"After observing the motions of galaxies and the expansion of the universe for the past five decades, most astronomers believe that as much as ninety percent of the material in the universe may be objects or particles that cannot be seen. This means, in other words, that most of the universe’s matter does not radiate—it provides no glow or light that we can detect."
The title of this collection of various works by various authors is a multifaceted pun. “Dark matter” most immediately refers to the fact that this is a collection of writing by Black writers and so one aspect of the pun has to do with race and skin pigmentation. Another aspect is that the content has to do with matters that are very specific to the Black experience. The least familiar aspect of the pun requires an understanding of the astronomical term dark matter. This quote is literally a reply to the question “What is `dark matter’” which the author poses just before providing this answer. The point of understanding dark matter within this context is that these will be texts written by either by Black authors whose “glow or light” went undetected or stories about how Black people facing those situations and circumstances. The title is within this aspect of the pun a commentary on the invisibility of Black people living within a white-dominated society.
"There are only a handful of mainstream black science fiction writers working today…One reason for this absence is that black writers have only recently entered the popular genres in force. Our writers have historically been regarded as a footnote best suited to address the nature of our own chains."
This collection is divided into sections containing fiction and non-fiction. This quote is from a short essay by Mosley that resonates with the idea of scientific dark matter as a metaphor for science fiction writing by Black authors. Part of his rationale for explaining why this genre has traditionally been bereft of minority voices has far less to do with the creative side of writing than with the business side. Until the appearance of Star Wars and the elevation of science fiction films from low-budget movies onto the A-list of potential blockbusters, science fiction had been a very self-contained literary genre guided by rigid expectations of content with very limited opportunities for publication. Those opportunities were owned and operated by mostly white men with surprisingly limited expectations about the future. As a result, minority writers wanting to take advantage of the limited potential for publication were basically told that if they wanted to write speculative fiction about the future, it should reflect the racial realities of the present. In other words, either present 2050 as being a world in which racial relations were no different from 1950 or don’t bother submitting at all. This state of affairs resulted in the metaphorical consequence that the glow and light of neither Black authors nor Black characters could be detected by readers.
"As he became more and more absorbed in the narrative, his eyes assumed a dreamy expression, and he seemed to lose sight of his auditors, and to be living over again in monologue his life on the old plantation."
The oldest story in the collection (1887) is by a little-known mixed-race writer named Charles W. Chesnutt who just very well might be the greatest short story writer America has yet produced. “The Goophered Grapevine” is his most well-known tale and is emblematic of his finest short fiction. In a series of stories, a couple from the North named John and Annie have bought a former plantation in the aftermath of the end of the Civil War. The structure of this series of stories is that they are officially narrated by John but always lead to a story-within-the-story narrated by a former slave named Julius. The passage above takes place at the point in which the narrative perspective transforms over into the dialect-heavy first-person storytelling by Julius. The Julius stories use the dual narrator structure to make ironic points about racism and that point is reflected in the actual publication history. Chesnutt’s complexion was light enough for him to have easily “passed” as a white but consistently identified himself as Black writer. “The Goophered Grapevine” eventually reveals the former slave Julius to be clever enough to portray himself according to the racially biased expectations of John and Annie while in reality being far more sophisticated. Chesnutt did not hide the fact that he was a Black author from his readers, but he did write stories that seemed on the surface to confirm their racial biases while actually completely subverting them in a way too sophisticated for most of his white readers to grasp.
