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Future Dystopia & Civil Rights

In "The Greatest," the first story in Walter Mosley's collection Futureland, the setting is a not-distant-future, dystopian America, which retains its cultural and social skew in favor of the powerful and against the disadvantaged but which has evidently been politically reorganized with a view toward redressing certain grievances. The big social picture of Futureland--a failed attempt by American Nazis to generate a race war and assassinate all African Americans--is important to recognize because it is implicated in the way that people make choices and confront life obstacles. Indeed, in that regard, "The Greatest" obliquely suggests that African Americans as a group have achieved some measure of social and cultural advancement. Even so, there is also a measure of social dislocation. Thus it is that, in the future dystopic America, Fera Jones has an opportunity to become a sports superstar--though at the cost of a truly private life, though her achievement is a consequence of her physical freakishness (basketball-player tall and 260 pounds of fighting weight) and racial and sexual ambiguity, and though no accomplishment of hers can prevent her father from being cured of a pernicious pharmaceutical addiction.

A double effect and what could be called a "half" effect of an imagined transformed future infuse "The Greatest." On one hand, Mosley invents for Fera a persona and history that programmatically violate preconceptions of American "types," whether the person be of African or European descent. On the other, he appropriates au courant pop-culture referents to construct his uniquely oblique vision of a somewhat-future America. Thus it is that Fera is a kinky-haired blonde, with skin pigmentation and hair that are too dark for the white "type" and too light for the black "type." Her father, Prof. Jones, is of definite African American ancestry, but he is anomalous as well--a professor at a Massachusetts university who is ev...

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Future Dystopia & Civil Rights. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 05:23, March 19, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1713372.html