RE: Afrophage!Grace's relationship to academia, and Dubois on the original mission team:
@sharonz-arty-corner03 pointed this ⬇️ out to me the other day and im choosing to take it #outofcontext for my own purposes
You and I are birds of a feather, it would seem. Black scientists who have been successful despite it all. men who are willing to put our fear and distrust of The System to the side to try to do what’s right. men who know how my story ends. i know what i am, Dr. Grace, you don’t have to shy away from it. do you know who you are? what you are?
and grace says “okay!! let’s bring it back to science, buddy!!”
as mentioned in my last post abt him, i think grace in this AU is so. put off by dubois. in part bc the niche they fill is too similar. they cannot both survive in this environment, they can’t both be the Smart and Useful Black. but i think in part as well because dubois is always looking to him, looking at him.
i HATE the scene about his and dr. shapiro’s relationship in the book (where he just tells grace flat out they’re “engaged in sexual congress”) but if you interpret it with any sort of grace (haha) against weir’s will, you get a man saying “life goes on. you have to live while you’re alive, and i’m going to. are you?” dubois is also part of the in-book discussion where it’s revealed the vat looks to grace as stratt’s second in command (and also boyfriend), and again he’s delivering a truth grace doesn’t want to hear, “you’re important, stop downplaying your role in this. stop downplaying yourself.”
and it’s all the more uncomfortable for grace if dubois sees him, really sees him, Black man to Black man. grace has no family. in my own headcanon backstory (which you can ask me about 😇) he left home for a reason. but here’s dubois, constantly saying “you’re like me. and you’re important. and you deserve to live.” and won’t let grace weasel out of it.
in any case, dubois’s chosen method of death in the book is by nitrogen inhalation. painless, easy. meticulously planned. it is this excess of nitrogen on board that saves not only grace but both earth and erid by allowing grace to synthesize resistant taumeba. it’s this same nitrogen that allows grace to purge the taumeba when they get loose. the book is explicitly clear, “I owe my life to DuBois’s preferred method of suicide.”
if dubois lived to make it to space, he dies in space, and grace lives on earth. because he dies on earth, grace lives in space. dubois’s death saves grace’s life, but they can’t both survive.
there can only be One Smart Black in the narrative, and it’s a competitive position.
