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Rethinking Race in Fantasy: an evidence-based approach
To be unambiguous right at the start: I don’t think there is any need to justify having diverse characters in any genre of fiction. People asking for justification, on those occasions where fiction does make use of representational characters, are rarely well motivated.
That being said, and to quote Lindsay Ellis, “The legacy of colonialism is baked into every facet of every culture on the planet.” In other words, even if your magnum opus is set in a world wholly different to our own, you take your baggage with you as you create it. You, whoever you are doing me the honour of reading these words, are a product of colonialism.
The baggage I am thinking of in particular is the terrible set of events that led to our modern, diverse world. I love that our modern world is diverse racially and culturally, but like many I wish so many millions of people hadn’t paid such a terrible price for it. Our real-world history gives us only one context in which multiple ethnicities mingle: colonialism, and its cousins, the many forms of slavery.
You hear the echoes of this when people get upset about historical biopics with characters of colour in pre-industrial Europe. The idea is that without colonialism or the ugliness of the African slave trade, there would be no Jamaican Brits, no African Americans. No…
