neither one of us fit, do we?" DEEP SHIT THERE.

Eden doses up on oxy and thinks about redwood trees. Or, as she calls them, Sequoia-dendron giganteum, because the only way Foyt can think to show us Eden is intelligent is to have her refer to every plant and animal she encounters by its scientific/Latin name. And it gets really fucking annoying really fucking fast.

An Ethics Officer shows up in her room in hologram form and reminds Eden that she only has six months to find a mate before she's thrown out to die on the surface. She tells Eden that “We cannot afford to supply precious resources to those who do not contribute to the continuation of our species.” But we can afford to dole out resources to all the babies you're going to theoretically make.

The Ethics Officer notes that Eden is a pretty poor mate option, but that some Pearl men have offered to mate with her. Eden has rejected them though, because she'd rather be dead than mate with her own kind and produce a Pearl child. So...I don't know, Eden just hates everyone, really.

Eden bemoans how she's doomed unless she can convince Jamal to mate with her. Austin listens sympathetically, as dogs are wont to do, and Eden has a flashback to her mum (a redhead or "pink pearl." You know, there are black pearls, too. Just saying) giving her Austin as a puppy and telling Eden Austin is colourblind. 

I tried to find a picture of how dogs actually see the world, but this came up on my Google search first.

Anyway, there's also some bullshit about Eden's mum "adopting" the poet Emily Dickinson into their family so Eden doesn't feel so alone, but how after her mum died Eden stopped believing in love. It's really...dumb.

Eden eats her meal pills (the future!) and waits for Jamal to show up in hologram form. To prepare for her date, she does a workout, has herself scanned for signs of the Heat and then "dials" in a new coating of Midnight Lustur. That's her blackface make-up. It makes her skin and hair a "lustrous shade of black." Eden examines herself in the mirror and tells Austin that she's "definitely passing, right?"

Here endeth the chapter. It's a short one, so let's talk about the blackface a bit.

Blackface was originally a form of make-up used in minstrel and vaudeville shows, popularised in the 19th century. It was used to create stereotyped and stock "black" characters (the mammy type, the pickaninny, the coon, etc). It was a significant part of spreading racist images and attitudes - well into the 1950s, black actors were limited to these stereotypical roles (one of the reasons I love Night of the Living Dead is that the protagonist was black and the film wasn't about him being black, nor was his character a stereotype - I've always found that to be a pretty big deal). In TV today, many black characters are still derived from these old stock characters. Think how many TV shows or movies you've seen where black people "encroach" on white territory to the shock and horror of the white characters.

A lot of the attention Save the Pearls has received focuses on the use of blackface and why it's so problematic that Foyt has co-opted it for her "reverse racism" angle. The problem for me (coming at it from a place of white privilege) is that Foyt is not in a position to decide that a) blackface isn't offensive and b) the history behind it should be ignored by readers because her intentions are good. See, here's the thing. Intent is not magic. What you intend and what you achieve can be separated by chasms sometimes, and this is one of them.

A white person co-opting such an enormous part of black history, with such a massive legacy of damage behind it, is just inherently a failure. I don't see any way this device could have been employed without being offensive. In the context of Save the Pearls, we're talking about a world where Coals have not always been the ruling class. Prior to the Heat, it's made clear that Pearls were on top, via Eden's reflections in the first chapter on the good old days when blue-eyed blondes were the standard of beauty. So we don't have a decades' long history of white oppression where black people donned whiteface make-up in TV and on stage to create exaggerated versions of white people because white people were deemed too inferior to get on stage themselves. We don't have the exaggerated stock white characters. We have "our world, but now it's too hot," so I can only assume social and cultural history until the point of the Heat is the same as ours.

So blackface make-up as a method of oppression against the Pearls just doesn't work. But then neither does anything else in this book, so no surprises there...