I really don't understand racism in the real world. People are what

people are, regardless of skin pigmentation or where their ancestors came

from. There's really only one real-world race - the Human Race - and I

loathe everyone equally.

This is not the case in high fantasy and science fiction, however. In

those settings, humans quite often share their worlds with other sentient

species. Elves, Orcs, Wookiees, Vulcans, Chua, Argonians... intelligent

humanoid creatures with their own unique cultures, languages, beliefs and

all that other good stuff, mingling with humans throughout the entirety of

time and space.

Usually, this co-existence comes with some kind of conflict. And all too

often, this conflict stems around differences between species. Sometimes,

this conflict is a deliberate analogue of real-world racism, where each

group represents an historical race of people in the real world and the

story of the conflict is (usually) a criticism of real events. This can be

a healthy way to examine such events more objectively - these stories

often center around root causes and motivations, looking at both sides of

the conflict with varying degrees of sympathy. You see this a lot on Star

Trek - the original series episode, "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield,"

where the guy with the half-black/half white face hates the guy with the

half-white/half-black face. This has been criticized as a "heavy-handed"

approach, but it is still a kind of social commentary.

It comes up fairly often in high fantasy as well. Authors will often

assign real-world cultural attributes to fantasy species to give them an

added degree of realism, and, sure enough, some other species will hate

them for it. Again, this is often an attempt to shine a light on

real-world problems with race and culture relations from history - foreign

cultures discovering the ancient people of isolated lands and then deeming

them "primitive" or "savage" because they don't happen to have fancy

pressed trousers or projectile weapons that use gunpowder.

Other times, it seems more happenstance and accidental - writers

following existing trends and using common tropes and themes without

attempting any sort of social commentary. In these cases, "species" is

used interchangeably with "race." This is where things get kind of

dangerous.

Consider a "typical" fantasy world where Orcs are the "bad guys." Orcs as

a whole will tend to be violent, black-hearted savages capable only of

destruction and mayhem. There may be rare exceptions to this rule, but as

a whole, all members of that race behave in a way that only ensures that

they will not enjoy a long-lived civilization. And they're all good with

axes.

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In that same fantasy world, Elves are all tree-loving happy-go-lucky

people skilled with bows and magic and the singing of songs. They have an

ancient, respected civilization and have done great works in days long

past. And all the females are super-models with perfect racks.

These are fairly obvious examples of racial stereotyping. If you applied

the same sweeping generalizations to any group of humans - whether that

group be determined by skin color, region of ancestry, code of beliefs or

whatever - it would be considered racism. Even the thing about elf women

having nice racks.

There is an overwhelming tendency for game designers to lump races into

ideologically-aligned factions, and some of these factions are blatantly

racist. Elder

Scrolls Online is, to me, chief among these - the Aldmeri

Dominion led by Queen Aryan

Ayrenn promotes ideals of an Altmer "master race" destined to rule Tamriel

by divine right. The "lesser races" are unfit for the task. They're not

even trying to hide the Nazi allusions.

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World of Warcraft

also does this. The whole "Horde vs Alliance" war pits species against

species. And they take cultural stereotypes to a whole new level, very

transparently "borrowing" certain cultural traits from real-world peoples

and amalgamating them into the different races. Trolls, for example, have

distinctly Caribbean accents and talk a lot about "voodoo," but there are

Polynesian influences in there as well. Tauren have Native American roots

- a hodge-podge of different tribes have contributed to their culture.

Basically, the "Horde" guys come from real-world tribal cultures, and

"Alliance" seems largely inspired by European cultures. And Pandarens are

pretty obviously inspired by ancient Chinese culture.

Some consider WoW's use of real-world cultures to be racist -

stereotypical cultural traits used satirically and making fun of the

real-world people upon whom these cultures are based. Others defend

Blizzard's use of non-European cultures as a basis for the different races

because they show non-white cultures in a more or less sympathetic light.

WoW racial cultures are more than they appear to be on the surface.

Be that as it may, the fact remains: all Humans are Alliance, all Orcs

are Horde.

Unfortunately, "faction-lumping" has been a part of the high-fantasy

genre since the genre started. Tolkien, considered by many to be the

grandfather of high-fantasy fiction, has been accused of racialism in the

Lord of the Rings - all Orcs, from pre-history onward, are

irredeemably-evil agents of the enemy, the constant footsoldier of the

great forces of evil. And it is furthermore suggested that this racial

tendency towards evil is a matter of genetics - their half-human

offspring, like Bill Ferny's Squint-eyed Southerner cohort, were also

wicked and rotten, and worked as spies. And it goes even deeper than that.

Tolkien himself described his Orcs as, "... degraded and repulsive

versions of the (to the European) least-lovely Mongol-types."

The flipside of this, however, is that Tolkien himself was very much

opposed to racism. When he consciously addressed such matters in his

books, it was always portrayed in a negative light. He was sympathetic to

the plight of European Jews during the first half of the 20th century, and

modeled Dwarf culture after what he called "that gifted people." And he

later regretted his depiction of the Orcs as wholly, irredeemably corrupt,

as such a notion conflicted with his Catholic beliefs. His physical

description of them, while surely insensitive by modern standards,

admitted a Eurocentric bias. And when Samwise finds the body of a Haradrim

soldier, he wonders if the soldier wasn't just some guy who would rather

be back home, the same as all the good guys.

It's not just high fantasy that depicts racism/speciesism. We see it in

science fiction all the time. In the original Star Wars movies, the Empire

is basically all humans, while the Rebel Alliance includes a number of

weird alien pilots and soldiers. This isn't really addressed in the movies

much (except when that one Imperial officer calls Chewbacca a "thing"),

but in the Expanded Universe stuff that followed, it was really played up

- the Empire is a xenophobic "master race" of humans, and aliens only fill

menial roles and are often subject to overt racism by the ruling

elite.

This was made retroactive as well, to span the era of the Old Republic

and Sith Empire thousands of years prior to the events of the movies. Play

a non-human Sith Empire character in Star

Wars: the Old Republic and you will encounter this speciesism

over and over.

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Even worse, Expanded Universe writers have taken a few seconds of

observed behavior on screen and extrapolated it into defining traits of

entire species. For example, the guys in the cantina band have big, weird

hands and are musicians; therefore, all Bith have incredibly acute hearing

and extraordinary manual dexterity, are renowned across the galaxy as

great musicians, and work in bars and cantinas everywhere because it's a

religious tradition. Greedo was a sleazy, conniving and none-too-bright

bounty hunter; therefore, all Rodians are untrustworthy, often stupid

criminals who come from a vicious hunter culture. If an alien stumbles on

screen, his species is clumsy and accustomed to different gravity. If he

is seen in the court of a crime lord, his species is know for ruthlessness

and/or lawlessness. If an alien is seen engaged in polite conversation,

his species is lugubrious and diplomatic and have special empathy glands

in their armpits. If an alien is seen frowning, his species is surly and

quarrelsome.

This kind of "monoculturalism" isn't unique to Star Wars. Lots of sci-fi

writers need to paint quick portraits of entire species to fill a

particular story need. If the story has a mining colony on an asteroid,

for example, there are aliens who are docile enough to work there as

slaves, or different kinds of aliens who eat rocks and excrete super-pure

unobtainium nuggets. If the story needs a war, there are warrior-culture

aliens with spaceships built for conquest, and those aliens are taught to

shoot lasers from the cradle, and their brain has no fear center in the

medula oblongata or whatever. Monoculture is one of those "accidental"

types of racism - stereotype becomes fact for those species. Individuals

who behave differently from these stereotypes are usually remarkable to

the other characters in the story.

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As I said up above, the accidental kind of racism can be dangerous. This

sort of unintentional depiction of prejudice has the potential to be very

harmful. On the surface, it may seem innocent enough - lazy writers just

following protocol and doing what everyone else is doing - but therein

lies the problem. When issues of racial inequality are not addressed in a

fictional setting, that means they are considered acceptable. It can

create a mindset in the audience where similar prejudices become

acceptable outside of that setting as well, so suddenly it's okay to think

everyone from X is a dirty Y, or that all A

are good at B but can't C. And even if it does not

actively encourage the audience to think it such a way, it is evidence

that the authors certainly do. Substituting broad generalizations for

acute individual characterization is a quick and easy way to tell a big

story, but maybe not the best way.