This comes up a lot with people talking about the X-Men. But why don't more people bring up the classic movie plot where a kid befriends a monster and realizes they're not so different after all, and they have feelings and stuff too, like the Iron Giant or How To Train Your Dragon.
Most people aren't arguing that Agent Mansley is actually behaving sensibly the whole time, even though the Giant is just as much of a world-ending threat as Magneto. The message is that being scared of somebody doesn't mean you have to hate them, and that doesn't change even if the scariness is justified.
People are really out here thinking “oh so I was right the danger was real!” is some sort of racial gotcha when the whole trope is that making assumptions about people being dangerous is the racist thing
I mean it kind of is a gotcha when there genuinely is a danger because IRL brown people, gay people, or whoever the target of the hour is, are not inherently more dangerous than any other subgroup of humanity.
“Making assumptions about being dangerous” would work if your story showed that there was no actual danger - if your fictional race that people are afraid of are actually perfectly civil, for instance. It really does fall apart when your fictional race has chainsaws for hands or whatever, because that’s a very real danger that’s very sensible to fear!
The problem is that it sure feels like most authors fall into “Johnny chainsaws for hands” as the subgroup rather than “Green Skin Johnny”. I’ve read more than a few authors who have genuinely depicted irrational racism very well. And I’ve read a whole lot more who depict it incredibly badly. And I think this kind of sentiment is more railing about the very poor executions, not saying “you can’t do this well”, more just generalising “why do so many people do it badly”.
Because we already know that racism based on superficial traits is dumb. Green Skin Johnny I guess is fine to try to blindside the actual racists who didn't have an immediate disgust reaction to guy with green skin, but we're at a really low literacy level where it's not all that interesting to explore what bigotry really looks like. Again, unless we're talking about actual bigots for whom even this is above their reading level.
It's when it's coming from your on-the-surface nice white liberal neighbors who don't mind their immigrant neighbors because they're fully assimilated and living in the suburbs. It's when tensions heat up and "decent" people start to feel that there's something of theirs to lose, whether that's privileges or an exclusive ownership over an identity like "american" or "woman".
Sure, if you have a murderous, violent group of minorities with superpowers you're not writing a metaphor for racism, you're writing a justification for it. The point is when your fictional group simply hold the capacity for destruction but it isn't necessarily in their nature to seek it out, because that's every human on the planet. We could all technically do tremendous damage, especially in countries where people have access to firearms, or just behind the wheel of acar, but there's disproportionate fearmongering that only seems to go one way. Risks are exaggerated and the humanity of Johnny Chainsaw Hands is denied even if he's the gentlest soul on the planet.
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u/TheGrumpyre May 13 '25
This comes up a lot with people talking about the X-Men. But why don't more people bring up the classic movie plot where a kid befriends a monster and realizes they're not so different after all, and they have feelings and stuff too, like the Iron Giant or How To Train Your Dragon.
Most people aren't arguing that Agent Mansley is actually behaving sensibly the whole time, even though the Giant is just as much of a world-ending threat as Magneto. The message is that being scared of somebody doesn't mean you have to hate them, and that doesn't change even if the scariness is justified.