Thoughts on racism in fantasy works?

I don't mind when it's done well...but like @21stCenturyHero said, 9 times out of 10 it's not. ^^;

And even when you get to the ones that have more thought put into them than usual, a lot of those tend to go the 'Malcom X/MLK dichotomy' route...basically, a whole subplot devoted to putting down the 'violent extremist' leader of [ins. minority race] in favor of the 'peaceful, societally approved' leader who shows how all members of [ins. minority race] should behave...

Like, that's a middle-school-level understanding of the Civil Rights Movement at best...and a little patronizing besides. =/ Unfortunately, you have to be pretty lucky to get a 'fantasy racism' story that tries any harder than even that.

It's important for these stories to exist, but as @DokiDokiTsuna and @21stCenturyHeRo both said, it must be done right. And it shouldn't be at the core of your story either. Racism extends beyond just hatred and bigotry. And it still exists no matter how many black people you know that have good jobs.

What I'm trying to say is, don't write a story where people said nasty things to a brown person and then that person overcomes racism by becoming a VP. That's just a shallow level understanding of the subject matter. Please don't forget, if you are not a person who experienced racism, you are looking at it from an outside-in view. You get to write about it while there are those who actually experience it. So please, educate yourself on this and tread lightly.

Lol. I had to do a double-take when I read someone say "when its done well".

I'm mixed black, so this is a theme recurring in everyday life. If you need racism in your work to make the plot go forward its outdated, done and old. Like having queer rep with everybody just being fine with it without needing it to be yet another story based on homophobic bias, you can do your fantasy without the stakes going to bigot borders.

I for one most definitely have no interest in stories continuing the very nonsense I seek to escape from in real life, but hey you do you.

it's always interesting seeing the reasons people use to defend the use or inclusion of fantasy racism especially when it's in the name of realism. like it's called fantasy for a reason you can absolutely create a fictional world or society or whatever without the inclusion of racism or discrimination

also using it as a tool to create conflict never bodes over well because 99.9% of the time it mirrors the opinions of folk in the real world where minorities are painted as the bad guys. this is why i hate most instances of the dark=evil trope because beyond perpetuating stereotypes it influences actual opinions so like yeah its not needed at all

From a minority standpoint, it's almost impossible to not experience it first hand, so it can end up in our writing even passively or without realizing because you're encouraged to 'write what you know' so it's hard not to picture a world without it that sometimes. Though those don't always = a racism allegory. Which is more what this thread is talking about I assume.

For why authors use the racism allegory can be for all kinds of reasons, it honestly really depends on what the story is trying to tell me and how it's handled. There are a LOT of wrong ways to do it, which is why starting new series with this theme can be difficult for me, I can't trust this will be a sincere, careful and respectful handling, or a horrible one where someone has a very vague understanding of just how deep racism runs and the many faces it has, or a just plain racist presentation,

I think racism in fantasy works is a good tool to use to ignite conflict in stories. Let's go a step further, it doesn't have to be racism, it could just be simply discrimination.

Discrimination between class, gender/sex/biology and etc.

People fear the unknown and bigotry exist in all shapes and form. Like the previous posters have mentioned, it needs to be done right and you can have a real ol' grand time in diving into the politics and socio-economic of this as well. But, personally, I don't think I could just write a story about racism. I think there needs to be more than the Us vs them trope. It can certainly create conflict and road blocks for the MC having to deal with the characters discrimination against others and it can even be used for characters to self-reflect and grow as an MC.

For example, it could create an interesting dichotomy where you have an intelligent character but because of their bigotry/racism, they make real stupid decisions and choices.

All in all, if it strengthen your story, plot, character, then use it. No need to shy away from the topic just because it's over done". There are many way to tell the "same story".

I don't think there's anything wrong with depicting racist people in fictional works. I think it can be quite interesting if done correctly and can be a neat tool to show how some cultures and races are different, and that it's okay for those races and cultures to be different than others. I think it's also okay to have a racist character who has had a been experience with another race due to a single experience, but then when they experience more of those people, they have a change of heart. I dunno, I just like character growth.

I think it’s a lot relatable, especially to Americans. Not in my country, though. It’s worse here lmao I find dystopian society more relatable.

It's not an easy thing to do because it's an ugly thing, but ugly things exist, and sometimes a story can feel too soft or coddled if it ignores ugly truths. Every story doesn't need to include racial issues, but I think it's safe to say race is always present, so it should at least come into consideration. If your story is a thousand years into the future, maybe then it won't matter. If your story exists in the modern-day, you can probably get away with subtle things. But if your story takes place in the past, and I'm not even talking about 100 years ago, just 50 or 30 years ago, then racism is most likely there. People judge and divide for all sorts of reasons. Even if everyone in the world were the same color, people would still care about hair color, height, or something else. I don't think there's anything wrong with racism in fiction, just as long as the author has enough skill to include an ugly thing without being ugly themselves.

Fiction has always been a place to portray & examine ugly issues & ugly times. I'd say whether it's appropriate is a personal choice and probably depends on how the story is handling it. Not everyone has to like it.

As someone who writes about fantasy racism, I think it can be a relatively safe way to examine issues from a distance. You can deconstruct the reasons behind prejudice, what makes it bad, and even potential solutions, without having to be tied down in the ugly details of real-life racism. If you can sympathize with a fantasy creature, why not with another human being who has a different skin color?

That isn't to say it can't be done poorly—certainly there's plenty of examples of that. There's probably flaws with how I handle it in my stories, too. Though it seems to have resonated with a lot of my readers, so I like to think I'm doing something right, haha.

Ahh, yes. Racism in fantasy. cracks fingers I'm going to be outing myself as a complete psycho today, and I'm going to love every second of it.

Sorry fellas, this might end up being a little bit of a rant. Tread carefully.

'Racism' (and I admit, I'll be casting an awfully broad net on the term as I use it here) is actually a really nice way of adding little shadings of depth to your worldbuilding and story. A relatively "soft" example of this is the animosity between elves and dwarves common in high fantasy works; aside from leading to cool banter (such as a certain, immortalized moment in LOTR I won't mention here) it helps to show two even-handed truths about racism:
1. 'racism' comes in a wide variety of shades and degrees, and isn't always of the incredibly dramatized and hammed-up variety you see most writers portraying it as.
2. Every race is guilty of racism, unlike the typical (and quite boring) oppressor/oppressed dichotomy that most works end up going for.

On a slightly more serious level, racism is also a decent way to bring realism and depth to your world, if done relatively even-handedly. It can even be a good way to contextualize plot events, such as growing tensions between nations or something along the lines of "there's a series of crimes being committed by people of a certain demographic, so people start distrusting a major character of the same demographic a lot more".

Now to the really fun part: When is racism in fantasy stories bad?

Almost every time it's ever been made a big deal of.

"Fuck thinly veiled allegories, fuck watching your every step to make sure you don't piss off SOMEONE, SOMEWHERE on the internet, and fuck one-sided, context-avoidant portrayals of racism!"

Those are words you can repeat to yourself whenever you're unsure of what to do when you want to implement racism into your story.

Thinly veiled allegories. AKA "I refuse to use any critical thinking on the concept of racism and how it fits into my world."

The truth is, I normally detest allegories, particularly poorly done or poorly concealed ones, simply because they tend to suck as stories. Admit it, you're not George Orwell, and you probably never will be if you have to look for advice in this thread. What most people who think writing this way is a good idea fail to notice (or don't care, in more experienced cases) is that trying to push a message will nearly always come at the expense of the story, even—perhaps especially—if you plan around it. So, if you think writing about racism in this way just to "make a statement" about modern culture is a good idea, I implore you to ask yourself this question, honestly: Do you want to write a good story, or do you want to write a piece of propaganda? Because the odds are very good that you aren't even close to good enough to have it both ways.

And I won't even go into how overdone such a parable would be in this day and age.

just writing your racism as a near-carbon copy of racism in America in a medieval fantasy is ironically a very good way to make your work far, far less realistic than never having racism to begin with, and the main reason for this, in my mind, is obvious in hindsight but very easy to miss. It tends to be very, very one-sided because it is looking at racism from a very specific lens, not a wider anthropological or psychological perspective.

How to avoid this? Ditch the oppressor-oppressed dichotomy immediately. In other words, ironically, in order to have better racism you need more racism. Don't just make the white-equivalent race mega racist when the POC-equivalent race(As far as they are portrayed in the story) is somehow not racist at all, even though every encounter a major character of that race has had with white-equivalents has been extremely negative. Hell, why are they even cognizant of the concept of racism instead of just assuming that "they're all like that"? THAT'S FREE CHARACTER GROWTH YOU'RE LEAVING ON THE TABLE!

It gets badly done so often or goes the Zootopia route of bad allegory ("stories where it's literally different species with different limitations are totally the same as the same human beings from different cultures, right???) that I'd be hard pressed to be interested on it as a focus, unless it's OwnVoices and the person knows what they're doing, which is extremely rare.

Even being latine myself, I just don't feel like I have the maturity to put that into a kind of story and the experience is, thankfully, very rare to really have a grasp that's not from other people's articles and whatnot. Even for fantasy races, here's resource disputes, systemic oppression, cultural justifications, the way each group throws its power(and how much they have of it) around, there's how every step of the culture and hierarchy becomes a tangled mess with bigotry. It's a gigantic worldbuilding thing to tackle and you can't just go "brightfins don't like sparklewings but a new threat shows they can work together and put their differences aside!!!" and call it a day unless it's basically a footnote in a larger story. If it's not just one episode and done, it'll end badly or at least very awkwardly.

I do tackle other types of discrimination and bigotry in my comic, but that's something I've got more firsthand experience with, and it's not particularly towards a group. And, it still goes into how people justify themselves into dehumanizing someone else and delude themselves that every problem will get solved once the undesired fellow is removed - not something as black and white as X doesn't like Y for odd reason that's gonna get solved at some point, or angry Y person needs to be taught they can't be violent in their resistance to oppression, actually (ew). Even when it's shunning, it's not a simple beginning or a simple "solution".

(and since OP brought up a specific comic - that page seems fine, but it really could get better or worse depend on how it's done later. Kinda felt a bit heavy handed to go "ugh people of that race, how dare" - microaggressions tend to be more, well, micro, and vile.)

Here's an amazing tumblr that's specifically about this, and depictions of IRL racism and common pitfalls too2 - they're not the ultimate authority on writing and research should be always very expansive, but it's a damn good start.

I think because stories are a good way to teach or inform about something without boring someone or making it sound preachy. Kind of like how a lot of cartoons for kindergarteners slide in moral lessons every episode.... except the moral lessons are about real social issues instead and it's for older people generally.

Fantasy is a popular genre for these types of stories because you can pretty much come up with anything lore-wise, so you can sidestep most of the research you'd typically need to do for something grounded in our reality and you won't accidentally end up saying something offensive along the way (at least, in terms of real life stuff, you can still totally end up fucking up your racism subplot and offending POC because you accidentally spread the wrong message coughs RWBY coughs)

While I'm in full support of racism being discussed in fantasy works, even to the point it's a major theme in my comic, generally they are not... very well handled.

This. This, a million times this. A lot of why racism subplots fail is because the people writing them present it as a clear cut oppressor vs oppressed conflict where one side is very clearly racist and the other is very clearly the victim. The racial minority can be racist - I've had relatives who are racist towards East Asians, despite my family and I being Southeast Asians ourselves. Racism is an inherently complicated topic and has many different shades.

Honestly? Just take inspiration in real life - not just based on Good Old American White Supremacy and Racism - but look on how this works outside of that too. A lot of the way I write my racism subplot is based on my own experiences and thoughts.

These stories aren't easy to write because this isn't a topic that's easy to tackle. You gotta be really dedicated to write something like this, because there is absolutely no easy way to go about it.

It depends, like anything, there can be poor attempts at handling it, but I think there's also no ONE correct way to do it either. You just have to speak from whatever your place of truth is. If you're white, you probably haven't experienced discrimination (unless there's another factor like you're also gay or transgender or something along those lines), so you do have to do some research and talk to people who have, and even then, be careful not to tell their story as your own. To give you an example though, in my fantasy comic, Santa Fae, I'm focusing more on elitism and classism, because that's more akin to what I have witnessed and experienced growing up in Venezuela. It is racism, but I find there, it does more with one's social & economic status than it does with skin color. There is old fashion racism, too, don't get me wrong. But I always saw it came from more from the kind of family you came from, if you had money or not, where you studied, etc. At least there where I grew up.

So, I decided to focus on that when exploring that "Otherness" in my characters, most of which are elves. Dividing them between Highborns and Houseless, and the privilege of magic, which is only afforded to the former. The Houseless don't belong a House, therefore are like a second class citizen, unworthy of the gift magic, and pushed to the side in society. Also, I did have the elves be all races mixed among both groups, because yeah, it's not jsut white people who do racism, and so neither should the elves excluding other just be white. The main character is a Latina elf (which I do establish is from Venezuela like me) and we see Black elves in there, too (one is a criminal the other the literal Queen of the elves), and a Polynesian one and even two main white elves that I show are gay. Cause often in Fantasy you see people take that shortcut and focus on the racism as "Elves don't like Dwarves" which you can have, I also do, but having everyone be white while you do that is....not great, in my opinion. I don't know if this is valid or not, who am I to decide that, I just wrote from my experience of that being like that, and hopefully see that.

In case anyone is curious, you can get the first Issue of Santa Fae now! You can find out how and see the first few pages right here on Tapas at:

P.S: I guess there's also another layer, but I don't know if I would count it honestly. A friend of mine who read it did. For context, I'm gonna have to go into SPOILERS so be warned lol. But one of the main characters is dead, but kept around by the other main character's magic, which in turn is what has made her hated by all the Highborns since it's "taboo" to do that in their culture. Thus this character is black sheep in their community, and the other isn't even considered a person. My friend said he saw that a commentary on gay people being exiled sometimes since the undead character is also gay but...honestly, I didn't intend that lol. I was just creating a set of rules and a reason why my character was ostracized, which you can argue is a commentary "Oh everyone that is different we automatically treat as different and cast them out" sure, that I did intent, but the gay reading is accidental or just one man's interpretation. So I guess my point there is, sometimes will read things their own way regardless of your intentions? Take that as you will.

This became a really long response lol. Sorry about that ^^

I really hate the "write what you know" advice. If I lived by that, I'd have such bland stories. I don't know what it's like to be immensely rich, or in abject poverty, or a soldier, or immortal, or a minority, or LGBTQ+, or experience racism. But, I am an imaginative and empathetic human being, who is good at listening, and somehow manages to write all of these things with nuance and respect anyway. That's what good writers do.

There's also the catch 22 of "don't write about X when you aren't X" and "how dare you not include X, your story is not diverse/realistic enough". A writer will face one of those critiques. You have to choose which you'd rather face, and just steel yourself for it.

The thing most people seem to dislike about racism in fantasy/sci-fi works is that it's often ham-fisted and poorly written. But if it's approached with care, and it isn't pushed at the reader in too preachy a fashion, it can be a realistic and nuanced addition to a fantasy world. Racial issues aren't prominent in my comic, but they do pop up subtly along species lines, as is typical with fantasy/sci-fi.

I absolutely agree with you. Very deep thoughts that respond within me. It is very important in today's world to talk about the problem of racism in all spheres, including the racism that manifests itself in the literary sphere. For me, one of the important symbols of the fight against racism is Rosa Parks. You can read more about her and her activities at https://samploon.com/free-essays/rosa-parks/. Most people have heard of Rosa Parks, the woman who refused to give up her seat to a white man after a long, hard day at work.