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The word "race" means many things in sff: real life ethnic groups (europeans, africans etc), fictional ethnic groups (Numenorans, Darthacans etc), and (possibly non-human) sentient species (vulcans, elves etc)
Often these fictional "races" are used as a metaphor for, or draw upon, real life ethnic or cultural issues. This can be done well, part of the long tradition of sff using metaphor to make broad and powerful statements about the human condition. But often these stories are warped by the authors unexamined prejudices, as well as the problems inherent in equating the arbitrary divisions of race and culture to the objective biological divisions between species.
In Part One of this essay I go through some of the issues involved with using non-human species as a metaphor for race. In Part Two (if I write it) I'll go through some of the issues with using made-up ethnic groups and cultures as a metaphor for real ones.
EDIT: I never wrote Part 2, but here are the notes for a panel I took part in on the subject.
Disclaimer: I'm feeling sleepy and stupid but need to get this out of my head (I've been putting off posting it for like a year while it gets longer and longer in my head) I know I'm prone to over-generalisations and am not all that good at expressing myself, but please don't point out my minor errors without also thinking about my actual point. Though really, if anyone read the whole thing at all I'll be grateful :)
I don't really have a point as such (beyond pointing out how dodgy it all can be), just disconnected thoughts. It's not something I've seen explored beyond discussions of individual stories, and I'd like to get the ideas out of my head and hear other people's POV. I'm considering a Swancon panel on a topic like this, and also may do a redraft and post to a relevant community, so any and all suggestions, corrections or thoughts would be VERY appreciated.
Oh, and if the length of the disclaimer didn't tip you off: it's LONG.
First let us consider fiction set in a world with multiple sentient species playing a large part in the story (Not those where non-humans just have cameos and 99% of the story involves humans)
Now in some stories the non-humans quite clearly are not meant as a metaphor for human ethnic groups. They're beings of pure destructive evil, or deus-ex-machina demigods etc (e.g. StarGate). I am not talking about those sorts of stories. That said, sometimes these stories decide the race metaphor is just too perfect and use it anyway, which can lead to incredibly dodgy implications like "other ethnic groups=pure evil" (as I go into in the penultimate section "Having your cake and eating it too")
I am also not talking about stories involving just races of humans, no matter how distinct their cultures or distant their home planets (e.g. StarGate again, the Belgariad, etc) That's for Part 2.
About the most perfect example of science fiction using species as a metaphor for race is Star Trek, and since I just watched a whole bunch of Deep Space Nine that's where a lot of this is coming from. But even in Star Trek the metaphor is often complicated by actual science fiction ideas about genuinely non-human lifeforms, and this is even more true in most other sff using species as somewhat of a metaphor. Still, the metaphor is pretty inherent to the story, and I'll try to deal with the subtleties of it's depiction in the section "Having your cake and eating it too".
Some examples: Harry Potter, Babylon 5,...(*draws mental blank*)
Non-human species usually come across as a single ethnic group/nation, having fairly uniform colouring (or having variation which is either random or depicts something like caste, not region of birth), with a fairly monolithic and uniform culture, government, language and religion. (Unless it suits the plot for this to be otherwise, and even so this generally doesn't go beyond the sort of heterogeneity one expects from a single country) Apart from a few quirks, the aliens are generally pretty human-like in appearance, behavior and physiology (The human-like appearance is understandable in movies and tv where characters are played by real humans, but it's also true in books and animation)
Humans are often similar, especially in science fiction. There is a single world government, standard language, and few if any religions. There is talk of "the human way of thinking" etc, and subcultures are fairly superficial.
Now sometimes writers are not deliberately using species as a metaphor to explore ethnicity, but are using ethnicity as a metaphor to help them write different species. This is understandable, given that there are no actual non-human sentient beings to use as inspiration(*). And completely unhumanlike non-humans are too hard to empathise with anyway. But in such cases how the species are written often transparently reflects the authors unconscious biases towards other ethnic groups, and the underlying real life template is so obvious that the story is difficult not to take as a commentary on real life, even if it's not meant that way.
So, we can consider these stories a metaphor or commentary on real life ethnic groups. But what does this metaphor say?
(*)One could argue for gorillas etc but most people don't think of them that way. Personally I think the mindsets of these non-human intelligences are a great starting point for sff, but it's not one many writers use very well.
First off, the very idea of equating other ethnic groups with other species is problematic. There is a long history of racists painting the ethnic groups they didn't like as animalistic and unhuman, biologically incapable of being civilised or decent.
When non-human species are used as a metaphor for ethnic groups, it's almost impossible not to send the same sort of message. They really are inherently different to us, there really is no point expecting them not to 'follow their nature', and it really is pointless expecting our cultures to ever truly blend and blur. Interracial relationships really are a hugely big deal, and bi-racial people are genuinely distinct from regular people, with no place they can ever truly belong or fit in.
When the "open minded" human characters use the same language as real life advocates for tolerance, but then are proven wrong by the other "races" being irredeemably different and uncivilised...that's pretty much a direct attack on those advocates, even if it isn't meant that way.
There's also the unspoken assumption that ethnicity=culture=nationality. One of the points of this history podcast series I just finished is that this assumption is fairly modern and rarely reflected by actual ethnicities/cultures/nationstates. I must admit to defaulting to this assumption myself unless I think about it very hard, and decided not to make the distinction in this essay since it's not like the fiction I'm talking about does (well, Babylon 5 makes some effort)
We can assume that the reader is human and will identify with the humans. So who do the humans represent in this metaphor? Westerners, and in particular the denizens of the author's home country. In american stories they play baseball, speak with american accents, and believe in democracy and capitalism and freedom of the individual. There is often some effort to include other countries a little bit, but it's usually pretty token, or they get exoticised nearly as much as the non humans *glares at JK Rowling* Non-humans, when not based on any specific culture (*cough* Jehovah's Witness Babylon 5 episode *cough*) are usually generically "ethnic", with incense and strange rituals and foreign looking clothes.
Now already this is a bit exclusionary but is reflecting the writers and audience. The problem comes when we examine what the metaphor says about the humans=westerners=america. Namely, that we're the best. Even if we don't rule the universe (as in Star Trek and Harry Potter) then we're still absolutely central, with the story stopping every now and then to emphasise how we're unique (thanks to our ingenuity and feisty spirit or whatever), and how other species would be better off if they were just like us. We're smarter, kinder, tougher, wiser and all around better.
On the other hand, the non-humans are always deeply flawed. Star Trek, for example, makes a point of being about tolerance and acceptance of other cultures, then creates races who really are all inferior to humans, so that the "tolerance" is just politely putting up with other races crap until they realise the humans were right all along. In Next Gen and Deep Space 9, the moral is that you shouldn't be prejudiced towards apparently less civilised races (the warlike Klingons and mercenary Ferengi)...because some of them may learn to reject most of their culture, become more human-like and join our side. And you know, their culture isn't all bad...because deep down they share some of our values. There's never anything that we could stand to learn from them.
The only times I can think of where a non-human species was more like my own culture than than the "human" culture was in futuristic stories where future humans have progressed and the aliens are "savages" like us modern day humans. Nice.
And the only times non-humans are better than humans is in fairly blatant noble savage/mystical Other situations. (I'm not sure I'm up to explaining why this sort of thing is bad, but it it is)
An unavoidable issue with live action sf is that whatever the metaphorical stuff going on with race in the story, in practice the characters are played by actual human beings, with real life ethnicity. Part of the humans=westerners thing is that most humans are played by white actors with a few token black characters thrown in for "balance", ignoring the fact that a very large of the proportion of the worlds population (and for that matter, the population of america) is asian or latino etc.
Non-humans are a real problem. If you have a given species played by a multi-ethnic cast then the single species=single ethnic group metaphor breaks down (also, given how subtle the differences between the appearance of each species it becomes harder to tell who is what). If every nonhuman is played by white people it gets a bit dodgy even by tv standards (unless you only have one or two). But if the members of a given species are all of the same non-white ethnicity then it looks like you're commenting on that ethnicity, and given all the bad things these stories are normally implying about the non-human species that's a bad idea too.
Unless you like being racist *glares at Star Gate, even though this essay isn't about them*
And don't get me started on black skinned evil elves and other reviled species which just happen to share traits with reviled ethnic groups (jews and roma are a favourite here, since the racist stereotypes run so deep they don't even feel like racism any more *mutters about long nosed xenophobic sneaky money grubbingjews goblins who run all the banks*)
So, like I said at the beginning, some species aren't meant as a metaphor for ethnic groups, they're just meant to be antagonists, or demi-gods, or whatever. So it's ok to say that they're inherently evil and deserve to die etc.
But then, after their inhumanity has been well established....they are used as a metaphor for race. Which sends an even stronger and dodgier "other ethnic groups are inhuman and evil" message than the stuff I've been talking about.
Now this is kind of understandable in say, Star Trek, where each episode has it's own writer and is pretty much designed to stand alone, and it is in general a bad idea to search for a coherent or consistent narrative/moral over time. That species may usually be inherently evil, but right now we're thinking of them as just another culture.
Star Trek did this several times, with the Klingons and then the Ferengi going from irredeemable antagonists to just another wacky member of the federation from series to series, though the change was subtle and consistent enough that it's only really bad when you look at the portrayal over an extended period.
One of the central tenets of Buffy is that all demons are soulless and evil so it's ok to kill them, while it is never ok to kill humans. But after a while they introduced some nice (or at least not actively evil) demons, and on Angel there were lots of perfectly innocent demons around, showing every sign of having a conscience etc. Yet it was still 100% acceptable to kill bad demons, and 100% unacceptable to kill bad humans (admittedly Angel blurred this a little too) Why?
Also, there were storylines which clearly paralleled demons with immigrants from other cultures(*). I read this great essay about how overall these were pretty dodgy which somewhat inspired this essay(**), imo the worst is the episode where a woman is marrying a demon, and he keeps going on about how intolerant the main characters are for not understanding his people's perfectly valid customs...one of which turns out to involve murder. So the message is...it's ok to be intolerant, immigrants really are evil?
Now I understand that something can both be itself and a metaphor for something else, and there's no reason that a story about a nonhuman race can't both have them be genuinely inhuman and be a metaphor about human ethnic/cultural interaction. See my discussion of Pratchett in the next section, for example. I think the problem is when the author (or in many cases, authors) is inconsistent and doesn't think through the implications of their statements.
In my opinion J.K. Rowling simply couldn't decide what sort of story she was telling in Harry Potter, and so rather than (as she claims) not having a message, she has a message about tolerance and equality but then contradicts it, creating a very dodgy subtext. At various points she brings up the idea that maybe human wizards aren't the pinnacle of all sentience, and that there's something rotten about their attitudes towards muggles, house elves, goblins etc. But then we are shown that house elves like being servants, that goblins can't be trusted, and in the end things really are better with human wizards in charge, as long as they have the same "Be nice to the inferior races and they will eventually realise we're right" so-called "tolerance" of Star Trek. Which is of course exactly the attitude decent people had back when racism was the norm (rather than the over-the-top parody of racism that is presented as a straw-man for our heroes to triumph over).
Now I would say that Tolkein was not using species as a metaphor for race. But many of his imitators do (D&D for example), and then end up presenting orcs as an "Oppressed minority"...who is ugly and smelly and unlikeable.
(*)While having a complete absence of any actual latinos, afaict the main nonwhite/immigrant group in Los Angeles. *points up to previous section*
(**)I can't find it now, but did find some similar links, which I posted below
Star Trek is continuously using the relationships between different species as a deliberate metaphor for conflicts between different races and cultures. This has allowed it to get across some very very powerful messages that probably would never have made it on to tv if they weren't couched in metaphor, especially back in the 60s.
And the great thing about metaphors is that they go from talking about one specific instance to talking about a more general phenomena, which can resonate more deeply and also make the audience look at things in a different way. It also makes us empathise with viewpoints that we would likely see as the "Other" in a regular narrative. The Centauri/Narn conflict on Babylon 5 is like Israel/Palestine, England/Ireland, Europe/Africa...and yet not quite like any of them, and has it's own interesting things to say. The Bajoran/Cardassian conflict in Star Trek Deep Space 9 is pretty interesting too.
On the whole JMS of Babylon 5 does a pretty good job, both of genuinely thinking about nonhuman species rather than just transplanting real-life issues higgledy piggledy, and of not being horribly racist. Humans are not just this uniform mass of liberal american values, and he actually makes the point of showing how many different religions and cultures earth has. He also makes the distinction between species, culture, and the individual: both the humans and the Minbari have different factions gaining more and less influence and heterogeneous shifts in public attitude from fairly benign to fascist and violent and back again, with likable characters on the wrong side and bad guys spread amongst all species. There are very few totally bad species (or totally good), while there is some self congratulatory "Yay humans" stuff it's also made clear that other cultures have attitudes and values we can admire and maybe learn from, and for a while the earth government is a major antagonist. I think some groups are rather demonised in a dodgy way (the Minbari warrior castes complaints about a religious caste conspiracy to gain power are actually true, but it's ok because, well, the religious caste are better) but on the whole it's pretty good and has some very effective messages and ideas.
Terry Pratchett is an interesting case, since his different species really are different (Trolls are dumb, dwarves really like gold etc) yet he is sometimes using them as a metaphor for ethnicity. While he has a general message that open-mindedness and change is good (which often means non-humans benefiting from particular parts of human culture) the humans have to learn to change as much as everyone else, and aren't exactly a beacon of goodness and light for everyone else to follow. Rather than simply using real-life racial issues wholesale without thought to context, he adapts and parodies them so as to both comment on real-life racism and genuinely explore what it would be like to have different, somewhat incompatible species living together. I think it helps that the humans are a very heterogeneous bunch who have culture clashes between themselves as much as with the non-humans. Also each non-human species is it's own self-contained society with it's own identity beyond "Like humans but more warlike" etc.
So in conclusion: using nonhuman species as a way of talking about real-life ethnic groups (either deliberately or as an unconscious subtext) is problematic and often done very badly. But done thoughtfully and intelligently it can be very powerful and interesting.
Often these fictional "races" are used as a metaphor for, or draw upon, real life ethnic or cultural issues. This can be done well, part of the long tradition of sff using metaphor to make broad and powerful statements about the human condition. But often these stories are warped by the authors unexamined prejudices, as well as the problems inherent in equating the arbitrary divisions of race and culture to the objective biological divisions between species.
In Part One of this essay I go through some of the issues involved with using non-human species as a metaphor for race. In Part Two (if I write it) I'll go through some of the issues with using made-up ethnic groups and cultures as a metaphor for real ones.
EDIT: I never wrote Part 2, but here are the notes for a panel I took part in on the subject.
Disclaimer: I'm feeling sleepy and stupid but need to get this out of my head (I've been putting off posting it for like a year while it gets longer and longer in my head) I know I'm prone to over-generalisations and am not all that good at expressing myself, but please don't point out my minor errors without also thinking about my actual point. Though really, if anyone read the whole thing at all I'll be grateful :)
I don't really have a point as such (beyond pointing out how dodgy it all can be), just disconnected thoughts. It's not something I've seen explored beyond discussions of individual stories, and I'd like to get the ideas out of my head and hear other people's POV. I'm considering a Swancon panel on a topic like this, and also may do a redraft and post to a relevant community, so any and all suggestions, corrections or thoughts would be VERY appreciated.
Oh, and if the length of the disclaimer didn't tip you off: it's LONG.
Part 1: Different Species
First let us consider fiction set in a world with multiple sentient species playing a large part in the story (Not those where non-humans just have cameos and 99% of the story involves humans)
Now in some stories the non-humans quite clearly are not meant as a metaphor for human ethnic groups. They're beings of pure destructive evil, or deus-ex-machina demigods etc (e.g. StarGate). I am not talking about those sorts of stories. That said, sometimes these stories decide the race metaphor is just too perfect and use it anyway, which can lead to incredibly dodgy implications like "other ethnic groups=pure evil" (as I go into in the penultimate section "Having your cake and eating it too")
I am also not talking about stories involving just races of humans, no matter how distinct their cultures or distant their home planets (e.g. StarGate again, the Belgariad, etc) That's for Part 2.
About the most perfect example of science fiction using species as a metaphor for race is Star Trek, and since I just watched a whole bunch of Deep Space Nine that's where a lot of this is coming from. But even in Star Trek the metaphor is often complicated by actual science fiction ideas about genuinely non-human lifeforms, and this is even more true in most other sff using species as somewhat of a metaphor. Still, the metaphor is pretty inherent to the story, and I'll try to deal with the subtleties of it's depiction in the section "Having your cake and eating it too".
Some examples: Harry Potter, Babylon 5,...(*draws mental blank*)
Not so alien after all
Non-human species usually come across as a single ethnic group/nation, having fairly uniform colouring (or having variation which is either random or depicts something like caste, not region of birth), with a fairly monolithic and uniform culture, government, language and religion. (Unless it suits the plot for this to be otherwise, and even so this generally doesn't go beyond the sort of heterogeneity one expects from a single country) Apart from a few quirks, the aliens are generally pretty human-like in appearance, behavior and physiology (The human-like appearance is understandable in movies and tv where characters are played by real humans, but it's also true in books and animation)
Humans are often similar, especially in science fiction. There is a single world government, standard language, and few if any religions. There is talk of "the human way of thinking" etc, and subcultures are fairly superficial.
Now sometimes writers are not deliberately using species as a metaphor to explore ethnicity, but are using ethnicity as a metaphor to help them write different species. This is understandable, given that there are no actual non-human sentient beings to use as inspiration(*). And completely unhumanlike non-humans are too hard to empathise with anyway. But in such cases how the species are written often transparently reflects the authors unconscious biases towards other ethnic groups, and the underlying real life template is so obvious that the story is difficult not to take as a commentary on real life, even if it's not meant that way.
So, we can consider these stories a metaphor or commentary on real life ethnic groups. But what does this metaphor say?
(*)One could argue for gorillas etc but most people don't think of them that way. Personally I think the mindsets of these non-human intelligences are a great starting point for sff, but it's not one many writers use very well.
I am not an animal!
First off, the very idea of equating other ethnic groups with other species is problematic. There is a long history of racists painting the ethnic groups they didn't like as animalistic and unhuman, biologically incapable of being civilised or decent.
When non-human species are used as a metaphor for ethnic groups, it's almost impossible not to send the same sort of message. They really are inherently different to us, there really is no point expecting them not to 'follow their nature', and it really is pointless expecting our cultures to ever truly blend and blur. Interracial relationships really are a hugely big deal, and bi-racial people are genuinely distinct from regular people, with no place they can ever truly belong or fit in.
When the "open minded" human characters use the same language as real life advocates for tolerance, but then are proven wrong by the other "races" being irredeemably different and uncivilised...that's pretty much a direct attack on those advocates, even if it isn't meant that way.
There's also the unspoken assumption that ethnicity=culture=nationality. One of the points of this history podcast series I just finished is that this assumption is fairly modern and rarely reflected by actual ethnicities/cultures/nationstates. I must admit to defaulting to this assumption myself unless I think about it very hard, and decided not to make the distinction in this essay since it's not like the fiction I'm talking about does (well, Babylon 5 makes some effort)
Who counts as human?
We can assume that the reader is human and will identify with the humans. So who do the humans represent in this metaphor? Westerners, and in particular the denizens of the author's home country. In american stories they play baseball, speak with american accents, and believe in democracy and capitalism and freedom of the individual. There is often some effort to include other countries a little bit, but it's usually pretty token, or they get exoticised nearly as much as the non humans *glares at JK Rowling* Non-humans, when not based on any specific culture (*cough* Jehovah's Witness Babylon 5 episode *cough*) are usually generically "ethnic", with incense and strange rituals and foreign looking clothes.
Now already this is a bit exclusionary but is reflecting the writers and audience. The problem comes when we examine what the metaphor says about the humans=westerners=america. Namely, that we're the best. Even if we don't rule the universe (as in Star Trek and Harry Potter) then we're still absolutely central, with the story stopping every now and then to emphasise how we're unique (thanks to our ingenuity and feisty spirit or whatever), and how other species would be better off if they were just like us. We're smarter, kinder, tougher, wiser and all around better.
On the other hand, the non-humans are always deeply flawed. Star Trek, for example, makes a point of being about tolerance and acceptance of other cultures, then creates races who really are all inferior to humans, so that the "tolerance" is just politely putting up with other races crap until they realise the humans were right all along. In Next Gen and Deep Space 9, the moral is that you shouldn't be prejudiced towards apparently less civilised races (the warlike Klingons and mercenary Ferengi)...because some of them may learn to reject most of their culture, become more human-like and join our side. And you know, their culture isn't all bad...because deep down they share some of our values. There's never anything that we could stand to learn from them.
The only times I can think of where a non-human species was more like my own culture than than the "human" culture was in futuristic stories where future humans have progressed and the aliens are "savages" like us modern day humans. Nice.
And the only times non-humans are better than humans is in fairly blatant noble savage/mystical Other situations. (I'm not sure I'm up to explaining why this sort of thing is bad, but it it is)
Intersections with actual race
An unavoidable issue with live action sf is that whatever the metaphorical stuff going on with race in the story, in practice the characters are played by actual human beings, with real life ethnicity. Part of the humans=westerners thing is that most humans are played by white actors with a few token black characters thrown in for "balance", ignoring the fact that a very large of the proportion of the worlds population (and for that matter, the population of america) is asian or latino etc.
Non-humans are a real problem. If you have a given species played by a multi-ethnic cast then the single species=single ethnic group metaphor breaks down (also, given how subtle the differences between the appearance of each species it becomes harder to tell who is what). If every nonhuman is played by white people it gets a bit dodgy even by tv standards (unless you only have one or two). But if the members of a given species are all of the same non-white ethnicity then it looks like you're commenting on that ethnicity, and given all the bad things these stories are normally implying about the non-human species that's a bad idea too.
Unless you like being racist *glares at Star Gate, even though this essay isn't about them*
And don't get me started on black skinned evil elves and other reviled species which just happen to share traits with reviled ethnic groups (jews and roma are a favourite here, since the racist stereotypes run so deep they don't even feel like racism any more *mutters about long nosed xenophobic sneaky money grubbing
Having your cake and eating it too
So, like I said at the beginning, some species aren't meant as a metaphor for ethnic groups, they're just meant to be antagonists, or demi-gods, or whatever. So it's ok to say that they're inherently evil and deserve to die etc.
But then, after their inhumanity has been well established....they are used as a metaphor for race. Which sends an even stronger and dodgier "other ethnic groups are inhuman and evil" message than the stuff I've been talking about.
Now this is kind of understandable in say, Star Trek, where each episode has it's own writer and is pretty much designed to stand alone, and it is in general a bad idea to search for a coherent or consistent narrative/moral over time. That species may usually be inherently evil, but right now we're thinking of them as just another culture.
Star Trek did this several times, with the Klingons and then the Ferengi going from irredeemable antagonists to just another wacky member of the federation from series to series, though the change was subtle and consistent enough that it's only really bad when you look at the portrayal over an extended period.
One of the central tenets of Buffy is that all demons are soulless and evil so it's ok to kill them, while it is never ok to kill humans. But after a while they introduced some nice (or at least not actively evil) demons, and on Angel there were lots of perfectly innocent demons around, showing every sign of having a conscience etc. Yet it was still 100% acceptable to kill bad demons, and 100% unacceptable to kill bad humans (admittedly Angel blurred this a little too) Why?
Also, there were storylines which clearly paralleled demons with immigrants from other cultures(*). I read this great essay about how overall these were pretty dodgy which somewhat inspired this essay(**), imo the worst is the episode where a woman is marrying a demon, and he keeps going on about how intolerant the main characters are for not understanding his people's perfectly valid customs...one of which turns out to involve murder. So the message is...it's ok to be intolerant, immigrants really are evil?
Now I understand that something can both be itself and a metaphor for something else, and there's no reason that a story about a nonhuman race can't both have them be genuinely inhuman and be a metaphor about human ethnic/cultural interaction. See my discussion of Pratchett in the next section, for example. I think the problem is when the author (or in many cases, authors) is inconsistent and doesn't think through the implications of their statements.
In my opinion J.K. Rowling simply couldn't decide what sort of story she was telling in Harry Potter, and so rather than (as she claims) not having a message, she has a message about tolerance and equality but then contradicts it, creating a very dodgy subtext. At various points she brings up the idea that maybe human wizards aren't the pinnacle of all sentience, and that there's something rotten about their attitudes towards muggles, house elves, goblins etc. But then we are shown that house elves like being servants, that goblins can't be trusted, and in the end things really are better with human wizards in charge, as long as they have the same "Be nice to the inferior races and they will eventually realise we're right" so-called "tolerance" of Star Trek. Which is of course exactly the attitude decent people had back when racism was the norm (rather than the over-the-top parody of racism that is presented as a straw-man for our heroes to triumph over).
Now I would say that Tolkein was not using species as a metaphor for race. But many of his imitators do (D&D for example), and then end up presenting orcs as an "Oppressed minority"...who is ugly and smelly and unlikeable.
(*)While having a complete absence of any actual latinos, afaict the main nonwhite/immigrant group in Los Angeles. *points up to previous section*
(**)I can't find it now, but did find some similar links, which I posted below
But it's not all bad..
Star Trek is continuously using the relationships between different species as a deliberate metaphor for conflicts between different races and cultures. This has allowed it to get across some very very powerful messages that probably would never have made it on to tv if they weren't couched in metaphor, especially back in the 60s.
And the great thing about metaphors is that they go from talking about one specific instance to talking about a more general phenomena, which can resonate more deeply and also make the audience look at things in a different way. It also makes us empathise with viewpoints that we would likely see as the "Other" in a regular narrative. The Centauri/Narn conflict on Babylon 5 is like Israel/Palestine, England/Ireland, Europe/Africa...and yet not quite like any of them, and has it's own interesting things to say. The Bajoran/Cardassian conflict in Star Trek Deep Space 9 is pretty interesting too.
On the whole JMS of Babylon 5 does a pretty good job, both of genuinely thinking about nonhuman species rather than just transplanting real-life issues higgledy piggledy, and of not being horribly racist. Humans are not just this uniform mass of liberal american values, and he actually makes the point of showing how many different religions and cultures earth has. He also makes the distinction between species, culture, and the individual: both the humans and the Minbari have different factions gaining more and less influence and heterogeneous shifts in public attitude from fairly benign to fascist and violent and back again, with likable characters on the wrong side and bad guys spread amongst all species. There are very few totally bad species (or totally good), while there is some self congratulatory "Yay humans" stuff it's also made clear that other cultures have attitudes and values we can admire and maybe learn from, and for a while the earth government is a major antagonist. I think some groups are rather demonised in a dodgy way (the Minbari warrior castes complaints about a religious caste conspiracy to gain power are actually true, but it's ok because, well, the religious caste are better) but on the whole it's pretty good and has some very effective messages and ideas.
Terry Pratchett is an interesting case, since his different species really are different (Trolls are dumb, dwarves really like gold etc) yet he is sometimes using them as a metaphor for ethnicity. While he has a general message that open-mindedness and change is good (which often means non-humans benefiting from particular parts of human culture) the humans have to learn to change as much as everyone else, and aren't exactly a beacon of goodness and light for everyone else to follow. Rather than simply using real-life racial issues wholesale without thought to context, he adapts and parodies them so as to both comment on real-life racism and genuinely explore what it would be like to have different, somewhat incompatible species living together. I think it helps that the humans are a very heterogeneous bunch who have culture clashes between themselves as much as with the non-humans. Also each non-human species is it's own self-contained society with it's own identity beyond "Like humans but more warlike" etc.
So in conclusion: using nonhuman species as a way of talking about real-life ethnic groups (either deliberately or as an unconscious subtext) is problematic and often done very badly. But done thoughtfully and intelligently it can be very powerful and interesting.
Essays and posts etc on similar topics:
- Ranting about Rhetorics about Race
- A tangent about race in sci-fi: the Ferengi and Highly Offensive Ferengi: Racial Issues and Star Trek's Multicultural Deep Space Nine in Film
- Discussion of the "Demon Nazis" episode "Hero" on Angel
- Imaginary Para-Sites of the Soul: Vampires and Representations of ‘Blackness’ and ‘Jewishness’ in the Buffy/Angelverse
- Brownskirts: Fascism, Christianity, and the Eternal Demon (in Buffy)