Ender's Game: What I Missed the First 20 Times Around.

[Content note: racism, homophobia]

Ender's Game

Like many people, I loved Ender's Game as a child. It was my favorite book; I must have reread it at least once or twice every year, starting when I was in middle school. I loved the plot; I found Ender to be a sympathetic hero; the details of the writing grabbed my imagination. I only recently, however, after a long break, sat down to reread it.

And what. the. everloving. fuck.

On page 65, Ender has the following exchange with his friend, Alai:

They grinned. Then Ender said, "Better invite Bernard."
Alai cocked an eyebrow. "Oh?"
"And Shen."
"That slanty-eyed butt-wiggler?"

"Slanty-eyed"? Since when was that in there? 

"And Shen.''
"That slanty-eyed butt-wiggler?"
Ender decided that Alai was joking. "Hey, we can't all be niggers."

No. Ender- Ender, who I respected and who I identified and sympathized with- just called someone a nigger. Just called Alai a nigger. Alai, whose open friendship meant the world to Ender, whose friendship meant the world to me and had stayed with me as I moved on from the books. Ender just called Alai a nigger. That is then followed by these two lines:

Alai grinned. "My grandpa would've killed you for that."
"My great great grandpa would have sold him first."

It's a mark of my privilege that I didn't notice this exchange when I was younger. Later editions of the book were modified* to take out the word, but I know that my copy contained Ender calling someone a nigger. And that when I was a kid, I didn't notice. Or care.

Orson Scott Card

The story, of course, gets worse. I had heard for a long time that Orson Scott Card (henceforth OSC for brevity) was a bigoted homophobe in real life. I had not known the extent. Wikipedia quotes him as calling for laws that ban gay sex to "remain on the books... to be used when necessary to send a clear message that those who flagrantly violate society's regulation of sexual behavior cannot be permitted to remain as acceptable, equal citizens within that society". So, basically: gay people are subhuman. Card also apparently believes that "the dark secret of homosexual society—the one that dares not speak its name—is how many homosexuals first entered into that world through a disturbing seduction or rape or molestation or abuse, and how many of them yearn to get out of the homosexual community and live normally." Yeah, okay, apparently all we gay people have just been molested into being gay, and all we want is to live "normally." Okay, bigot, how about you shut the fuck up.

But I had not seen his bigotry run into his work, having not reread it since before I was aware of these issues. I had not seen the link between his (stupid, wrong) non-fiction theorizings and his fiction. I had been trying to be careful, in fact, to keep my own prejudices against Mormonism (which has some racial and gender-based stuff that I am not going to get into here, as well as policies on homosexuality, that I strongly disagree with) from biasing my view of OSC as an individual. And then I read the following response to a teacher's question about why he had chosen to release an edition with the word "nigger" removed:

Even as the old obscenities dealing with sex and excrement were unleashed upon the public, new obscenities moved from the realm of the merely indecorous to the sinful. What f* and s* (and worse words) had once been, now n* has become. And, just as there were prudes who screamed in outrage and demanded that any work containing those old bad words must be banned, so we have a new group of prudes making identical demands about works containing the new bad word. 

... 

Such a word, today, is n*. In the scene just quoted, I had Ender using the word to wake Alai up to the fact that by calling Shen "slanty-eyed," Alai was being racist. A sort of tit-for-tat response: If you're going to call my East Asian friend "slanty-eyed," then you choose to live in the kind of world where you would be called "n*." Morally, this is clearly (to me, at least) a rejection of the kind of world where people call each other names based on superficial racial characteristics.

Oh fuck no.

First off, let's talk about how you chose, as a white person, to create a circumstance in which a black person would have to be taught about how to not be racist by a white person. Let's just take a look at that.

Second, let's talk about how there is a distinction between "prudes" and "people that you have offended by being racist." Shit and fuck? Those are words that people might feel offended by. They are "strong language." The word nigger's offensiveness does not stem from how "strong" it is, it stems from how it is a word that was used (and is being used, now) BY WHITE PEOPLE to OPPRESS BLACK PEOPLE. So having Ender (a white person) call Alai (a black person) a nigger is not at all the same as having people of any race say "fuck you" to other people. It replicates the power imbalance and the violence that we, if we are not racist scumbags, are trying to move AWAY from in the US. There is no prudishness involved here. This is not a case of feeling that the word is improper, this is the use of a word that actually hurts people and contributes to systemic inequality.

Thirdly, let's talk about that second paragraph there. The moral that OSC seems to be trying to impart is apparently: if you, as a person of color, say something racist, you deserve to be put in your place by having someone use racial violence against you. You "choose to live in the kind of world where you would be called 'n*'." 

But there's no way that a white person- there's no way that Ender- would ever be at risk of making that choice. They could never choose to open themselves up to racial invective, because there aren't any structurally racist words that apply to white people. If there were, the logical conclusion of that scene would have been Ender getting his comeuppance for using a racist term: after calling Alai a nigger, Ender would have been called something racist. But that didn't happen, because white people apparently don't have to follow the same "tit-for-tat" rules that people of color do.

So my feelings on Ender's Game are now basically: fuck that shit. I loved this book, but OSC, while he may be a gifted writer, is a racist, homophobic, sexist douchebag, and that stuff doesn't just magically not get included in his writing. It's there, and I hate it, and I don't think I'll ever be able to read this book, that was my favorite book, again.

*Transcription:

They grinned. Then Ender said, "Better invite Bernard." 

Alai cocked an eyebrow. "Oh?" 

"And Shen." 

"That little butt-wiggler?" 

Ender decided that Alai was joking. "If you didn't hold yours so tight it would wiggle, too."

Note: I've chosen not to discuss some other problematic portions of the book, including the gender essentialism (apparently girls tend not to pass the tests to get into Battle School, because there are "too many centuries of evolution working against them" or some bullshit); the whole thing about how OSC has written it so that Jews think they're the shit, but they actually suck; a whole damn lot of adults saying "yes, we're abusing these kids, but it's totally justified because: alien menace, so we'll joke about how horrible this is and then do it anyway!"; and the entire structure of Ender's growth, which reads like a perfect portrayal of someone who is being abused justifying their learned abuse of others.