OOTS #1255 - The Discussion Thread

[Liquor Box]

That's also the case in Terry Pratchett's Discworld and that didn't stop him from having an entire book about humans being racist toward other humans.

Because racist people aren't prejudiced against people because they dislike specific shades of color, they're prejudiced against other people because they're part of a perceived out-group and they're using skin colour as a marker of that out-group. But the same person can hold prejudices against several different out-groups based on different criteria. For example, it's not uncommon for real-life white racist to hate both black people and white jews.

Well in this case it's not clear whether the comic does go into intra humanic racism. There's nothing in the comic itself, and it seems people arguing about a hint by some ambiguous commentary (which I haven't read).

I agree that racism is about creating in in-groups and out-groups. The reason it makes sense to me that there'd be less (or no) racism if there were other species is that other species create more obvious out-groups, and all humans become an in-group. Of course we don't actually know, because there are no other species in the real world.