Whatever

Wait, I always thought Harry was black. Are you sure you didn't say he was black? I mean, I guess in the end he's green. But... I could have sworn! Crazy.

Mo Pie:

I never said he wasn't black. So he might very well be black!

John,

I just picked up Old Man's War this weekend and I'm reading it now. This is the first work from you that I've read.

I don't know if the problem is me, but even at 33 years of age, and living in a pretty diverse area, I still picture everyone in a novel to be pretty much like me -- white.

As a reader, I like your style without many physical descriptions of the characters because my mind's eye does a fine job filling that in by itself and the story feels uncluttered.

On the other hand, my mind's eye tends to create pretty bland characters. It never even occurred to me that one of the Old Farts could be black.

Regards,
-Drew

From the article: as well as younger voices such as Nalo Hopkinson, Steven Barnes, and Tananarive Due,

Um, Steve Barnes has been writing for over 20 years. He's not a 'younger voice'.

That said, the article is right - take a look at epics like Song Of Ice And Fire or The Wheel Of Time. They are predominantly eurocentric, but don't address it.

OTOH, novels like Brasyl and Ragamuffin (by Ian McDonald and Tobias Buckell respectivley) aren't but aren't written by minority writers. And they're fairly good. But they might get labeled as appropriative by some.

From the discussions of appropriation at Wiscon I've been to, I don't think they classify that way. They're remarkably respectful, and stem from the authors research and personal experiences.

I don't think you fail at discussing race in your novels. It's not a central theme, but it doesn't have to be as long as it's acknowledged to exist, and cause tension, be unfair, and be a moral issue.

Here's the thing though: Among other things it would be odd to point out this one character's race in an overt fashion when I don't note it in the case of other characters.

Someone status as a minority is worth noting, even in passing. If someone is black, and is surrounded by white people, *I* notice. If I'm me, and surrounded by heterosexual people *I* notice, and it's important to me. It informs the way I interact with them.

It's not strange for me to notice this in person, but not being informed of it in fiction leaves me feeling frustrated. It doesn't have to be the central theme, but I don't like it when it's obfuscated.

Josh Jasper:

"OTOH, novels like Brasyl and Ragamuffin (by Ian McDonald and Tobias Buckell respectivley) aren't but aren't written by minority writers."

Actually, Toby is a minority writer.

Huh. I must have met someone else thinking it was him.

Shows what I know. My memory is like one of those things you strain noodles in.

Toby is biracial, having grown up on a boat in the Caribbean (mostly in Grenada, I beleive), though I have heard him at a con panel concede that he looks white. That, plus his name having a very Anglo flavor, and the fact that he lives in rural Ohio, makes it understandable that Josh Jasper would think that he is not a minority writer.

Also of interest to this thread is the treatment of the book Richard K Morgan just wrote, which, in the UK was published under the title "Black Man". In the US, the title was changed to "Th1rt3en", and the PW Review skipped the fact that the main character was black, and failed to mention the racial politics of the book. Niall Harrison who edits at Strange Horizons has some comment thread in his journal about it here.

I'm sending the ARC I have to Steve Barnes soon, because I think his perspective on it would be valuable.

Also, it's hard not to mention K. Tempest Bradford's blog when talking about racial politics in the F&SF world. She pays a lot of attention to it.

Actually, looking at his web site, I actually did totally misremember someone else as him. But it's a good point that someone's racial identity might not be what somene else sees them as.

Which, as I recall, was a point made in Brasyl.

I remember when I got to the line about Samuel being a Howard graduate, I had to click over to the next picture in my mental slide projector. His features barely changed in my imagination, he just got a lot darker.

I do think that people tend to imagine characters as looking like themselves unless the description says otherwise. I'm curious as to whether or not black readers see a lot more black characters than I do.

Any black whateverarians care to confirm or dispute this?

I thought OSC's attempt to write about an ethnic community not his own in Magic Street was interesting. I don't know how successful he was, but it felt right to me from my time in the Navy, where different cultures tend to mix in ways you normally don't see in the general populace. But then, I'm not black, and he could of been completely out in the weeds and I might of missed it.

I like your works' racial neutrality...and even more enjoyed your gender neutrality in Android's Dream, too. :-) It opens up your work to the reader's imagination in very different ways.

I see a flaw in your logic. Something one of your commenters has already touched on. Most readers, even readers of color, will assume any character whose race is not mentioned is white. that's because only white people never think of themselves in terms of race. White is the default. therefore, if race doesn't come up, then you're default, therefore white.

Now, dropping subtle hints may clue some readers in, and that's fine and all. But if one of your characters is not white, then you're missing out on a key component of life that every western culture non white person has to deal with every day: the fact of their non whiteness. It's something people like this NOTICE every day.

Obviously, I and others don't wake up every morning thinking "Hmm, I think I'll have corn flakes for breakfast. Also, I am black!" But my skin color affects almost every interaction I have with the people I come into contact with every day. Not always in flashing neon, but it's not something that's incidental to me, even when it's not impacting me negatively.

Depending on what type of world you've created, this may or may not be a huge issue for your characters. But you also have to consider the impact of those characters on readers. And if you're truly committed to portraying a world in which not all people are white, I think you need to be a bit more overt about that. Again, no neon lights. But NOT specifying race doesn't get you a multiracial world.

After all, how many books actually specify race when it's not non-white? Everyone already assumes white. If you want to break them of that assumption, you're going to have to call SOME attention to it.

Josh, one quick note -- the "younger voices" comment was comparing Barnes, Hopkinson, and Due to Delany and Butler. Technically, it was an accurate comparison.

Which isn't to say they couldn't have chosen some much better examples, or that it wasn't also a misleading statement.

Tempest:

"Something one of your commenters has already touched on. Most readers, even readers of color, will assume any character whose race is not mentioned is white."

By and large, I suspect this is true. Interestingly, however, in an earlier discussion along this line, I noted that the ethnicity of Harry Creek, the protagonist of The Android's Dream, is intentionally left undefined, and a number of commenters in the discussion thread said they assumed he was Native American. I found that interesting and a little surprising.

I also wonder if the "default white" setting is as prevalent in the under-40 SF set. Anecdotally, it doesn't seem to be, but then again I'm out here in the fields of rural Ohio, so maybe my view is skewed.

John, I perceived all the characters in your Old Man's War series as white. I'm sure a great deal of that is because, like Drew and Nathan, I see a character as like me (white and straight) unless the author states otherwise.

However, I think another huge reason for that is because none of the characters behaved in any way other than how your typical white American behaves.

No one's black culture eclipsed the fact that he was now green. Nobody griped that Mom's carne asada was much better than the crap in the mess hall. As much fun as risk-free promiscuous sex sounds, odds are high that at least one person would have chosen to not engage in that kind of behavior because it ran counter to the way they were raised. (Not that promiscuity is necessarily owned by a particular race, mind you.)

Perhaps in that universe, race doesn't matter because everyone speaks, acts, dresses, and eats the same. Perhaps race isn't so inextricably linked to culture as it is today. Maybe switching bodies made the characters realize that everyone really is the same on the inside, and that what's on the outside just doesn't matter.

Because you do not explicitly define anyone's race, the readers have to determine for themselves, based on each character's actions, what a character's race is. Based on the culture you present in Old Man's War, etc., everyone is white.

I also wonder if the "default white" setting is as prevalent in the under-40 SF set. Anecdotally, it doesn't seem to be, but then again I'm out here in the fields of rural Ohio, so maybe my view is skewed.

Well, I think that's at least partially because us young'uns are so used to talking to people from all over the world on-line. I mean, if you lived your whole life in rural Ohio (for example) a hundred years ago, your exposure to non-whites might be much more limited than today, when you can be on a message board thread with people from Brazil, Myanmar, and France, chatting about what happened on last week's episode of Battlestar Galactica (assuming you can all read/write the same language, of course!). In general, it's just not as important an issue; if there's no way to tell, who cares?

Janiece said "...where different cultures tend to mix in ways you normally don't see in the general populace. That's about how I see it too. In the Navy, most everybody is Navy Blue (yeah, yeah, some dark blue, some light blue heh heh old joke) - and it's been that way for me for so long that it never even occurred to me to wonder about Fixer's race, because I don't mentally divvy people up by color (mostly for me the mental divisions are: Friend, Teammate, Neutral, and Asshole). I don't mean this in any morally superior way, I just don't care. I didn't even know that Howard was a predominately black university, because it never occurred to me to care in or out of the context of the story.

A while back, some friends and I were discussing the movie I, Robot. Somebody mentioned that the detective in the book was white and in the movie Will Smith was not (not as a criticism, just as an observation on the many changes made to Asimov's original concept). Nobody cared about the change of race in the lead character, and up to that point most of us hadn't even noticed. (We also agreed that the movie was a cliche riddled POS, but the special effects were really terrific and it was a fun movie anyway). The larger observation was that Will Smith seems to be dammed effective at breaking Hollywood stereotypes and doing it in a manner you don't even notice. For me, that's the coolest thing about good character development, seeing the person as a person, not the stereotype, without even realizing it.

- On a final note: I expect somebody will bring up the example of the "Big Surprise" in Starship Troopers where Rico turns out to be non-white. So I'll just do it first. So there, it's done, carry on :-)

I also wonder if the "default white" setting is as prevalent in the under-40 SF set.

John, I'm 32 and I grew up in San Diego. So, I'm in the "under 40 set" that you mention, and I grew up (and continue to live) in a large city with a very diverse population. Hell, me being white means I'm the minority!

My default setting, as I mentioned in my earlier post, is straight and white. But I typically do not have a problem identifying with a character of another race, etc. That may be because "male" seems to be another default setting in literature/Hollywood/video gaming...

I actually also thought Harry Creek was Native American (no idea why...) and there was at least one character in OMW I pictured as black, same with AD. Lots of Asians in TLC, too!

I'm well under-40, btw.

Keri:

Interestingly, I grew up in Southern California too, and I think it actually did make a difference in my "default" setting, since my own default runs more toward white hispanic than anything else. And it still does, actually, although my immediate family probably has something to do with that, since Krissy's family (and, for that matter, Krissy and Athena), has a large Mexican component.

Also -- and this is the geek in me coming out -- when I think of future settings, I tend to imagine what a couple hundred extra years of non-racially-segregated population movement is going to do to the default skin tone here in the US. I suspect it'll get rather a bit more brown. As noted this is close to my own personal default anyway, so I'm good with that. But again, I'm realize I'm a bit of geek for making that bit of factoring.

The psychological research seems to indicate that when people are presented with characters that are ambiguously characterized, they assume that the characters are more like themselves than not. However, most psych research is done with college students at R1 universities, most of whom are, as you'd guess, white.

I think the person above who pointed out that your *culture* was white hit it more on the head. When you don't directly state, people make assumptions based on other factors, including behavior and cultural assumptions.

I'm seriously over 40, and grew up in southwest Ohio, and I thought some of the characters in OMW were non white. Oddly I didn't think any of them were black, but I did thinks a few ere Hispanic, and for some reason I thought Harry was Asian.

Tracey:

"I think the person above who pointed out that your *culture* was white hit it more on the head. When you don't directly state, people make assumptions based on other factors, including behavior and cultural assumptions."

I think that's an interesting point, and one worth exploring a bit. My excuse could be that the characters were spending more time dispensing plot points than talking about themselves, but then I have to admit that at least a few of the characters in OMW did go on about the food.

If I had to point to anything in OMW that made me think that everyone was white (and I did) it would be the names. John. Jane. Harry. They're white-sounding names. There may have been a few ethnic names, but the certainly don't come to mind at the moment.

Got a question on the matter of Race Etc.

For those of you who think of yourselves as belonging to a group outside the standard, would you rather read something that is unspecific, like OMW or something where race, ethnicity, sexual identity is mentioned and by a writer who means well but just doesn't get it right? I know as a Midwestern Irish American I'm not all that comfortable writing too far outside my own experience, so I either do what I know or do "generic" human with no racial and few ethnic clues, because I'd rather not get things wrong.

Also, and this is an aside, just because someone is "white" does not mean they are part of the cultural center and treated well by SF as a genre. When was the last time you read a Appalachian or southern character in SF that wasn't a buffoon?

I read Delaney long before I knew he was a gay black man (as a hetero teen male, bisexuality and gender-shifting were the more thought-provoking themes). I learned that Steven Barnes was black after I became a fan. The ethnicity of both was irrelevant to my appreciation of them as writers. Knowing it informs, but does not necessarily enhance my appreciation of their work.

Conversely, I was introduced to Octavia Butler as a black woman science fiction writer with a black female protagonist. It's interesting to note that it took news coverage of Butler as a recipient of a MacArthur "Genius" Grant, a rather mainstream award, to bring her to my attention. It is nonsensical to try to separate Butler's and her character's ethnicity from the tapestry of her work. Rather, it enriches the reader's experience.

So, it seems that the significance of ethnicity (as opposed to the less meaningful term 'race') in SF/F is primarily dependent upon the intent of the writer and interests of the reader.

FWIW, I always saw Thomas Jane as black. I'm not sure why.

Dean

"John. Jane. Harry. They're white-sounding names."

Heh. Interestingly, in the case of the Special Forces, the generically Western names is commented upon in The Ghost Brigades -- see page 249.

...imagine what a couple hundred extra years of non-racially-segregated population movement is going to do to the default skin tone here in the US.

You reminded me of this Time magazine cover from 1993 (that long! yipes). It doesn't necessarily extrapolate into the future, but morphed a collection of faces comprising the racial spectrum in America of 15 years ago.

Regarding how race matters between characters: In Gaiman's Anansi Boys, the entire cast, except for the villain, is black, but he just about never says so. Does it make a difference that the novel is set in London, a black neighborhood in Florida and on a Caribbean island? I imagine that a white character acting against those backgrounds would find them-self a bit more racially self-aware than usual.

My skin is about as white as skin can get without being an albino.

I think I read Farnham's Freehold at way too impressionable an age, because unless otherwise specified, I picture people in SF novels as having skin colored like a frappacino.

Of course, having read too much Heinlein at a young age, I also expect characters to be pan-sexual and uber-competent, until demonstrated otherwise. ::grin::

John, I particularly enjoyed your book's SPECIES neutrality at [redacted for spoilers]

Jon R:

Thanks. I enjoyed that too. I hope you don't mind I trimmed out your comment to keep it from ruining the surprise for others.

-- JS

I must have read a different book. I thought everyone in OMW was gay and Puerto Rican? Musta been the Hennessy.

Seriously, I caught on about Sam at the Howard U. mention. And I too tend to think characters are blanco like me until I am given a large billboard in the story that says they are not.

I totally misread Bear's "Carnival" and had to ask her directly what race the main male characters were. Hmmm.

In my novel, two of the main characters are Black and Middle-Eastern. I don't make an issue of their race because I don't see it as an issue in their world. And I'm tackling a ton of other things in there besides. And the main female character is white. FWIW.

Mfitz

Von Neuman's War by John Ringo and Travis S. Taylor has many Southern characters that not only aren't buffoons, but save the world.

One of the reasons I've attempted to seek out a diverse group of friends is so that I can write convincingly from a minority perspective.

My first novel has a Hispanic and an African-American as two of the main characters. One of my goals as writer is to have distinct characters. I hate it when the characters all blend together in a novel.

My main sources of authenticity for these characters is both from personal experience and the characters I've read from minority authors. I recommend Octavia Butler and Alice Walker for getting the feel for African-American characters.

I also have a couple of bisexual characters in the novel.

I'm still offended by the crude racial stereotypes masquerading as "aliens" in The Phantom Menace...

I can't say why, but it would be relevant for folks here to read "The Pickup" by Charles Willeford. Just sayin'.

John:

I can understand your white hispanic default setting. Obviously San Diego's culture is greatly influenced by its proximity to Mexico; I grew up as much with enchiladas and carne asada as I did with hamburgers and hot dogs.* The first curse words I used were in Spanish, because they just sounded so much worse that way. My disdain for the immigration "crisis" is in part due to the fact that Mexicans have always been a part of my life, and I know they're not going to usher in the Apocalypse. Don't worry, America; you'll get over it.

Regarding the future of human skin tone, I agree. Dark skin is a dominant trait, although skin color seems to be one of those traits that blends. A child with a dark-skinned father and a light-skinned mother will be somewhere in between. So I think there will be a general trend towards the middle, but the extremes will always exist.

Again, though, I think race is as much culture as it is skin tone. If we all behaved the same way then perhaps nobody would care that he is black and I'm a whitey and that guy over there is Hispanic. And that probably won't happen until we have the universal social circumstances and upbringings. Hey look, a catch-22!

*Yeah, there's more to culture than just food. But it's easy, and everyone understands it.

Maybe science fiction is taking a turn for the better. I for one, loudly applaud what the Wachowski brothers did with their casting for the Matrix films. The characters of color, far outweighed the white characters - and in fact I can only think of 9 white characters in the entire trilogy!

Neo
Trinity
Cypher
Mouse
Switch
The Merovingian
Agent Smith
All of the Other Agents & Cops
The Architect
Persephone

Did I miss anyone?

Yes and I found the lack of white characters in The Matrix very challenging to my suspension of disbelief. To enter the Matrix, one must be an elite computer hacker. Yet they would have us believe that such hackers are more likely to be totally hot chicks and muscular handsome black dudes than geeky white or Asian guys. But whatever....

John:

Heh. Interestingly, in the case of the Special Forces, the generically Western names is commented upon in The Ghost Brigades -- see page 249.

I only have the paperback.

I've got a strange life, Jared thought.

Dean:

Oh, fine. Bottom of page 270, then.

I also wonder if the "default white" setting is as prevalent in the under-40 SF set. Anecdotally, it doesn't seem to be, but then again I'm out here in the fields of rural Ohio, so maybe my view is skewed.

This is because rich, powerful people actively seek to maintain the status quo so that they and their families remain rich and powerful. Leaving aside the horrors that occur when someone transgresses a community's lines, or things like the increasing racial separation and gang violence in LA and elsewhere, or the de facto segregation of schools in Texas cities, there are simply people who feel that their family, their kids deserve the best but feel no general social obligation -- this is why, for example, there are schools in the Dallas area where they have advanced scientific equipment, such as an SEM, which parents consider critical to the proper education of their children, while in Houston schools teachers struggle just to keep basic order in a physics class sometimes. No parity can be established because affluent people will not tolerate a redistribution of resources in a way that they see diminishing the quality of their children's education. Since the less affluent don't have money to buy the publicity and access to legislators to force it upon the more affluent, the status quo continues on, changing slowly but not necessarily going away in the way Scalzi seems to think it has.

But I am significantly less racially sensitive than most people with my last name

Sorry, that should read

But I am significantly less racially sensitive than many people with my last name

because I shouldn't presume everyone with my last name gives a damn about race issues.

Dammit, forum software needs a way to allow edits too. The linked line above should read

Leaving aside the horrors that occur when someone transgresses a community's lines and there are violent assholes about

Someone can bring up Rico in Starship Troopers without mentioning Rod Walker of Tunnel in the Sky?

I remember Ellison answering a question about not having gay characters in his fiction once. He said they were there, he just didn't mention it unless it was relevant to the story. Same with race.

agm:

"Dammit, forum software needs a way to allow edits too."

It's called the "preview" function.

My defacto presumption is that every character is a lesbian black woman. I continue with this assumption until the writer proves otherwise.

Couple of points.

The interesting thing about making Fixer black is that it relies on social cues a lot of non-american readers won't get. I mean, I know that DC is largely a black city, but I had no idea why Howard U attendance might be relevant to ethnicity until I looked it up on wikipedia. Heh, does this get us into discussions of race being a cultural construst?

And on another tack, while being neutral in ones descriptions of characters when it comes to ethnicity, sexuality, country of origin, whatever, is often appropriate, sometimes its affirming to have that sort of thing pointed out. Being a gay reader of SF/F (Particularly fantasy) isn't quite as alienating as being a black reader, but it is close. Reading epic fantasies through my teenage years, there were plenty of boy meets girl, boy becomes king moments - where were the boy meets boy, deals with the dynastic issues of not liking chicks plotlines? Stumbling across various authors that wrote gay characters as protagonists (rather than the comic relief or the nasty pedophilic villian) really was an affirming experience for a (then) awkward, closeted teenage boy. Its also good marketing - I'll read more of an author's works if they make me feel well disposed towards them.

I suppose the reason that SF tends to deal with minority issues like race and sexuality better than fantasy is because, as you say, John, its easy to posit a future world where such things don't matter. Fantasy writers, on the other hand, often seem stuck in the superficially medieval european world they almost always write in. Of course, its usually not actually medieval europe, and they could be as multicoloured and pansexual as they want, but somehow this doesn't seem to come through very often...

It would be interesting to find out what your foreign language readers assume. Would Japanese readers, reading it in Japanese, assume the characters are Japanese? Possibly not, since the names are Anglo, but it would be interesting to find out.

Anyway...
As a reader, I'm not terribly worried about a character's race, since it falls a bit low on the priority list of important characteristics (behavioral ones being higher: morals, personality type, sociability, etc.) though it is interesting to know for visualization purposes. Also, as a reader, I appreciate the following side affect:
As a writer, I find it useful to know more about the character than I put on the page. Race sometimes makes me address the character's background and culture in a way that I might have filled in with a generic white-esque background otherwise. White isn't a problem, it's the *generic* that is. (Besides, whites have varying backgrounds as well: Polish, English, Russian, Norwegian, German, Swedish, French, Southerner, Yankee, Canadian, Midwesterner, etc.)
So, while I don't think race really matters in terms of VALUE, I do think it enriches the written tapestry.

PS: Nice Preview, Scalzi. It puts in carriage returns now!

My defacto presumption is that every character is a lesbian black woman.

Which is a pretty safe default, if you read enough S.M. Stirling.

My defacto presumption is that every character is a lesbian black woman

That's fair--we don't see too many lesbian black men running around in fiction.

I assumed Harry Creek was Native American because of his last name...Creek, a tribe of Native Americans. Huh. Just seemed right to me.

I am always surprised at my own assumptions. I automatically assumed Fixer was white, and that he was the type of clever shady dude that one finds in NYC. And I must congratulate you over Sam Berlant. I never once noticed, and assumed that Sam was female.

The only other author who has up and slapped me in the face with my own unspoken assumptions was James White in his Sector General series. He had always made clear that the genders of alien species were not used unless it was directly relative to the plot. I read the entire series until I was smacked in the face with the fact that an alien character who was a delicate empathetic butterfly was a male character. Moreover, what floored me was the discovery that character of Conway whose adventures I had followed over 7 or so books had the first name of Peter.

And I hadn't once noticed.

Mythago:

"we don't see too many lesbian black men running around in fiction."

Suddenly we've come upon the real problem in speculative fiction.

D. Paul:

Well, you know. He might actually be Native American. I'll have to ask him.

John Perry wasn't a lesbian black man?

I'm going to have to re-read 'cause that certainly was the vibe I had, once I realized he was male.

BTW - That link? Were you aware you were shirking your responsibility to write about circumcision and footbinding in your fiction?

What about sandpapering nipples, do you think you will at least include that?

As a writer, you have a responsibility...

Just don't make it tooo subtle, hunh? It was only on my third reading of The Star Beast that I realized that Mr. Kiku (my hero) was a Kenyan.

I basically share Tempest's opinion about this. This kind of thing is devious and cool for meta-discussions, but I don't think it's particularly helpful for breaking stereotypes during the reading experience itself.

I mean, the project is kind of interesting. You could do a neat study afterward and see what people remember about the characters, and whether they gave them race. Although, it has to be said, that as you are writing from a certain positionality, it's likely that people may race the characters white because they come across like white folk generally do -- in the same way that Tempest and Nora and others have said that they can often tell the writing of a black person without having any race-specific markers in the text. It obviously won't be a perfect indicator, but it might affect results.

It seems, to me, as if this kind of mild protest is a kind of extension of colorblind thinking. It takes the problem of race being omitted in science fictional worlds and extends it by... continuing not to mention race.

I don't mean to be too harshly critical here. I don't think your writing is obligated to do anything that it's not doing. I just disagree that what you've presented here is as radical or productive as you seem to be implying.

I think the races you're exposed to in your own life certainly affect how you see character in novels. I don't often imagine characters as black, as there aren't really that many black people in New Zealand. Or Hispanics, or Native Americans. But I do often imagine people as Polynesian or Asian. In fact, I saw a boy on the bus this morning, I would guess he was Samoan, and he looked exactly how I thought a boy in one of the books I just read looked like. Then I realised that the book was set in Russia so that was pretty much impossible.

Good point - I would add that the Surprisingly Black Dude trick would work best in the US. Where I grew up, if someone had a European name, they were pretty well bound to be white. There were non-white people, but they were almost all East Asian or South Asian, and had typical East Asian or South Asian names. I don't know if that's the case in NZ as well.

Well, if you assume that race is primarily a cultural construct, and that most large human populations would not merge into a single culture, then it's likely that race issues will be relevant in most large human societies that one might project or otherwise speculate about in an SF story.

But here's the thing: the relevant races in question, and the inter-racial dynamics, might not be the same as those in the early-21st-century US. A lot seems to depend on the historical baggage a society comes with, which varies between time and place. For instance, given the history of how American society developed, it's no surprise that the most persistent race issues here involve Anglophone Whites vis-a-vis African Americans, American Indians, and Hispanics. But we can see just from the variety of comments we've had that the dynamics can be rather different elsewhere.

As an SF writer, one has the opportunity to be able to speculate how racial dynamics might be different in a later, or alternative, society. Or one can ignore it as if it doesn't matter in the story. But in that case, you're writing from the perspective of a group of people who have the luxury of not having to think about it much. Which either means you've got a utopia with no major skeletons in its historical closets, or you're writing from the perspective of the subgroup that dominates. Depending on the story and its context, your audience may or may not be willing to go along with this.