He would've written something to suggest this, that this is bad, and that we should take the side against it. "Getting away with it" is too shallow to hold such deep subtext.

On the way to Genua (a cross between Oz's Emerald City, Disney's Magic Kingdom, and New Orleans), Granny and Nanny come across an ordinary, unmagical wolf that's been anthropomorphised through story magic.

But it's still a wolf. It's not a werewolf, as it can't change its appearance. Besides which, werewolves are neither human nor wolf. But in stories, 𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘺𝘰𝘯𝘦 expects the Big Bad Wolf to act human - they don't expect him to act wolf. Or werewolf, for that matter.

If story magic dictated that all black Genuan women working in service must look and act like a Mammy or Aunt Jemima, just as innkeepers must be fat and have a big red face, or just as the wolf must act human against his own nature, then 𝘸𝘦 𝘴𝘩𝘰𝘶𝘭𝘥 𝘩𝘢𝘷𝘦 𝘣𝘦𝘦𝘯 𝘵𝘰𝘭𝘥.

Instead, we got the footnote. And the footnote is all the evidence you need to know what sort of craft choice this was. We learn little about how Mrs. Pleasant changes in the story, if at all. She's just a name.

In the nicest of ways, when Pratchett falls short in Witches Abroad, it's in those moments where it's painfully clear that Discworld was being written by a white, middle-class bloke from Beaconsfield.

Beyond this footnote, racism is, in fact, a problem in Discworld. Just not in this book.

Outside the other forty novels that make up the Lore™, #DavidGraeber once noted that, when demi-human species are introduced to any fantasy universe, and cannot be unified under a cohesive social, legal, or political order, "racism is actually true:"

> …There actually are different stocks of humanoid creatures who can speak, build houses, cultivate food, create art and rituals, who look and act basically like humans, but who nonetheless have profoundly different moral and intellectual qualities...

> ..."This is among other things the absolute negation of the bureaucratic principle of indifference, that the rules are the same for everyone, that it shouldn’t matter who your parents are, that everyone must be treated equally before the law..."