arranged marriage that is happy. In a number of his stories, Heinlein challenges his readers' possible racial preconceptions by introducing a strong, sympathetic character, only to reveal much later that he or she is of African or other ancestry. In several cases, the covers of the books show characters as being light-skinned when the text states or at least implies that they are dark-skinned or of African ancestry. Heinlein repeatedly denounced racism in his nonfiction works, including numerous examples in Expanded Universe. Heinlein reveals in Starship Troopers that the novel's protagonist and narrator, Johnny Rico, the formerly disaffected scion of a wealthy family, is Filipino, actually named "Juan Rico" and speaks Tagalog in addition to English. Race was a central theme in some of Heinlein's fiction. The most prominent example is Farnham's Freehold, which casts a white family into a future in which white people are the slaves of cannibalistic black rulers. In the 1941 novel Sixth Column (also known as The Day After Tomorrow), a white resistance movement in the United States defends itself against an invasion by an Asian fascist state (the "Pan-Asians") using a "super-science" technology that allows ray weapons to be tuned to specific races. The book is sprinkled with racist slurs against Asian people, and black and Hispanic people are not mentioned at all. The idea for the story was pushed on Heinlein by editor John W. Campbell and the story itself was based on a then-unpublished story by Campbell, and Heinlein wrote later that he had "had to re-slant it to remove racist aspects of the original story line" and that he did not "consider it to be an artistic success". However, the novel prompted a heated debate in the scientific community regarding the plausibility of developing ethnic bioweapons. John Hickman, writing in the European Journal of American Studies, identifies examples of anti–East Asian racism in some of Heinlein's works, particularly Sixth Column. Heinlein summed up his attitude toward people of any race in his essay "Our Noble, Essential Decency" thus: Individualism and self-determination In keeping with his belief in individualism, his work for adults—and sometimes even his work for juveniles—often portrays both the oppressors and the oppressed with considerable ambiguity. Heinlein believed that individualism was incompatible with ignorance. He believed that an appropriate level of adult competence was achieved through a wide-ranging education, whether this occurred in a classroom or not. In his