As to William Stoddard’s first comment, I’m not sure that Heinlein’s audience was less subtle than we are (however subtle that may be), but that their culture led them to accept the one way link between neo-chimps being like black slaves without bridling at (or noticing?) the converse of black slaves being like (neo) chimps.

I did read your review of Farnham’s Freehold and there is much in it with which I agree. I remember that I also, when I read Farnham’s Freehold back in the mid-60s, made and heard the same moral equivalence argument.

BUT, for me, at least, he overdid it with a) the fact that the dominant blacks ate meat from the white slaves (and, in fact, raised some for their meat, b) the routine black use of white women as “bed warmers”, and c) the brutality of the black masters’ routine treatment of the slave males – either castrating them or cutting off their thumbs. In all three cases (including, I “think”, even the second), his black on white slavery exceeded US white on black slavery and, more tellingly for me, in each case it did so in a way Europeans “traditionally” associated with African – cannibals with unbounded libidos, especially for white women, and sub-humanly brutal.

Heinlein was born in Missouri, a border state (and the site of some of the worst atrocities in the Civil War) in 1907. I bet he knew some Civil War veterans growing up. I think the way he implemented his moral equivalence story did reflect the racism of his era, even though (at least before the 1960s), his writing expressly rejected racism.

As to Farnham’s Freehold, I think it may have been intended as an almost mathematical argument against racism: Here, Heinlein shows his readers, is a society where blacks are masters and whites are slaves. You find this repugnant? Without loss of generality (as mathematicians say), it’s equally repugnant when whites are masters and blacks are slaves. A conversation between Hugh Farnham and his second wife at the end of the book makes the moral equivalence of the two explicit, in fact. I discussed this at more length than I can here in a review at http://www.troynovant.com, if you’re curious. The trouble is, if I’m right, that Heinlein laid out his trap for prejudiced white readers so subtly than many people thought he shared the same prejudices.

Other than ‘reality’ tv, and germane to the discussion of racism, I hope that in 65 years people will cringe at the disgusting treatment by a surprisingly large segment of American citizens of President Obama. The day after election day in 2008 I found I was not living in the country I thought.