Race beyond Skin Color

Race in The Lathe of Heaven does not just pertain to human skin color; Orr’s dreams alter the world’s methods of classification across the board, from the seemingly inconsequential to more prevalent distinctions. Apart from the character of Heather Lelache, Le Guine does not focus much on race in terms of skin color. Rather, she breaks life on Earth down further into aliens or humans, races, nationalities, and even healthy or unhealthy. They play roles just as important as skin color does for society today in respect to racial classification because they show how human classification is inevitable.

Each incarnation of the world that Haber creates using Orr has another set of human divisions. Cultures, races, and nations unite only at the threat of alien invasion, though they are only promoting further division and war in attacking another race without discovering that alien’s original intentions. In another reality, the disappearance of skin color puts everyone on the same racial scale, but suddenly humans terminate and classify one another based off of health problems. With this endless cycle of division and classification, Le Guin has the reader question whether humans are capable of living without race. Despite our best attempts at reforming the world, can we stop ourselves from judging one another? The fact that each of Haber’s/Orr’s reincarnations of the world has humanity divided, or sorted into the strong versus the weak, tells the reader that we cannot.

Rather than chiding this human flaw, Le Guin suggests that racial distinction is crucial for human identity, and it is impossible to get rid of it. Orr always notes the beauty of Lelache’s uniquely-colored and multiracial skin – when she and all the rest of humanity has turned the shade of a battleship, he feels the world has gone blander: “But the food had no taste and the people were all gray” (134). To make up for lack of racial distinction, violence against the unhealthy and as a sport has been legalized, as if humans would be so deprived of conflict without race that murder would be justified.

Along this idea, Orr realizes that his dreams cannot continually improve the world, and may not have improved the world at all, just as he notices that trying to unify humanity only leads to more division. Haber’s dream reality where “this world will be like heaven, and men will be like gods” (150) is never achieved; the world changes but the quality of life is just different, not better. Haber’s determination to ignore the evidence – that humanity needs to have its differences (racial or otherwise) and the world cannot be made perfect – reminds me of Toni Morrison’s ideas on how we treat racism nowadays. In Playing in the Dark, she talks of a “popular and academic notion that racism is a “natural”, if irritating, phenomenon” (7). It entails that we have a recognized that humans have internalized and innate racist beliefs, but that we can cure them. Another blog on this post, by LCurlin, says that, “Toni Morrison criticizes those who try to write racism out of our past or try to confine its discussion to the distant past rather than confronting it”. Just like Haber, such thinking ignores the flaws of humanity, like a need for division, and tries to quick-fix the world.