I Thought I Was Wrong For So Long - Tumblr Posts
It makes me happy to see this as someone who writes a TON of fantasy. I think another way to look at this is to say that you can't be racist to a dog and to apply that to your story. Most people feel it's inhumane to put a human in a cage, but not a dog.
The best way that I avoid this is to think how are my species related. One really specific example is a story where my characters are suppose to be "born by typical human means, but because of when they were born they ended up with special powers lol." I call these guys blood borns and always refer to them as a different species.
I've never even considered referring to them as a race because they're too different from "normal" humans in my story to be considered one.
Funnily enough, because of that, that story isn't my metaphor for racism despite having a plot close to it. The one that is has all the creatures under the same species, but they have differences between them and are put in a caste system referred to as 'classes' that order their importance and the whole plot is that their system is flawed assuming that [superior race] x [anyone else] isn't a true blood. When the caste system simply states that anyone who has two of the same blood type is a true blood.
I just think it's easier for people to use races because in our own world that's how it's used. We treat different "races" as whole other beings, which is really ridiculous.
Fantasy """races"""
We should stop calling fantasy races that. Normalize calling them "species" or "kinds" or "kin", or just anything other than "race".
A "race" is a matter of non-meaningful differences like skincolor and maybe average penis length. There is no evidence that different races are more intelligent etc which can't be explained by differences in opportunity or culture.
A """race""" is not living four times as long, and also they can read people's minds, and they are an anthropomorphic cat, and get +1 to DC saving throws against fire because why not, and have completely different origins to other """races""", also they're genetically predisposed to mindless lawful neutral rampages. That's something else.
High elves and dark elves and wood elves could probably be considered races of each other (if all any stat differences are due to culture or magic, not blood). But not in relation to humans.
I'm just saying; when Tolkien established the concept of fantasy races the word "race" meant something very different than it does now. Not to accuse Tolkien of anything, I have no idea what his stance on that matter was, but still.
Having an entire intelligent species that is inherently evil is one thing, but calling that a """race""", and especially if it gets used as a metaphor for actual races or racism, is another entirely.
The metaphor doesn't work because in real life all races are the same in ability (except for shit like +1 to cow juice digestion or -15 to not combusting in the sun like a vampire).
But racists don't know that or choose not to, they believe some races are better than others and there's a genocide-or-be-replaced situation when there just isn't. Racists often hurt their own race if it means hurting a different race because they believe it's that or their race will cease to exist, like how you might sacrifice a bunch of Gondorians to defeat Mordor, but since that isn't going to happen in real life they are actually just hurting themselves and others for no reason.
The irrationality of racism is crucial for all allegories of it because it's more likely to convince evil people to not be racist than the moral argument.
If in your setting """races""" are as different as they often are in fantasy, you have created a world where replacement theory can actually happen and where there could be some strictly practical arguments for racist policies like paternalism or even genocide which aren't completely imaginary.
Speciesism is also an interesting and valuable concept to explore, since unlike racism it may be practical but still unmoral (being distrusting of or genociding Tolkien or 40k orcs is still genocide but, like, they're orcs. Mindflayers even more so, they can literally only exist by parasitizing and torturing other intelligent species, it's the lesser of two evils). But sometimes speciesism might not be practical either. There is never a reason to discriminate against hobbits, they're just perfect little guys. They just wanna hang out and maybe sell cheap produce, without them the price of turnips will skyrocket! But speciesism should definitely be kept separate from race.
The words we use change how we think to some extent. Especially when in so many settings the "human" ""race"" is invariably Just White People™, then people will start thinking of all non-white races with the same brain pathways we use to conceptualize Orcs and Klingons. They become part of the same "other" as POC, which probably isn't going to improve the othering situation.
I've seen friends of mine (not racists) slip up and say "Humans" when they actually just mean "Europeans" in the context of talking about actual IRL history which is a mistake writers should probably stop priming our brains to make.
Could you imagine if all our crime media did the same thing and made people associate criminals with people of color??? oh wait