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IBARW: Race and Racism in Fantasy Fiction

August 8, 2008

Racism was not a problem on the Discworld, because--what with trolls and dwarfs and so on--speciesism was more interesting. Black and white lived in perfect harmony and ganged up on green.

--Terry Pratchett, Witches Abroad

It's International Blog Against Racism Week and I've seen a lot of good and thoughtful posts on race and racism among writers, editors, and readers. One thing I haven't seen (though it's quite possible I just missed it, and if so, please link me to it) is anyone addressing the broader question of how race and racism work in fantasy worlds, where they are both endemic and rarely questioned. Epic fantasy is the worst offender here, as epics generally require war and heroes and Good/Evil dynamics that are most easily driven by racism or its alter ego, nationalism, but fairy tales and legends are almost as bad, rife with unquestioned hereditary enmity and sterotyping, and most paranormal romance seems to postulate a world where white human women love vampires (with their fetishized pallor) and werewolves and ghouls but never give a non-white human man a second glance.

Pratchett's cheerful shift from racism to speciesism plays up the biggest problem I have with the use of race in fantasy: it exists only for the purpose of having an -ism attached to it. The idea of ganging up on people because of their race may be dismissed, but only if there's a different sort of ganging up to replace it, as though it is simply impossible to conceive of groups that don't gang up on other groups. Usually this ganging up is attributed to destiny, heredity, or religion (often in the form of tangible deities). Countless pages have been written about wars that can be traced back to some sort of eternal conflict between orcs and elves, or mortals and the undead, or any other two fantasy "races" of your choice. This hereditary enmity is never questioned or challenged except occasionally by Romeo-and-Juliet-like figures, a couple too young and besotted to pay attention to hundreds or thousands of years of history in which their ancestors busily slaughtered each other because vampires hate werewolves and werewolves hate vampires and that's how it's always been and always will be.

Sometimes authors attempt to justify this nonsense by saying that it's really about gods hating each other and their followers being forced to fight (most of David Eddings's books follow this formula) or about certain races being inherently evil (Tolkien's orcs are the canonical example), but that seems a pretty weak excuse. Of course, hereditary racism is a pretty weak excuse too. Bluntly, this is just plain sloppy writing. It encourages both the writer and the reader to be lazy, to buy in to this idea that because your ancestors found some justification for killing their ancestors, it's okay to perpetuate both the justification and the killing.

Stereotypes are another type of sloppy, lazy writing, and they pop up everywhere. I adore George R.R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire books, but this is one of his weak points; his characters travel all over their world and meet people from lots of different places and backgrounds, and the only time you hear "But I thought all _____ were _____!" is when a knight does something unknightly. Old wise men are old wise men, grim determined fighters against the forces of evil are grim determined fighters against the forces of evil, foreign barbarians are foreign barbarians, witchy women are witchy women, etc. The characters are almost all well-rounded, but it doesn't change the overall impression that they were stamped out of the same mold before being meticulously painted in different colors. Even non-racial stereotypes exercise the part of the brain that relies too heavily on pattern-matching and gets in the way of treating people as individuals, and I think that does readers a disservice both while they're reading and after they put the book down and go out into the real world.

Here on Earth, one of the ways people frequently try to get past racist ideas is to make the point that They are just like Us, and therefore there's no need to hate or fear them. This breaks down between elves and orcs, but that's fine, because it breaks down between people too. They are not just like Us, for any given values of "They" and "Us". They are different from Us and that's still no reason to hate or fear them. Nonetheless, I don't remember the last time I saw any fantasy character come to that realization. The closest you get is the occasional grudging truce. More often, if anyone even thinks to bring up the "We're all the same under the skin/scales/fur" argument, it's laughed off. Then everyone agrees that all possible arguments against all-out inter-species war have been considered and rejected, and the arrows start flying.

While reading Daniel Abraham's Long Price Quartet (or rather, the first three volumes of it, since the fourth isn't out yet), I was struck by the presence of a character type I rarely see: the merchant who has made his home in a distant country and is respected reasonably well as a businessman even if he isn't fully fluent in the language and looks like a foreigner. In real life, I encounter hundreds of people like this. Why are they so unusual in epic/heroic/high fantasy? More often, you see unquestioned isolationism that leads very quickly to unquestioned suspicion, hatred, and violence between cultures. In order for that degree of strict cultural distance to be maintained, pretty much every fantasy country would have to be run like North Korea, and even then you would still get diplomatic missions and intermarriage and international students and smuggling and so forth. Instead you get theoretically relaxed, open societies where it just happens that none of those funny-looking people from the next kingdom over have ever even thought about coming across the border to, say, start a restaurant or an import/export business, or even to do a bit of shopping. There might still be suspicion, hatred, and violence, but at least it would have some degree of nuance, instead of being predicated on the wholly unlikely notion of happenstance separatism.

I'm not suggesting that blandly race-free racism-free fantasy worlds are the way to go; I think the unquestioned absence of racism is in many ways as bad as the unquestioned presence of racism, not least because it so often only pops up anyway in the guise of nationalism ("We don't hate the funny-looking people from another country because they're funny-looking. We hate them because they hate us!"). What I would like to see are more fourth-stage narratives where cultural and physical differences matter but aren't all that matter, where stereotypes show up and are then questioned and refuted, where the cost of enforcing isolation is made clear and at least one person wonders whether the payoff is worth it. I'm not asking for intermarriage between orcs and elves, but maybe something as small as an elf who runs a construction company, hires some of those ugly stupid orcs to do the heavy lifting, and eventually starts to get to know them and sees that they have their own language and culture and joys and sorrows... and all of that as a sidebar to the main plot, not a way for the writer to proudly parade around their anti-racism and ask for cookies.

There are, of course, fantasy authors who handle these issues well. Pratchett, that tongue-in-cheek opening quote aside, gets tremendous credit for examining and discarding pretty much all of these notions; not only does Ankh-Morpork have all the multiculturalism you would expect from a major city, but there's thriving international trade, tourism, and as much negotiation and diplomacy as war. Abraham deals very carefully and thoughtfully with the reasons why one country might go to war against another and how the civilians in both places are likely to react when it happens. Michael Swanwick apparently likes nothing better than to tee up fantasy and fairy tale stereotypes and then hit them so hard they shatter, which makes for a very enjoyable reading experience if you don't mind occasional jagged shards underfoot. I haven't read much fantasy recently, being on more of an SF kick, but I hope other suggestions will be offered in comments. After all, I wouldn't want to stereotype fantasy authors as being universally clueless. Some of them are very smart and articulate. In fact, some of my best friends write fantasy! And I'm sure they can tell you that I don't look down on them at all. Can I have my cookie now?

Posted by Rose Fox on August 8, 2008 | Comments (9)