: Re: In modern Sci-Fi/Fantasy, does real world racism need to be addressed? I have read through a lot of questions regarding questions of a similar nature, but all of the questions I looked at involved

@Margaret427

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Why do people seem to think that if a character isn't a straight white male, then the story must address homophobia, racism, and sexism?

When was the last time you saw a movie with a black actor that didn't "talk funny", and without jokes or antagonism related to race?

One of the things that made the original Night of the Living Dead movie memorable was that even though its main character was played by a black actor, there was nothing in the film that would have to be changed had he been white.

Casting Jones as the hero was potentially controversial in 1968: it was not typical for a black man to be the hero of an American film when the rest of the cast was composed of white actors, but Romero said that Jones simply gave the best audition. — Night of the Living Dead - Wikipedia

Making non-racist society the norm is not a bad way to go.

Similarly, I remember seeing a Columbo episode in which one of the characters was obviously gay. Throughout the entire show, no one commented about this, and it played no role in the plot. If you want to eliminate homophobia, that was the right way to do it.

Having female professionals, without referring to them as "a female doctor" or "a lady lawyer" or making an issue of their sex was a far more powerful method of eliminating sexism than was explicitly making an issue of it.

Sometimes (always?) the best way for an author to deal with ____ism is to create worlds in which it simply isn't an issue.

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