Persecution Flip

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

When most writers want to write about discrimination and oppression, they stick to real-world examples—after all, there are plenty of those. Some writers, however, wonder: "What if it were the other way round?" What if Africans had enslaved Europeans? What if India had colonized England? What if women had all the power and men had to stay in the kitchen? And so on and so forth. There may be a semi-plausible Alternate History explanation for the switch, but just as often it simply is that way.

Often this is not just an interesting what-if, but a way of making a point, saying to the privileged group "well, how would you like it if...?" This tends to be Anvilicious, though not always in a bad way. The message may also be that power corrupts, and no matter who's on top, things will always suck for the group on the bottom. On the other hand, in certain cases the barbarism of the now-powerful group can be played up too much and the whole thing can seem as though it came out of some dislike or distrust of the group in question. Or, alternatively, the work may be disparaging towards the now-oppressed group (which is usually an Acceptable Target due to being in power in the real world), and suggest that they deserve to be treated badly.

Compare Just the Introduction to The Opposites.

Examples of Persecution Flip include:

Anime and Manga

  • In Yuu Watase's short manga story "Perfect Lovers," a heterosexual couple is transported into an alternate dimension where homosexuality is normal and heterosexual relationships are illegal.
  • In the manga Ooku, after a disease kills off a large percentage of the male population, feudal Japan becomes a female-dominated society, with women as leaders and warriors and men viewed as sex objects too delicate to fight (or farm, or fish, or...).
  • In Jyu-Oh-Sei, the Penal Colony planet of Chimera is controlled by four "Rings" (Night, Ochre, Sun, and Blanc) which are primarily divided by skin color. When Thor and Rai are sent there, the Blanc Ring is least powerful of the four, and thus the formerly pampered twins (who are about as white as one can possibly be without having Albinism) find themselves at the bottom of the social ladder.
    • Furthermore, since men greatly outnumber women, women have free pick of mates and are regarded as more valuable. Their higher social status is somewhat theoretical though, since the series plays this out with some Unfortunate Implications.
  • Prison School, Hachimitsu Academy was once an all-girl school before allowing in boys. Since the Underground Student Council still enforced the rules, the only boys who are enrolled were subjected to harsh punishments in the prison wing of the school.

Comic Books

  • In the House of M miniseries, Wanda creates a new world through her reality warping powers where mutants are the dominant species and humans are deemed second-class citizens and given the slur "Sapes." Most notably, Magneto and his family rule Genosha as an aristocracy and super-powered individuals like Spiderman and Miss Marvel are only tentatively accepted as equals to mutants.


Film

Literature

  • Both the book and stage version of Noughts and Crosses (black people are in power; white people are victims of discrimination).
  • The novel Blonde Roots by Bernardine Evaristo (Africans enslave Europeans)
  • From a single Alternate History anthology (although some of these are a bit iffy):
    • "The Wandering Christian" by Eugene Byrne and Kim Newman (Judaism becomes the major world religion; Christianity all but wiped out)
    • "Hush My Mouth" by Suzette Hayden Elgin (African former slaves rise up and seize power in the United States after the Civil War; white Americans all but wiped out)
    • "The English Mutiny" by Ian R. MacLeod (India colonizes England)
    • "Islands in the Sea" by Harry Turtledove (Islam becomes the major world religion; Christianity is practiced only in a few small areas)
  • Robert A. Heinlein's controversial Farnham's Freehold posits a future where the members of a white family are the slaves of cannibalistic black masters. The cannibalism is what pushes it over the edge into "Black people are worse" territory.
  • One Sheri S. Tepper novel, Six Moon Dance, is about a repressive matriarchal society. Tepper has a very feminist message in a lot of her work, so this is sort of like "examining demographics that would lead to men being oppressed in the same way as women".
  • Steven Barnes' Lion's Blood series is set in an alternate history where African civilization and Islam became the dominant forces in world culture. The main story is set in an alternate American south, centering on a young (black) nobleman and his (Irish) freedman.
  • Edgar Allan Poe's story Doctor Tarr and Professor Feather. It involves inmates taking over an aslyum which "coddled" them and treating their former doctors, now the inmates, in a Bedlam House way. It has a kind of Family-Unfriendly Aesop: If you treat those weaker than you with kindness, they'll just take advantage of you and then do worse. One interpretation of the story is that it's a metaphor for Poe's views of American blacks (which, considering that he was a proponent of slavery, isn't terribly implausible).
  • Gullivers Travels with the talking horses domesticating the human "Yahoos" as farm animals.
  • In Katherine Kerr's Polar City books, blancs (i.e., whites) are a lightly oppressed minority.
  • In a Fantasy Counterpart Culture version, Flora Segunda has the largely European-flavored (though apparently California-dwelling) Califans conquered and ruled by the pseudo-Aztec Huitzils.
  • In Waberi's "In the United States of Africa", Africa is the largest superpower while the Western world as we know it is plagued by the very maladies that current Africa faces, from the perspective of an adopted white French girl.
  • In Kirill Moshkov's Special Expert, Legioner Tauk is sent to a Lost Colony, whose population is predominantly black, with the whites being treated as second-class citizens. Since Tauk is himself white, he has to pass himself off as a servant, while another agent, a black woman, can freely pass herself off as a member of the societal elite. She does explain to a local man that back on Earth, it is their people that used to be subservient to the whites. The man has a hard time believing it.
  • William Tenn's story "Eastward Ho!" is set in a post-nuclear-war future where Native Americans are in power, and the oppressed whites keep fleeing further and further east. Eventually they plan to sail to the land of freedom—Europe.
  • The hero of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness ruminates on the colonial relationship by invoking the Roman invasion of Britain and wondering aloud how the Ancient Britons saw the colonial system from the other side.
  • Many of the stories in the Chicks In Chainmail quintet, edited by Esther Friesner, deal with the male-female issues by gender flipping, or other plot device, some well-done, and some belaboring the point.
  • Black Like Me is an account of journalist John Howard Griffin's dyeing his skin black and living in an area he had visited as a white man and describing the differences.


Live Action TV

  • Fable
  • Sliders had one episode where women were the dominant gender. Another where Mexico won the Mexican-American war so Americans were the day laborers. And some others that get just bizarre.
    • In the first case, Arturo gets involved in politics by running for mayor. Wade is against this, as she believes his "equal rights" campaign will ultimately lead to a patriarchy. Interestingly, Arturo actually wins the election, although a miscount results in him leaving before the official results are announced.
    • The pilot episode has Quinn listening to a radio broadcast about Americans illegally crossing into Mexico in search of jobs. This is the same world where traffic lights are inverted (green means stop, red means go).
    • A mild case in the first episode involving the Kromaggs, when the heroes slide into a world where US was largely colonized by France, and Arturo is being made fun of for being English.
    • In one episode, There is a world where Kromaggs are timid docile creatures who wouldn't hurt anyone. Humans oppress them and put them in labor camps.
  • The Twilight Zone episode "The Eye Of The Beholder", in which beauty is a pig nose and cleft palate while movie-star looks are a deformity.
  • In a Star Trek:The Next Generation episode, an androgynous race views any gender identity as an illness to be cured.
    • In another episode, a race of humanoids is ruled by women, while men are their servants and sexual playthings.
    • On still another episode, a child-alien persecutes the adults on the ship for imposing rules on children.
    • In another episode, Worf travels to an alternate universe where the Bajorans are enemies of the Federation and they overpowered the Cardassians.
  • The production team for Star Trek: The Original Series had a script for a story in which Dr. McCoy and Lt. Uhura crashlanded on a world with a culture similar to the Antebellum South, except the racial roles were reversed, with black aristocrats owning white slaves. NBC wouldn't let them make the episode.
  • In one episode of Red Dwarf, the crew visit a parallel universe where women are the dominant gender. Their entire history is gender-flipped, so Hamlet was written by Wilma Shakespeare, Nellie Armstrong was the first person on the moon, and men organised equal rights marches and burned their jockstraps in the '60s. Oh, and it's the men who get pregnant.
  • Sexism and Gender Stereotypes are played with in the weird little German-UK SF series from the 1970's - Star Maidens. In which, two men escape from the planet Medusa which is ruled by women and where men are badly mistreated and head for Earth because one of the men has heard it's ruled by men. They are pursued by a couple of their female mistresses. Let's just say it wasn't subtle and leave it at that.


Music

  • The Vienna Teng song "No Gringo" (poor Americans illegally cross the border to Mexico looking for work).


Theatre

  • Zanna, Don't! (being gay is normal; being straight is stigmatized). Don't ask how they reproduce.
    • Actually, the play makes reference to the use of surrogate mothers, sperm donors etc..
  • Older Than Feudalism: There was a Greek play, whose title escapes me at the moment, in which the roles of master and slaves are reversed, and it turns out the slaves make the situation even worse, spending more time beating their former masters than getting anything done.


Real Life

  • This Not Always Right post has a customer attempting this. It comes off as head-scratchingly ridiculous.
  • This sort of thing has happened when different groups get the upper hand in a closely-divided country. Some prime examples are:
    • Protestants and Catholics taking turns persecuting each other during the European Wars of Religion (including the Thirty Years' War) whenever the ruler changed (either through succession, conversion, Klingon Succession, or conquest). England's history is a prime example: Henry VIII was famous for persecuting Protestants mercilessly until that whole divorce thing, at which point he started persecuting Catholics; when his Catholic daughter Mary became Queen, she persecuted Protestants; and when Mary was succeeded by Elizabeth, she started persecuting Catholics again.
    • The same was more or less true when the Middle East was under Byzantine rule. Oriental and Eastern Orthodox Christians took the place of Protestants and Catholics, with the favor of the local governor being the variable.
    • In the interminable wars between the Byzantine and Sassanid Persian Empires in the 6th and 7th centuries, Jerusalem would inevitably change hands. Since the Byzantines were Christian and distrusted the Jews, every time they took over the city, Jerusalem would be purged of its Jewish population. Whenever the Persians—Zoroastrians who distrusted Christians as possibly loyal to Constantinople, but had no problem with the Jews—took the city, they slaughtered the Christians and spared the Jews. This happened several times over a relatively short period of time before the Muslim conquests put an end to that by destroying Persia completely and taking a huge bite out of Byzantium; when they took Jerusalem, they surprised everyone by slaughtering nobody.
  • A study done decades ago in a real class promoted and demoted blue and brown eyed pupils to show the effects and issues of racism and other -isms. The children, regardless of being told about the study, stated that they came to feel superior or inferior, and had trouble re-adjusting even years later.
  • A study done with college students had some be jailers, and some jailed. The jailers were somewhat oppressive, but only somewhat. After a time, they switched. The once-jailed-now-jailers were much more oppressive.
  • Bob Marley was classified as white due to having a British dad. As result, he was a target of racism in his native Jamaica.
  • Folks with Albinism, absence of skin pigmentation, often is faced with this, even if they have sibling with normal pigmentation. It's sadly common for Albinos to fall prey to violence attacks in many African nations, to the point many governments, like in Tanzania, had to take legal action.

Others

  • The Disability Rights Commission, once a British-Based Disability rights organization now part of Equality and Human Rights Commission, released a two-part short films known as "The Talk". it shows a man finding himself in a location where the disabled are the majority and he's looked down upon for being able-bodied.
  • Amy Chua in World on Fire details the phenomenon where one ethnic group will get a lock on the economy (for whatever reason). As a result others will blame them for any troubles they have and take "revenge" (meaning a wild spout of mayhem on anyone vaguely related to them). According to the book this can alternate between slow grinding and bloody rioting. And no real life examples should be given other to say just read the book.
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