Art: Octavia Butler on Racism

On the way home from work last week, I was listening to NPR news program as usual. Most of the stories and reports were about Katrina Hurrican Victims and how they are working and trying to get their life back in order.

Right before I got off the freeway, Sharon Ball's story was on. The report was on Octavia Butlet, the first black woman to succeed in the science fiction genre. She died last week of age 58. The report was 15 minutes long so I found a parking spot and sat in the car until the report was over. After I listened to Sharon Ball's report on the radio, I rushed home, got online and checked out the reports and articles on Octavia Butler.


This is one small quote from her essay on racism. If you want to check out the whole essay and any other articles and news about her, please visit www.npr.org.

"Several years ago I wrote a novel called Dawn in which extra-solar aliens arrive, look us over, and inform us that we have a pair of characteristics that together constitute a fatal flaw. We are, they admit, intelligent, and that's fine. But we are also hierarchical, and our hierarchical tendencies are older and all too often, they drive our intelligence-that is, they drive us to use our intelligence to try to dominate one another. "