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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.
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Beyond this footnote, racism is, in fact, a problem in Discworld. Just not in this book.
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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:"
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> …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...
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> ..."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..."
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> ..."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
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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.
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On Roundworld, we now know that race is a cultural phenomenon, not a biological construct:
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This doesn't stop folks who don't know any better from assuming, based on apperances, that race 𝘪𝘴 biological, judging that all the things known about genetics absorbed by "common sense" is a good enough heuristic.
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The minute you decide that humans live with, e.g., silicon-based lifeforms, the biological basis for racism is reified - a basis that, again, geneticists and anthropologists have refuted through the scientific method.
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Since we can't fit Roundworld's anthropological constructs to a world of fantasy, writers usually co-opt the word 'speciesism' as a fine distinction from what we would understand as racism, and to help bring us into the secondary world the story presents to us.
