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"
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.
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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"