A couple years ago I puzzled a bit over the meaning of "The Zombie Apocalypse", and along the way I discounted the interpretation of it as a race war as not being the whole story. It is hard to put a finger on this quotation or that shrug of the shoulders that leads me to reconsider, but I'm not sure I'd be quite so quick to discount that translation these days. I've heard too many people talking about being ready for it with an immediacy more pressing than "a collapse next year."
Several cities are now afflicted with "flash mob" gangs that use electronic media to coordinate maneuvers to converge and attack stores or people in overwhelming numbers and then fade away. It isn't difficult to find out that most of the mobs are young black men.
It does have something of the unexpected character of zombie attacks, doesn't it? Maybe I was naive in 2010, or maybe the zombie fad is morphing a bit, but I now think the racial aspect is larger than I did then.
I think at minimum, the popularity over the last decade of zombie literature suggests that the idea is not far below the surface for us. Our fears of invaders who are not merely different, but deeply different from us likely owes something to race.
ReplyDeleteHowever - humans have always felt this way about those outside the tribe. The reason it focuses on race is because we actually know about other races now. Through most of history, contact with other races was rare or even unimaginable - hatred was for ones near neighbors and competitors. Also, I had not heard zombie-fear applied to American blacks, but to swarms of immigrants.