How to discuss racism in a fictional context?

Just explain that different kinds of oppression are different, not "better" or "worse" than each other.

It's annoying and frustrating, but often educating people means explaining why their well-intentioned questions don't make sense in the first place.

Hmm....interesting question. I think that the best way to discuss racism in fiction is through the wonder of satire. There is absolutely no shortage of online forums filled with racist dimwits of all colors and creeds, and will provide endless ammunition. I do have a few tips for writing satire. These are what I find to work best.

1. No pontificating or preaching. It's not a sermon, and a sermon disguised as a novel will, without exception, alienate a large group of your target audience.

2. Construct the jokes around the target's absurdities and then exaggerate said absurdities to ridiculous proportions.

3. Don't be afraid to offend people; that's the whole idea of satire: shocking people out of their comfort zones.

4. Swear only if it's a necessary element to the plot. Truly good jokes don't require gratuitous profanity; that's what makes them funny in the first place.

5. Always remember, that whatever your message is: never, ever, for any reason, sacrifice any part of telling the actual story for the sake of your message.

I reiterate, and I cannot reiterate this enough, that these are simply my tips. I hope I helped.

If you don't know much about racism, there's always researching it on the internet.

But for now?

Is one country colonized and/or oppressed by the other? are the people of one country visually distinct in some way? have they historically fought each other in wars? what kind of wars? Have the people of one country exploited or enslaved the people of the other country? Do they follow different religious beliefs, on the whole? Do they have significant cultural differences?

tons of questions to answer before you can really get a start on answering that question.

CL Polk said:

If you don't know much about racism, there's always researching it on the internet.

But for now?

Is one country colonized and/or oppressed by the other? are the people of one country visually distinct in some way? have they historically fought each other in wars? what kind of wars? Have the people of one country exploited or enslaved the people of the other country? Do they follow different religious beliefs, on the whole? Do they have significant cultural differences?

tons of questions to answer before you can really get a start on answering that question.

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Amen to that.

OP, I think your issue here is you're trying to build the story around the theme (racism) rather than the theme around the story (have you a story yet?) It's a crucial, but very easily reversible, mistake. If you have notes about how you want to work racism into the story, save those, and get working on the actual story. Then, from there, work the theme into the story.

Samsonet said:

The question is, how do I explain to my friend that xenophobia isn't just hurling slurs at people, and how do I do it in a way that doesn't make them go "you're being too serious, we're just making things up"?

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"I don't want to have this come up as 'you're being too serious, we're just making things up', but I'm unsure if you know that there's different levels to xenophobia that's not just hurling slurs at people. So can we talk about it?"

Ya know, directly with your full thoughts and feelings in a considerate fashion to address if they're either ignorant or if they know they're working a specific angle and you'd like to speak of that.

I'm trying to figure out what you're trying to do and what the problem is, exactly. So you have this idea for a story, and it involves this character who has to deal with racism as an obstacle in the way of their goals? I don't think there's anything wrong with that. Is the problem that you and your friend are in disagreement over the kinds of historical and cultural factors that can create the specific problems this character encounters? There was another thread a while back (may have been in this forum, or maybe it was in SF and F) about racism in a fantasy world.

Some people in this thread were using the term racism to only mean the general mistrust or xenophobia people may mutually experience when they encounter people who look different than they do or who have different customs. Others were talking about racism as something that arises when there are genuine power differentials between two or more cultures, where one occupies or colonizes another, and one is established as "superior" in a more asymmetrical and ongoing sense (which many would argue is the situation we have in the world today).

Is this the kind of issue you and your friend are having? If you have very different visions about how you want to develop your world or characters, I'm not sure it is resolvable. There are some great examples of team-written stories out there, but I'm guessing that people have to share some sense of how they want that world to work.

Read Naughts and Crosses. It's generally considered one of the few cases where this subject is handled well.

So is wanting to present racism as something that's happening to a character in this story what's ignorant, or is the way the other person is handling it the problem?

Samsonet said:

The racism isn't my theme; it's my friend's theme. That's what's causing the trouble, I think: the story as I see it is about three characters living during a war, but the story they see is about one other character suffering.

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Oh. I see. Well, I think I have a solution to your problem: Your three characters live out the war, and your friend's character suffers some moral guilt over his war-related actions. In wars, there's plenty of guilt to go around, and plenty of reasons for suffering from it. There's something to drive the story and therefore work in your friend's theme. See where I'm going with this? Or have you already suggested this to your pal?

I'm in the midst of finishing a story that's explicitly about racism. My first novel had a subplot that was originally intended as dark humour: an enclave in the Hunts Point neighborhood of the South Bronx that decided the zombie apocalypse was a white plot to wipe them out. This led them to wall themselves in and refuse all offers of assistance from FEMA, and, as a result, they survived when FEMA's mistakes killed off nearly everyone else.

I found that this subplot resonated with my readers in a way that I hadn't expected: while none of them were surprised at the enclave's ultimate implosion, they didn't view the initial assumption of it being a failed genocide attempt at all surprising.

That led me to explore that subplot in my second novel, and I wind up wrestling constantly with depicting racism without writing an unreadable heavy-handed message novel. What I finally concluded (and I hope works) was that I should depict racism without judgement. The enclave's leader responds to white people with suspicion and distrust because he's lived a life where he believes he can trace nearly everything bad that has happened to him to the race divide in our society. Other blacks and Hispanics in the group resonate with that in varying degrees, ranging from whole-hearted acceptance to the uneasy feeling that the leader's racism has crossed the line into insanity, with some actively attempting to undermine the leader because of the way he treats the small handful of surviving whites in the group.

As the author, I'm doing my best not to judge which of them is right, but just write a story about the conflict and explore exactly why each of my characters reacts to the situation in the way that they do. One of the perks of writing zombie horror is that they are all going to die anyway, so I don't have to worry about showing racism being rewarded.

Which gets around to my advice to you: don't feel like you need to teach a message. Racism impacts us all, sometimes in positive ways and sometimes in negative ways, depending on who and where we are. Depict those impacts realistically, depict racism as evil if you must, but remember that each individual racist doesn't think of himself as evil, and frequently doesn't even explicitly understand which of his decisions and actions are founded in racism.