I think a lot of people on this website and in media discussion online in general could do more to ask themselves if the problem with a trope is the trope itself or its execution. Take, for example, the puzzling idea I've seen a few times on here that science fiction envisioning futures where racism no longer exists on a structural level is somehow racist rather than like, the goal of anti-racist movements as long as there have been anti-racist movements? But then you realize, oh what these people are really taking issue with is the particular way that sci-fi tends to execute that, which is in ways that resemble modern-day "colorblind" ideology where cultural differences just cease to exist or become less common, and the new Universal Human Culture is, of course, really just modern white Western culture re-packaged, we're still all reading Shakespeare but not the Romance of the Three Kingdoms or the Shahnameh. The reason for that isn't because it's impossible for humanity to move past racism, though (which is itself only a few centuries old and varies wildly across cultures), it's that the people creating this media are themselves products of modern-day racism and imperialism and haven't fully thought through how much that influences their ideas of stuff like "great literature that our cultured characters should talk about" and how that would likely be different in the future they're envisioning. And in doing so, they haven't actually created the "post-racism future" they're claiming. But that doesn't mean that more honest approaches to that are bad! Similarly, a lot of stuff about "bury our gays" acts like the issue is just "gay characters dying" period, even in a series where lots of characters of various identities die in fairly proportional amounts, and even when that's obviously the best way to tell that particular story and letting them live would destroy the story (e.g. the doofus I saw accusing the author of The Song of Achilles of doing a "bury your gays" when there's no way to tell the story of Achilles and Patroclus where they live, otherwise you've ship-of-Theseus-ed into a whole new story with the main characters just having those names, a sort of reverse filing-the-serial-numbers-off). No, the issue is the way that as a pattern in media as a whole, as well as in specific works that treat LGBTQ+ characters (and particularly lesbian and bi women) as more disposable than cis het white men, the overall effect is that queer lives are represented as less valuable and less worth living. It doesn't mean no story is ever allowed to kill a gay/bi/trans character ever again. You guys have really got to take some time to think about what is the actual problem here? when you do media criticism, lest you risk endorsing deeply anti-progressive or just bad ideas that if you really reflect on, you might realize you don't actually believe anyway.
Re: the objection to sci fi futures where there's no more racism, I suspect it's one or both of two things:
- The explanation you described, where viewers take as authoritative not the statements by various characters that humans have moved past intra-species racism, but the on-screen situation exactly as shown -- with overrepresentation of white people in positions of power, the dominance of Western cultural touchstones, etc. -- and take those things not to be (Doylist) artifacts of the time and place when the show/movie was made, but to be (Watsonian) indications that structural and cultural racism still persists several centuries in the future in much the same way it does now.
2. Some people treat any claim that we've moved past intra-species racism in the future to have the same meaning that it does when people make it now: as a perniciously motivated denial of the present persistence of structural racism. This may involve taking a little too literally the point that speculative fiction is always really about the present, not the future, missing the nuance that speculative fiction often works in metaphors: it's inter-species racism that is standing in for present racism, and it wouldn't be able to perform that function as effectively if we assumed it was existing alongside persistent intra-species racism.
Speculative fiction works by defamiliarizing things, allowing them to show up in sharper relief because they're presented in a new context rather than the one that may have become invisible because we're so accustomed to it. Sometimes that involves showing us an extreme version of a current problem, driven to its dystopian conclusion; sometimes it involves seeing a familiar problem arising somewhere else or in a new way, from the perspective of characters who no longer experience the present version of those problems and can encounter them with fresh eyes. When Star Trek shows new kinds of inter-species racism arising when human intra-species racism no longer exists, it's NOT saying "we can never stop being racist"; it's saying that we will have to confront new forms of prejudice as we continue to encounter new types of people, but we can get over them. The efforts to overcome human supremacist attitudes, which regard Vulcan or Klingon culture as perverse or inferior, would look pretty futile if they were shown against the background of a humanity that was consistently incapable of overcoming white supremacy.
I think people who say the second thing would respond to you that they don't want allegories and don't think it's a satisfactory substitute for discussing racism in a more direct, realistic way. And I think there's some truth to that a lot of the time: Allegory makes it easy to reduce things to broad principles like "let's all get along," "prejudice and stereotypes are bad" and feel like you've done your job, whereas if you were dealing with a real-world group... well, you can do that too (plenty of media has), but it's more obvious, more glaring and the creator would nowadays likely receive some (deserved) backlash for it. Allegories can get so abstract that you can have people nodding along with something like that one "anti-homophobia" metaphorical episode of TNG whose name escapes me at the moment, who would very much still be homophobic in real life: because the episode didn't do enough to make the connection for them. Those people probably had a very different reaction to something like "Rejoined," which was about homophobia in an allegorical way but also included a lesbian couple, so it was harder to abstract away from that.
Additionally, with something like the TNG episode, there's something just kind of exploitative to me about making an episode all about how bad it is to be prejudiced against a marginalized group that the show itself is too chickenshit to actually depict openly. I've similarly heard things from Jewish people about how it feels to watch Holocaust allegories in shows with zero Jewish characters, or from black people about slavery allegories in shows with no black people or that may even have white characters playing the "slaves" in question.
But just bringing up "Rejoined" to me shows why "allegories are worse" is yet another example of name the problem. The fact is that this stuff can be done well if you're aware of that issue with allegories of being too broad and toothless and make an effort to counteract it. You can write a sci-fi or fantasy allegory of racism that addresses the nuances of systematic racism. (To give an example: I mostly think Harry Potter fumbled its racism allegory hard, but one small thing I really liked was when they showed that there are characters who are otherwise on the sides of the angels, like Horace Slughorn, who still harbor some casual anti-Muggle-born prejudices, like being surprised by Hermione and Lily's magical talent. That's one place where many allegories fuck up: just saying that "prejudice is bad and hurts people, so don't be prejudiced!" without going into how those prejudices are deeply baked into our society and media and so you need to make an active effort to unlearn them.) It's just that most people don't. (Even with the example I gave, Harry Potter could've done way more with it than it did.) And "Rejoined" shows that you can in fact include the marginalized group it's really about -- and even if they're not marginalized over that identity in the fictional work's world, it makes it harder for viewers to ignore what the story means in a real-world sense, and it also shows viewers from that marginalized group that the creators are on their side. So the issue isn't with allegory, it's with bad allegory.
I think a lot of people who are quick to criticize allegories don't similarly think through the downsides of the alternative they're suggesting, that racism (or misogyny or homphobia or colonialism etc.) can only ever be addressed well by representing the actual group it reflects in real life. In particular, when we're talking about sci-fi set in the far future like Star Trek, there are a lot of very good reasons why, outside of backwards time travel like in "Far Beyond the Stars," they're not addressing racism in a way that looks exactly like it does today: starting with the fact that it probably wouldn't. Even if you are to assume that racism today still persists among Earth humans in the 24th century (and given that "racism" itself is only about 500 years old, that's a big if), it would likely look extremely different from how it does now -- different stereotypes, different fault lines, different everything. Certainly, the day-to-day, more individual issues that people criticize allegories for not addressing would be completely different. But of course they're also ignoring the hopelessness of suggesting that, to paraphrase the classic civil rights anthem, we shall not overcome. I think we can and we will! I like to see visions of the future that recognize that! I just think that creators should put in the work to make sure they actually are that!
#racism is. definitely older than 500 years old#but yeah
I figured I'd get this response sooner or later, and I'm frankly surprised it took this long. So I guess it’s time for a (lengthy) bit of clarification, but TL;DR: no, it is only about 500 years old, but that's because what you're likely thinking of isn't actually what "racism" is.
In fact, I'm being a bit generous here, because if you want to be really specific about the term, "race" as a concept -- the division of people into our modern-day broad categories like White and Black and so on -- is even younger than that, and came about more gradually over the past 500 years but really only solidified during the 18th and 19th centuries. But I would say that the concept really begins its development with the advent of European colonialism that began with Columbus, and the beginning of the Atlantic Slave Trade that came with it. Medieval Europeans didn't organize human beings in that way; even if they did see non-Western-Christian-Europeans as Other (see: the Crusades, see: prejudice against the Moors of Iberia/North Africa, see: antisemitism), they didn't organize people into the categories we do now, they didn't have the concept of "race" or "whiteness." Ancient Romans certainly didn't; they saw a lot of people we now consider "white," like northern Europeans, as less civilized than a lot of people we now consider "brown" or "black," like people from the Middle East and North Africa, whom they viewed as the originators of civilization and as having more in common with them than northern Europeans did. (As is explained really well here.) The term "barbarian" came from the ancient Greeks, originally referring to anyone who didn't speak Greek; and then the Romans adopted it to refer to those "uncivilized" northern Europeans.
"But wait, that's still prejudice based on ethnicity!" you say. And yes, that has been around for a long time. But that's not what racism is. As was the common adage in the early days of Tumblr: racism is prejudice plus power. Specifically, racism is not just being prejudiced against people of a different ethnic group or nationality from you, it is a broader societal system where everything from the law to "science" to culture and media is/was used to justify a view of people from the broad racial groups of "White," "Black," "East Asian" etc. as essentially separate species with separate abilities and legal rights and so on, and where that power dynamic flows in one specific direction (which is why you can be prejudiced but not "racist" against white people). There's no "natural" reason to organize humans into these groups, no meaningful biological distinctions between them, no reason to use the particular groupings of "White," "Black" etc. or draw those lines where we've drawn them except for social and political reasons. Which is why, for most of human history, we didn't organize humans in that way. What would "whiteness" mean to the Romans, who largely didn't organize their thinking about ethnic superiority around melanin and/or origins on the European continent? What would they have say to the concept of "race," which suggests they're more similar to northern European "barbarians" than Babylonians or Egyptians? It would make no sense to them, and that's because it wasn't designed for their world, but over a thousand years later.
"Race" came about specifically as a justification for European colonialism and while some of it built out of earlier prejudices (such as prejudice against the Moors and "Saracens" (Arab Muslims)), the idea of this particular racial hierarchy of Europe vs. Other and the tropes we associate with it emerge out of the Age of Exploration and were created to justify Europe's brutalization of, initially, the New World and Africa and, over time, everywhere else.
There are about a billion academic books I could cite about this, but one in particular that I read recently that I think is also written in fairly accessible language is Timothy D. Taylor's Beyond Exoticism: Western Music and the World which specifically focuses on music, but traces really well how these concepts of "race" evolved out of a desire to differentiate Europe from the New World/Africa in a way that posited Europe as superior, and that before the Age of Exploration and the Columbian Exchange (which included the Atlantic Slave Trade), a need and desire to do that didn't really exist in the same way. (And how some features of classical music as basic as harmony/tonality in fact have their roots in the creation of "race" during colonialism. Yes, really. Read the book and you'll see!)
So that's what I mean by racism being only about 500 years old. Humans have been prejudiced against people from other countries and parts of the world for a long time, and there's a long horrifying history of that in medieval Europe especially from blood libel to the Crusades. But "racism" is a particular form of ethnic prejudice that came out of colonialism, and I think that's important to point out so that we can discuss how ideas we might now consider intractable (as systematic racism is in so much of the Western world today) are actually newer than we think -- and so it's not actually unthinkable to think they might go away (or at least have mutated into another form) within 350 years. It's like that Ursula K. LeGuin quote about how capitalism might feel immovable now, but at one point in human history, so was the divine right of kings.
