Fallout Historical Speculation - African-Americans

[camwyn]

I don't know about you, but pretty much the first thing that comes to mind when I think of 'American society in the 1950s' and 'African-Americans' at the same time is 'segregation'. Other things follow after that, most of which can be summed up as 'generally shitty treatment' and 'if people didn't see the civil rights movement coming in earnest, they should've'. The thing is, I think this was one of the aspects of real-world American society that did shift and change by the time of the Great War. Just... not as fast, and not as strongly.

Start with the fact that you can roam through a wide selection of ruined buildings in the DC area, including manufacturing facilities, office buildings, public libraries, hotels, apartment complexes, hospitals, museums, and government buildings. All the buildings that are large enough to have multi-stall bathrooms have separate bathrooms for men and women, but there is not one instance of finding bathrooms labeled 'coloreds' or 'negroes' or any other racial designation. Similarly, you can find (and in some cases use) water fountains in public buildings and in businesses; all the water fountains stand alone rather than being connected to another one nearby or having another one nearby, all of them use the same in-game object, and none of them are marked as 'whites only' or 'negroes only'. There are a number of diners scattered across the landscape, none of which have any signs of any particular seating area being reserved or set aside for any reason.

Similarly, while it's been a while since I checked them closely, I don't recall any indicators of segregation appearing in the buildings in New Vegas. I can't use most of the New Vegas buildings as evidence, though. The majority of those were in use and might have been renovated, updated, or otherwise changed by the residents. The majority of untouched buildings in New Vegas were all private businesses rather than places of public accommodation, though. REPCONN or Sunset Sarsaparilla might have had different on-site policies about that kind of thing. I know we never encountered any sign of official racial separation on the grounds of the Sierra Madre Casino, which was largely sealed off from the outside world and populated only by chemically altered weirdoes who would've had no reason to rip signs off doors (the Ghost People). The Madre may or may not be admissible as evidence.

I'm not counting anything in the Divide; if Ulysses is to be believed there was a thriving community there before the Courier started a certain ball rolling, so the Divide buildings can't be relied upon as evidence. And I'm not even considering Big Mountain. Everything's been altered and rewritten there a million times over. If the drawings that appear during the intro sequence for Old World Blues are to be believed, the six highest scientists at Big Mountain were five white guys and a woman who was either white or Asian to some degree, but those are the only humans in Big Mountain we know about other than the Chinese prisoners-of-war being used as experimental subjects. No evidence one way or the other. And I don't know if the handful of prewar buildings in Zion National Park were big enough to be subject to any segregation rules that might have existed, so I'm not counting them either.

I have not played games one and two enough to verify anything about their buildings.

There is also the matter of the Vaults. The purpose of the Vaults was to run social experiments on pre-selected segments of the population to see how they reacted to the stresses of isolation and how successfully they recolonized Earth after the vault opened. Each Vault other than the control Vaults had its own experimental condition; it seems very unlikely that if society were racially segregated on the surface, every single experimental Vault would include 'and we make the blacks and the whites live together and use everything in common' alongside its main experimental condition. Vaults 3 and 8 were both control Vaults, neither one of which exhibited any signs in-game of having been racially segregated. Vault 8 became Vault City, with a racially mixed population (ostensibly people from outside can join the population, but this happens very rarely). Vault 3's inhabitants were slaughtered to the last by the Fiends. No indicators of separate restrooms, living quarters, eating facilities, etc. The only Vault known to have practiced any specific kind of isolation or separation was Vault 19, which imposed an arbitrary red/blue scheme on the population and appears to have been an experiment in paranoia anyway.

Building evidence aside, there is again the matter of the Anchorage campaign. In Operation Anchorage, the second highest ranked officer you meet (after General Chase) is Lieutenant Thomas Morgan, a black man affiliated with the Army Intelligence Corps. The female doctor mentioned in the speculation about women is also black, and there are several African-American characters working on camp equipment alongside characters of other races. Since corpses disappear within seconds in the sim, we can't use those as evidence of anything- but we can use Mothership Zeta. The medic squad that was captured by the aliens is composed of Private Elliot Tercorien, Corporal Rheems, Corporal Spurlock, Private Beckett, Private Mears, and Sergeant Daniels. Of these, Tercorien, Mears, and Daniels are listed by the game as 'Caucasian'. Rheems is listed as 'Hispanic', but he looks about as white as the other guys. Both Spurlock (dead) and Beckett (revivable) are visibly black. That's two out of six. This would appear to indicate that at least one unit was at least moderately racially integrated. I hate to keep using entertainment filmed long after the fact as an example, but two out of six is a better cast percentage than M*A*S*H. (There were, in fact, actual black doctors in the medical units in the Korean War. The executives behind the show dropped Spearchucker Jones from the cast in the first season and never really bothered again.)

I don't think pre-War Fallout America was a particularly racially enlightened society, but I do think that if it had still been officially segregated to any great degree we would have seen at least some level of physical evidence in the ruins. The Army had black men and women serving in the same units and same roles as white men and women. I am inclined to think that the early civil rights movement probably foundered, and that racial issues were addressed with 'all due deliberate haste', emphasis heavily on the 'deliberate' part, over the course of decades rather than years.

There was still at least some degree of social separation of blacks and whites, I think. Vaults 101 and 21 represent populations that were closed off from outside genetic infusions for close to two hundred years, but very few of the Vault inhabitants we see look particularly interracial in ancestry. This may be a case of the graphics engine being at fault, though. It's hard to tell ages apart, let alone races, and I know I've encountered several characters in FO3 and New Vegas who looked like they were either realistically desert-tan or just needed to wash their faces who were listed as 'African-American' in the game code- plus I have generally suspected that there are many more Vault 101 inhabitants than we see in the game. Overall, though, I think the early civil rights movement foundered- possibly due to fortuitous 'accidents' taking out several would-be leaders and court cases shutting down a lot of the others- and racial change wound up coming about very, very, very slowly, just the way the people on top thought it should be.

Comments

[camwyn]

Oh, excellent. Thank you!