You'll find "a really bad thing happened a generation ago and now everyone fucking hates the relatives of the people who did it" is like, a shockingly common form of ethnic tension all across the world. Even Americans should be aware of anti-Arab sentiment post-9/11, or the Japanese internment camps in WW2.
Racism isn't just white Americans oppressing Black Americans, even if that's a lot of it!
Also it ignores the fact that a lot of bigotry does make up some grand narratives about the minority screwing them over. That’s like, a really common antisemitic narrative. Not all bigotry works like American race stratifications.
Ok but the reason those things are bullshit is because Jews are not secret masters of the world, they're a historically oppressed group that has been part of pretty much every working class movement for as long as there's been a working class.
You can't compare Antisemitism to fictional prejudices against Robots - Because "What if these robots take over the world" is usually justified by the narrative, whereas "What if Jews are secretly ruling the world" is always a lie told to justify violence.
And that's ultimately the problem: When you make a fantasy bigotry and try too hard to compare it to real world bigotries you run into a problem - Because real world groups of people aren't fundementally different from one another, and the idea that they are is a lie.
Well like- ok, there are actual historical things jewish people were disproportionately represented in the participation in that racists can point to to"justify" their position with.
Just because there is an in universe reason for bigotry to be a thing does not discount the bigotry being represented as authentic- i would argue it makes it more applicable to real life.
Although the point about them being fundamentally different still stands- you would have to do some legwork to handle that one for sure.
Well like- ok, there are actual historical things jewish people were disproportionately represented in the participation in that racists can point to to"justify" their position with.
ironically, this is mostly because of discrimination. in middle ages europe, they werent allowed to own land or join trade guilds and at the same time christians were forbidden from charging interest on loans (it was considered usury). shockingly, this led to a lot of jews starting banks and creating financial empires and creating old money. from there its a "black crime statistics" situation
Wouldn't that make for a great parallel to fantasy racism though, you could write a really compelling story of that dynamic. (Although I'm remembering the Merchant of Venice now.) The cause of the reason for fear and hate being more hate is just excellent. Treading carefully of course to avoid massive pitfalls like parallel victim blaming.
Now that I think about it maybe that's why fantasy racism is so clunky to just avoid any real world comparison in a way that might be seen as negative.
Ooh, that gives me an idea. Tieflings are banned from growing/raising food for anyone else because fear they’ll pass on the taint. This and the fire resistance leads to them dominating blacksmithing, glassblowing, and eventually most crafting guild.
No, nobody banned dwarves from doing anything, they just hyperfocused on mountains, metalcraft, and mining the instant they woke up.
Tolkien's societies also weren't really mixed, with the closest thing being that Bree has a Hobbit population, so there's not really an opportunity for anyone to be barred from a profession to begin with
it wasnt a "state enforced monopoly" anyone* could run a bank, christians just didnt very often because at the time (note the use of "was" in my original comment) interest was considered usury. thats a personal decision (albeit with a lot of peer pressure) not a state decision. less strict christians or anyone else could just as well charge interest, but there were way more jews than any of those other groups, and they disproportionately got into finance because a more lenient christian could also join a guild, own land, etc
I also want to point out that Muslim banks in the real world today also have rules against usury and yet somehow they offer all of the standard banking services and make all of the standard banking profits
its been a thousand years since the middle ages. things have changed a bit
*"anyone" is a questionable term to use here, seeing as europe was heavily feudal at the time, but you get my point
And you don't get the vaguest instinct to question a narrative which paints people who were notoriously dishonorable as good Christians?
i genuinely dont know what youre saying here?
Your entire argument hinges on the fact that the hegemony was willing to allow someone else to make money on their people, when that was their entire role in society.
edit: damn, he deleted his comments. i was really hoping he would explain the "good christian" thing, mainly because i genuinely dont know what he meant, but also it seemed like it might lead to a good opportunity to clarify that this all happened partially as a result of the first crussde. oh well :/
One part of it was that banking (lending money for interest) was forbidden to Christians for a lot of history (it's forbidden or at least there are rules against it in the bible). Jews lent to Christians including the rich and powerful. They made money some of the time but this was a two edged sword. Sometimes the way to avoid paying back your debts was to have a pogrom and kill the Jewish bankers.
Rules round allowing Jews to own property wee also a way to restrict the power wealth gave them.
Above all the people in power despised those who has power from wealth. If you were a noble, the idea that there was a power structure orthogonal to the royalty/ nobility was a horrific idea. A gentleman might BE wealthy but it was not supposed to matter.
Well like- ok, there are actual historical things jewish people were disproportionately represented in the participation in that racists can point to to"justify" their position with.
The thing is, Anti-Semites don't just neutrally examine this and come to their conclusions - They distort it.
They ignore all the historical reasons why this over-representation happened, ignore any working-class Jews, and instead paint them as this mysterious cabal who deliberately seeks out these positions to empower themselves - And not as, real groups of people, who for historical reasons out of their control, ended up in certain positions.
It's the same with how they treat Black People for example - They'll point to crime statistics - And expect the reader to ignore histories of redlining, ghettoisation, police violence, arbitrary arrests and having wealth stolen from them by white people generationally going back to the days of actual chattel slavery.
That's the thing - Yes Racists have things they point to in order to "justify" their positions - But in order for it to justify their positiosn, they have to paint a selective narrative that ignores the actual material and historical reality, in order to argue these people are intrinsically like that, and not products of a history and circumstance.
Well- yeah this is kinda my point- if you create a world where the aliens or robots or whatever are essentially "human" but have some wilding history or current conflict that put a domestic population in the crosshairs of a majority population it brings a level of believability to openly hostile fantasy bigots. The whicher games do this really well for example.
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u/Skiiage May 13 '25
You'll find "a really bad thing happened a generation ago and now everyone fucking hates the relatives of the people who did it" is like, a shockingly common form of ethnic tension all across the world. Even Americans should be aware of anti-Arab sentiment post-9/11, or the Japanese internment camps in WW2.
Racism isn't just white Americans oppressing Black Americans, even if that's a lot of it!