Both versions of The Handmaid’s Tale have a problem with racial erasure

In Western fiction, dystopic stories often ask, "What if this atrocity had happened to white people instead?"

That was the formula more than 100 years ago, when H.G. Wells wrote The War of the Worlds, its narrator comparing the Martian invasion of Britain to Britain’s ruthless invasion of Tasmania. It’s the formula in Universal Pictures’ new franchise-starter The Mummy, which envisions a Middle Eastern woman bringing war to London, as Brits and Americans brought war to Iraq. And it’s the basis for Margaret Atwood's 1985 novel The Handmaid's Tale, which imagines a world in which white women are enslaved and sexually coerced as black women were under American slavery.

Appropriating the experiences of women of color to create a hell for...

Continue reading…