Derogatory term: Wog

Question answered by FreeZone in Scientology

FredricRice asked this question on 9/5/2000:

I've run across Robert A. Heinlein's use of the term "Wog" in his book, "The Number of the Beast." I know that L. Ron Hubbard hated "Chinks" as he called them, and that the Scientology cult uses the derogatory term for anyone who hasn't been suckered into the cult.

Did Hubbard get the term from Heinlein? Or was the racist term merely one od many used in Hubbard's time and Hubbard -- and his insane cult -- merely adopt the use of the term?

Thanks.

FreeZone gave this response on 9/6/2000:

I don't see any reason to assume Hubbard got the term from Heinlein. Most likely is that he picked it up in traveling as a teenager. He never got out much from the white communities where the natives were looked on with contempt.

I think you can exaggerate the degree to which Hubbard was a racist and some critics do. His notorious remark about chinks in his teenage diary probably passed as quite a witticism among the circles he was in at the time. He was raised in an environment where the belief that whites were superior was less an ideology than something taken for granted as an obvious fact. He never really examined the beliefs he was raised on.

If you pick out almost any of the adventure stories he wrote, you can see racist elements and a white man's burden attitude about the natives. They are shown as villains or exotic background, never as heroes or even developed characters - but then character development is hardly the strength of Hubbard's fiction.

While Scientology is and has always been a heavily white movement, it should be noted that a few blacks were in leadership positions from quite early on, before it became a PR element to bring in a token black face.

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