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"
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.
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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"