Also, yes, throw aliens into the mix and suddenly you’ve got handy targets to explore ideas of racism and prejudice without the baggage of actually using identifiable real world racial groups. A Romulan shooting a Klingon for hanging around and seeming suspicious has parallels to the Trayvon Martin situation but is more comfortable both to write and to view because of the layer of fantasy involved.

During Dr. Nama’s Q&A we also discussed some of the modern tendency to put a Rodenberry-style happy face on the past as well as the future. Like the Jonah Hex movie where he had to have a scene with a black friend telling him (and the audience) that Jonah may have fought for the Confederates but didn’t believe in slavery. Or the Captain America movie where the Howling Commandos were suddenly multicultural pals hanging out in the bar, including the Japanese guy who drawls “I’m from Fresno, chief.” Even though we’re dealing with a fictionalized WWII full of ray guns and super soldiers, that was jarring to me because all I could think was “You’re lucky you’re in Europe, chief, or you’d be in an internment camp”. There just wasn’t enough speculative diversion from real history established for that to seem like anything more than pandering to modern sensibilities.

I’ve seen ways to tweak it that aren’t quite so jarring. For instance, the tabletop game Deadlands which I reviewed before had an Old West setting where women were far more emancipated, but explained that by the idea of the American Civil War having dragged on and on years past 1865, draining away a huge portion of the menfolk. Sure, the underlying goal was to let people play female characters in positions like U.S. Marshals, but historically it made a certain amount of sense as the absence of men going off to war has often seen the ladies stepping up out of necessity to take over occupations they normally wouldn’t be considered for. Also historically, the pendulum swings back once the war ends and the men come home… but what if they don’t come home?

I think Deadlands also had something about the Confederacy eventually freeing its slaves out of desperation, but I’d have to look back over my books. But one of the other major themes of Deadlands was that hate and fear played right into the hands of the monstrous powers seeking dominion over humanity, so I don’t think they glossed over the race issue entirely. Acknowledging it can be a minefield, but ignoring it can sometimes arguably be worse.

I’m what some people call ‘color blind’. To me, a person is a person is a person. I don’t judge people by skin color, because to me, it’s not a factor, and should never have been a factor.

Despite my views, I know some people consider it a factor, so I look right down the barrel of this problem with my own writing.

With my sci fi/space opera novel, I can edge around the issue somewhat. When there’s aliens to contend with, does skin color matter one bit? Probably not to the humans in the story. Though I will admit, my lead male is a white human male, my lead female is an alien, and in many cases, the skin color of background characters isn’t even mentioned, unless needed for a bit of description, so my book might seem a bit racially bland, as sci fi often does.

But with the webcomic I’m trying to write, I don’t get out of it so easily, since it’s set on Earth only a little into the future. That means I need to be conscious of current discrimination issues while writing it. I may have trouble in this story because it is visual and that means there isn’t any ambiguity to a reader what color someone’s skin is.