Why race and gender do not matter in Andy Weir’s ‘Artemis’

By all accounts, “Artemis,” Andy Weir’s new novel of economic intrigue on a future moon colony, is selling briskly, with a film on the way. The reaction to the book has been mostly positive. However, two writers at “Wired,” Justice Namaste and Sarah Scoles, decided to have something called “A Conversation about Race and Gender in Andy Weir’s Artemis.” What was contained within had more to do with what social justice warriors think about the subject than what was depicted in the book, set on the moon in the 2080s.

Colorblindness is racism

One of the more dispiriting statements by Namaste suggests that the ideal once expressed by Dr.

Martin Luther King about a future in which people are judged by the content of their character and not the color of their skin has been abandoned by the social justice left. “The idea behind this is that if you don’t see racial difference, you can’t possibly uphold inequality. However, many scholars argue that by refusing to acknowledge when racial discrimination does exist, color-blindness actually supports systems of racial inequality.”

One of the implied suggestions in the novel is that, on Artemis at least, and hopefully, on Earth as well of the 2080s, Dr. King’s vision has been achieved. Jazz, the main character, is a woman of Saudi descent, though not a practicing Muslim, hence a “woman of color’ (a term that lumps together people of very diverse backgrounds who are not white European or North America.) However, that matters little next to aspects of her character, good and bad.

This issue of the main character seems to have triggered the writers for Wired. The fact that Jazz is not defined by her ethnic background or her gender is something they find abhorrent.

The world of ‘Artemis’ is as distant from our time as we are from the 1940s

The Wired writers forget that “Artemis” is set in the future as well as on the moon, in the 2080s to be exact.

Racial and sexual attitudes will have evolved from 2017 much as they had already developed from the 1940s when racism and sexism were accepted and pervasive. One of the beautiful aspects of the novel is that not only do these social ills no longer exist, but the hypersensitivity toward race and gender does not exist either.

The great sins of the 1940s and for some decades following were racism and sexism. The great sin of the early 21st Century is the tendency to see those things in just about everything, even when they do not exist.

Jazz never blames her troubles on her gender or ethnic background, as a social justice warrior millennial might. She knows she has made some bad decisions and knew what she has to do to overcome them. Then she goes ahead and does those things, even at significant risk for herself. Therein resides her great appeal, making Jazz someone anyone would like to know or even be.