Interest Convergence in Space Traders and District 9
“The Space Traders” and District 9 are two very different films. The former, actually an episode of the 1994 television show Cosmic Slop based on a short story by Derrick Bell, was directed by a black man named Reggie Hudlin and is about the objectification of Black folks in America. It takes place in an alternate universe in which aliens come to earth and promise to provide America with essentially unlimited wealth, but under the condition that they can take away every Black American. Alternately, District 9 is a film made in 2009 by a white South African director, Neill Blomkamp, about xenophobia and segregation in South Africa. In the South Africa of this film, aliens have arrived to Earth, but instead of taking over, they have been placed in an enormous slum and treated like pests. While these two films have very little in common on the surface except for the existence of aliens on Earth, they share one prevalent theme: interest convergence theory. Coined by Derrick Bell, interest convergence states that white people will only support minorities when they have similar interests, or when the outcome will benefit whites as well. Both “Space Traders” and District 9 use aliens as a means to comment on interest convergence when it comes to the most basic of human rights.
In “The Space Traders”, after the aliens make their proposal, U.S. officials meet to make a decision about whether or not to send away all the Black people. In this room of all white people except for a single token black man, they measure pros and cons, viewing Black folks purely as objects, as voters and consumers as opposed to human beings. They are asking how white Americans and politicians and CEOs would benefit or detriment from the disappearance of Black Americans, and this is a prime example of interest convergence. White folks only care about what happens to Black folks in relation to how it affects them, they don’t tend to consider the humanity of the black person in question. Bell noticed this in real life, and created The Space Traders to create a quite clear allegory using science fiction.
In District 9 the main character, Vicus, is the one whose interests converge when he starts becoming one of the aliens he discriminated against. While he had been the oppressor for his entire career, his social descent is immediate when he is infected with a substance that turns him into a Prawn, the aliens that arrived on Earth. Now that his peers no longer see him as human, Vicus is forced to work with the Prawns to get access to their ship so that he can be cured and they can escape. This explores interest convergence in a different way from “The Space Traders” because Vicus’ interest actually change throughout the movie, as opposed to a group in power merely talking over a pros and cons list.
