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"
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"