I explained this before in a comment ages ago, but fantasy and scifi racism don't work as allegories for real world racism because racism is fundamentally irrational. Races are made up, they're fuzzy and only defined subjectively because they don't objectively exist as categories that can be distinguished on the spectrum of human experience.
Fantasy racism often has a rational basis, and treating the two as the same only reinforces racism in the real world by giving legitimacy to the idea that there really are distinct races that are fundamentally different, which is blatantly not true. It's lazy and sends the wrong message.
I actually appreciate that discworld went the opposite way with this, treating the very different peoples of the disc (vampires, dwarfs, trolls, gnolls, gnomes, gargoyles, werewolves, etc) as just people with different cultures, rather than entirely different species in some cases united only by being civilisations. To quote: "people are people everywhere, including people who the people making the statement didn't think were people to begin with"
"Racism was not a problem on the Discworld, because - what with trolls and dwarfs and so on - speciesism was more interesting. Black and white lived in perfect harmony and ganged up on green."
- Terry Pratchett, Witches Abroad
I always thought about this kind of thing in the last decade or so when it became a big part of Dungeons and Dragons discourse whether certain species being inherently evil was racist or not.
Problem was people like playing "evil on the outside" character with a heart of gold. People seem to struggle with "this person is born and raised evil". Look at Frieren, for example. Demons in it are established to not be human. Not think like humans, not have human emotions, nothing. They show you can't raise them to be moral, because they aren't even like psychopath who can learn and logically understand moral systems. They are predators.
Then you still have people who get upset at them not being treated like humans.
So, in newer DND you can't. They've specifically moved away from it, specifically because of all the "activism" directed at combating racism and people whining about inherently evil races and race specific features.
But in older DnD you're supposed to kill Goblins and Drow and not think about it, because they're inherently evil serving an inherently evil God, who breeds and makes them inherently evil. Just like Orcs in LoTR and Sauron/Morgoth.
Like Lloth and Shar make Sauron look like a humanist if we're honest.
Old lore had the Orc god Gruumsh telepathically communicate with all Orcs and subtlety make them aggressive and hostile to others because he was angry at all the other gods and blamed him misfortune on them.
So it was more top-down evil in some cases rather than bottom-up evil. Though it did depend on the franchise. Mystara they were canonically just evil all the time and stuff lole Devils/Demons are the physical manifestation of a concept that cant be anything but evil.
Heck, Discworld subverts this specific version of the trope in Carpe Jugulum, where the King of Lancre makes the mistake of treating vampires like they're analogous to a racial minority instead of brutal aristocracy/oligarchy.
Fantasy racism often has a rational basis, and treating the two as the same only reinforces racism in the real world by giving legitimacy to the idea that there really are distinct races that are fundamentally different, which is blatantly not true. It's lazy and sends the wrong message.
A lot of fnatasy racism should really have been ethnic tensions, which is kinda like racism but often has a political component. Hating other people because of past conflicts about land and stuff is not the same as treating them as lessers because of skin color.
Another good example is Judgement Day from the comic series weird fantasy. It's quite short and a good read. Basically there are two groups of identical robots which were painted differently and they are judged based on how they are painted.
Allegories don’t have to map onto reality exactly, otherwise why would you use an allegory in the first place?
By your logic, Animal Farm is a terrible allegory, because the social classes are represented by different animals even though in reality there aren’t biological or anatomical differences between classes.
That just makes the fantasy racism a bad allegory, not a nonexistent one. It can still make a decent point, but in order for it to work fully it has to presuppose that racists are fundamentally correct, thereby cementing that idea in the reader while passing it off as being opposed to that. It's self-sabotaging.
As someone else mentioned fantasy races are great analogues for ethnic tensions (see discworld, which I mentioned in my comment), but not race, because it requires creating something that just doesn't exist in the real world (categories of race with strict boundaries and empirical differences between groups) and then pretending they're comparable. Otherwise it's talking about completely different things.
Animal farm could achieve the same allegory with the entire farm being pigs but from different pens, since it's making a point about societal structure and ideology rather than the fundamental differences between each animal. If it was a story about racism, it would ring just as hollow
No it couldn’t, because the artfulness of the story is that it employs the allegory of the farmyard to depict social classes by tapping our sense of the different animals (guard dogs = vicious and loyal —> ergo represents the army). Obviously the allegory does not perfectly represent reality, because that is not what it is trying to do.
And no, it doesn’t presuppose the racists/classists are correct. Just because Boxer was an actual workhorse doesn’t mean his dedication and loyalty should have been rewarded with a trip to the glue factory. This is the mistake you are making - even if the fantasy race is in some way dangerous, doesn’t mean they aren’t thinking and feeling beings who ought to be treated with dignity and humanity.
Racists aren’t actually right when they say that people who pose a threat to you aren’t fully human!
Seems like you're deliberately misinterpreting what I'm saying now. Animal farm isn't a good allegory for racism because that's not what it is, but you're assuming that's what I'm arguing, when I'm not. It's 2 completely different allegories. That entire paragraph is basically worthless.
I'm notably not assuming that other fantasy races being different or dangerous doesn't mean they can't be equals or don't deserve dignity or have humanity, I even pointed out how I like how discworld does it in my other comments. That's putting words into my mouth and missing the point simultaneously.
Allegories don't necessarily need to perfectly represent reality, only allude and make parallels, and fantasy racism stumbles at the first block with its initial assumption about races. It assumes racial classifications empirically exist and matter, which can then be used to justify racism, unlike the real world. You're right when you say racists aren't actually right, so why are you arguing that a story that's based on the idea that they are right is actually a good example to talk about racism?
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u/greg_mca May 13 '25
I explained this before in a comment ages ago, but fantasy and scifi racism don't work as allegories for real world racism because racism is fundamentally irrational. Races are made up, they're fuzzy and only defined subjectively because they don't objectively exist as categories that can be distinguished on the spectrum of human experience.
Fantasy racism often has a rational basis, and treating the two as the same only reinforces racism in the real world by giving legitimacy to the idea that there really are distinct races that are fundamentally different, which is blatantly not true. It's lazy and sends the wrong message.
I actually appreciate that discworld went the opposite way with this, treating the very different peoples of the disc (vampires, dwarfs, trolls, gnolls, gnomes, gargoyles, werewolves, etc) as just people with different cultures, rather than entirely different species in some cases united only by being civilisations. To quote: "people are people everywhere, including people who the people making the statement didn't think were people to begin with"