Without mentioning it as much, I assure you this is still about dominator culture.
For many reasons -- including the upcoming election -- there have been a lot of Venn diagrams popping up showing various combinations of dystopian novels and movies, labeled, "You are here."
It showed me that one of the gaps in my dystopian reading was Fahrenheit 451. I decided to rectify that.
I noticed a lot of things wrong with it along the way, but this might be the paragraph that sums it up.
“Now let’s take up the minorities in our civilization, shall we? Bigger the population, the more minorities. Don’t step on the toes of the dog-lovers, the cat-lovers, doctors, lawyers, merchants, chiefs, Mormons, Baptists, Unitarians, second-generation Chinese, Swedes, Italians, Germans, Texans, Brooklynites, Irishmen, people from Oregon or Mexico. The people in this book, this play, this TV serial are not meant to represent any actual painters, cartographers, mechanics anywhere. The bigger your market, Montag, the less you handle controversy, remember that! All the minor minor minorities with their navels to be kept clean. Authors, full of evil thoughts, lock up your typewriters. They did. Magazines became a nice blend of vanilla tapioca. Books, so the damned snobbish critics said, were dishwater. No wonder books stopped selling, the critics said. But the public, knowing what it wanted, spinning happily, let the comic books survive. And the three-dimensional sex-magazines, of course. There you have it, Montag. It didn’t come from the Government down. There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship, to start with, no! Technology, mass exploitation, and minority pressure carried the trick, thank God. Today, thanks to them, you can stay happy all the time, you are allowed to read comics, the good old confessions, or trade journals.”
Nothing makes literature bland like diversity, am I right?
I do understand that Bradbury was getting requests to rewrite things. He rarely wrote characters other than white men, and when he did they were stereotypes. Also, he had editors and anthologies wanting and making changes.
I will add, however, that the questions he was getting seemed to be about including Black people and women. Somehow that does not reflect the list of minorities he mentioned, perhaps because then it wouldn't sound so ridiculous.
It is easy to feel sensitive about your words and work being questioned. It still is worth asking if there is a point.
Really, he has two things going on here. There are fans who like his work, but find his view of the world narrow and are inviting him to do something better. Not only are there personal feelings of exclusion, but there are other ramifications that affect how you are viewed by others and how able you are to access your civil rights. Having any sense of decency should make you willing to at least consider it.
On the other side, you have economic forces where they want you to make changes to be more commercial. Often, it is very reasonable to turn those down. It is not unusual to read of other artists having to draw lines there.
I suppose the charitable interpretation of Bradbury's response is that with the criticism coming in from both directions it felt like the threat of censorship. That could be a reasonable concern.
However, I believe the real issue was more of a hissy fit; everyone else was stupid and shallow! He was an outlier who was right! There was no point in considering the fact that as a white man he started out with a fair amount of privilege, that fame as a writer had given him more, and that he had an opportunity to wield a real influence for good, at the expense of some personal discomfort and effort.
In fact, in this book, the solution to a society bullied by "minorities" is blowing it up. The future will depend on a few smart survivors that seem to be following Montag naturally, despite his newness to the efforts and the repeated affirmations that he is nothing (which I don't think Bradbury believed for one minute).
It's an old pattern. Ralph Nader blamed social conflict on no longer being able to tell ethnic jokes, a crucial stress relief, at least for the ones making the jokes (which he said was everyone but am not sure that would stand up to scrutiny).
Kurt Vonnegut followed different accommodation of minorities to a similarly ridiculous extreme in Harrison Bergeron, and then found another solution to changing attitudes around sex in therapeutic, humble rape in Welcome to the Monkey House.
https://sporkful.blogspot.com/2016/10/privilege-and-harrison-bergeron.html
Based on Bradbury's premise, though, isn't it weird that the people most interested in banning books are also those most interested in maintaining the status quo of white men in charge?
Conservatives are the ones most interested in removing regulations that might protect you and forbidding laws that might protect you from, say, being shot with an assault weapon (lots of destructive violence in Fahrenheit 451). If the great loss in Fahrenheit 451 is of intellect and compassion, it's not the party that tries to include minorities that is fighting that.
How does that get missed?
The more privilege you have, the more any questioning feels like a grave insult. That defensiveness ends up standing in the way of reason.
They are so used to their right to be heroes that they don't think about how a hero would not prioritize his discomfort over the actual safety and well-being of others.
Somehow, it happens again and again.
We may have to spend some time exploring the manosphere.
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