With A Wizard of Earthsea, I was more than equal. Everything else I read at school taught me that being Black made me inferior. But in this story was an unremarked-upon truth that I thought no one else knew: being white did not make you virtuous. I was the only Black kid at an all white school, and my classmates’ monolithic disregard for my being was appalling. Reading that line filled me with dread the bad guys in this book were like the bad guys in my own life. Using these gifts, he saves his home from “a savage people, white-skinned, yellow-haired, and fierce,” who liked “the sight of blood and the smell of burning villages.” Turning past pages of characters who had nothing in common with me, I settled into a cozy yet rustically sparse yarn about an adventurous adolescent who calls and commands hawks and apparitions of mist with equal aplomb. Bored with the Agatha Christie mystery my class was reading- And Then There Were None-I decided to skip through my literature book instead. I stumbled upon A Wizard of Earthsea, the first book in the cycle, as a twelve-year-old. Normally, each autumn I immerse myself in all six of the books, but with the rise of a new Civil Rights movement, I’m moving that schedule up to summer, and I think now is the perfect time for everyone else to follow suit. That’s the brilliance of Le Guin’s Earthsea Cycle, one of the first fantasy series to cast dark-skinned people in protagonist roles. One thing that remains true, both in her vision and in our world, is that this magic originates with Black people. And then, as if by magic–just like the penultimate scene in one of her final books–a coalition of people of all hues and ideologies unite to rework society in the name of equilibrium. Though the city backdrop of most high-profile protests is at odds with Le Guin’s lush settings, this moment in 2020 feels like something she might have imagined: Black and brown people banding together to uproot an inequitable system built by hordes of pale brutes.
She loved color and trees, but mostly she loved subversive ideas. Le Guin, who passed in 2018, was a brilliant science fiction and fantasy writer who built entire worlds based on concepts of Taoism, feminism, and transformation. The moment felt supernatural, like a scene from an Ursula K. It didn’t start with George Floyd, but his death was the shock that brought thousands of heroic Black people from out of pandemic lockdown to fight back against systemic forces of death. Sign up for our newsletter to get submission announcements and stay on top of our best work.
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