The Comet (5 pts): Dismantling Racial Discrimination Through Tragedy
With the current state of the world right now, I feel that this is a better time than ever to show appreciation for the African American authors of the past and the present. As I looked through the reading list, I came across W.E.B. DuBois' name, along with his work The Comet . Though I had heard of DuBois from my high school history classes, I did not know any of his works. When I saw that The Comet was written in 1920, I wasn't expecting much out of the "sci-fi department". Normally when I think of what defined sci-fi back then, my mind tends to lean towards the film Metropolis . Robots, utopias, weird machines, anything futuristic. How could a single comet compare to that without feeling inferior? It all made sense after I finished reading. The sci-fi element was just the backdrop to the main theme of the story; the comet was the catalyst for the realization that racial discrimination is not only an absurd concept, but it unfortunately takes a serious tragedy for