Stumbling into a Discussion of Parable of the Sower

A white man who's an acquaintance of mine recently said he had been in a book club reading Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower. For context: we were in a conversation with several other people who hadn't read it, during a break in the midst of a spring community cleanup where there was a lot of trash. Some of the trash was left behind in small tent encampments of unhoused people.

He described the book, which takes place in 2024, as being about homeless people constantly breaking into middle class people's houses to steal from them, or worse. The middle class people had walled themselves off to protect themselves from home invasion by homeless people.

And because the author was a Black woman, he said, it made it possible for the members of the book club to talk honestly about the problem set out by the book, implying that if it had been written by a white author it would not have been okay to do so. That the author saw those homeless people as a problem, too.

I said that this was not how I had seen the problems the author had set out in the book when I read it back when it came out 30 years ago. I didn't remember her presenting the problem as homeless people vs. the middle class at all. I had seen it as the devolution of society, of the social compact, where there was a huge number of completely hopeless people with no other options or knowledge of how things could be, and that I had wondered what could have happened to create a scenario of such total awfulness. I remember thinking that the public schools must have been decimated, for instance, and that income inequality must have gotten much worse.

And here we are, with both of those things clearly underway, and a well-meaning liberal person is reading Octavia Butler and somehow seeing her as blaming homeless people instead of the systemic problems she was indicting.

Maybe there was more nuance to his book group's discussion, or his understanding of the book, than I am describing here. It was a fairly brief conversation because we had to get back to work.

I hope so.