Content warning 49/
> ..."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..."
Content warning 50/
> ..."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
Content warning 51/
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.
Content warning 52/
On Roundworld, we now know that race is a cultural phenomenon, not a biological construct:
Content warning 53/
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.
Content warning 54/
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.
Content warning 55/
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.
Content warning 56/
But when you get right down to it, to find out what it's really all about, that trolls and dwarfs sling slurs at each other is an example of racism.
We can say this much: politically and socially speaking, Ankh-Morpork has got its shit together.
Content warning 57/
Humans, trolls, dwarfs, vampires, werewolves, golems, zombies, Igors, the odd talking dog - all are welcomed to be bribed, robbed and murdered within its walls. Ankh-Morpork's got the room for commentary like this passage in Snuff (2011) (👇):
Content warning 58/
> ..."And so one at a time we all become human - human werewolves, human dwarfs, human trolls… the melting pot melts in one direction only, and so we make progress."
Heavy stuff: you're equals in Ankh-Morpork ON THE CONDITION that you act human.
Content warning 59/
So surely there's also plenty of room for bad, old-fashioned human-on-human racism.
Pratchett thought so, too. Jingo (1997) is a sharp rebuttal to, "Racism is not a problem on the Discworld."
