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.

That wolf gets more character development in one scene than Mrs. Pleasant gets in two or three.

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.

> …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..."

> ..."If some people are orcs and others are pixies, equal treatment is ipso facto inconceivable."

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-the-utopia-of-rules#toc10

And by "true," what I think Graeber meant was this: fantasy writers, whether they know it or not, blur the mess about race that early anthropologists caused, and contemporary ones are still trying to rectify.

On Roundworld, we now know that race is a cultural phenomenon, not a biological construct:

https://www.sapiens.org/biology/is-race-real

https://www.sapiens.org/biology/race-scientific-taxonomy/