lincoln

white authorship.

Important to remember that national identity was consciously constructed over the past 250 to 500 years, and there are places and people in the world where and for whom family/clan structures or other social identities like moieties are the primary, not nationality, ethnicity, or race. So groups of people always develop identity, and usually it is defined in a schismogenetic process of reacting against undesirable practices that neighbors engage in. In the modern world there's also the necropolitics to consider - the way camp/ghetto/minority enclave culture develops in schism from the dominant mainstream but also subversive and codependent interaction with it. The construction of race (and gender) are part of defining the lens for who counts when defining the corpus of "the people."

I don't know what specific take to go with for your setting. Just some related ideas I thought worth sprinkling in your mental garden to see what curiosities grow. I certainly think you're pondering the right kind of questions to make good stories.

Its similar to how race was perceived in the Roman empire so I always took it as part of like,, if you're writing a story about Empire you're gonna include things that are reminiscent to Rome lol

Legend of the Galactic Heroes (which, admittedly, is meant to be in the future of "our" world rather than a fully secondary setting) doesn't do much with race but does have the "democratic" faction be obviously racially diverse while the "autocratic" faction is just White Aristocracy (and explicitly called out as an intentional choice by the first Kaiser to keep his inner circle loyal).

Thinking about it, Gundam broadly does this too.

does it even make sense to depict the existence of an axis of oppression constructed on skin color and separate from nationality outside of our universe where it is a continuation of the construction of race science? does doing so actually naturalize the existence of race as a real category?

I think some of this depends on how you depict that. Like bringing an authorially critical eye to that perspective rather than, for instance, just flatly depicting it as something that is inherently or inevitably "true".

A good book to read on the false scientific basis for racialisation would be Angela Saini's "Superior: The Return of Race Science". (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superior%3A_The_Return_of_Race_Science) The book explores the history of scientific racism, and shows how racial hierarchies were a social creation by the powerful, to keep themselves in power.

If you are writing a dystopian universe, then one of the ways that can be dystopian is to parallel some of the destructive social norms from our world. But just as you would be critical of those norms for this world, you can also be critical of them in whatever world you're building.

I would say one thing to avoid would be shoehorning racialisation/racism into the world in a clumsy way. I really felt that when I was watching the Netflix adaptation of Shadow and Bone. For me that was racialising the (previously unracialised) material in a way that showed all the horrors of racism - which was pretty triggering to watch as an Asian person - without also being explicitly critical of that racism.

And also without showing anything positive of the culture that was being subject to racialisation. You only got to see the character being bullied, listening to slurs, etc. You never got to see anything positive from that culture (not even delicious food from that culture!), so there was never anything positive about belonging to that culture on display. And then the racialised main character literally had to hug it out with one of the most racist bullies in the end, without that bully ever repenting of their own racism. Not great.

On the other hand, if you're writing a universe where people are racialised, another thing to avoid would be having characters who feel as if they're there just via colourblind casting, but don't have convincing cultural roots. I'm talking about something like the Netflix adaptation of Bridgerton, where the South Asian characters in the second season weren't speaking or acting authentically in relation to their stated cultural background.

If you're inventing racialisation in your universe, then you can also invent culture, and you can root your racialised characters in their own cultures in a way that "colourblind casting" sometimes fails to achieve. You can also show positive aspects of those cultures. The entire culture doesn't have to be positive, or free from critique, because no culture is entirely perfect. But if you're talking about identity, then certainly one of my own experiences is feeling positively connected to aspects of my own culture, even if I'm racially minoritised for belonging to that group. That is to say: it doesn't have to be just about racism or hatred directed at people from a minoritised group. It can also be about what it feels like to draw some positives from your (minoritised) background.

By the way, you might enjoy reading Yoon Ha Lee's Machineries of Empire space opera trilogy. If you like Ancillary Justice I think you will probably really enjoy these books. They aren't so much about race, but they are certainly about culture.

Lee is a Korean American and a trans man. Race isn't necessarily a huge thing in the Machineries of Empire series, in that characters aren't particularly racialised or subject to racism. There's plenty of dystopia though - entire cultures are subject to genocide. The underlying world building is about how beliefs in different calendrical systems mathematically enable certain weapons and battle formations to function.

And then there are thematic tensions in the book that I relate to, in terms of what I see as tensions between Eastern and Western stances on individualism vs communalism, between the individual and the communal self. This is also played out in a militaristic culture in which obedience to a hierarchy is built into the characters' psyches.

There isn't gender-based discrimination either, but it's also one of those times where I can read a book where some characters aren't always comfortable with their own gender, or have thoughts about their gender. Rather than just seeing gender as an inherent, unquestionable thing.

Anyway, this is a very long comment from me, but good luck with it all.

this is probably a somewhat elementary comment in many ways (also I haven't read the books in question -- don't worry they are on my reading list already) but I'm going to assume when you say nation here you mean nation in a modern sense (as in, organized body of people somewhat defined by borders/law/government etc etc etc).

But I'm not sure that's necessarily an eternal definition, right? Like, "nation" can mean a lot of things that aren't exactly those of the modern state apparatus -- I think of American Native usage of "[x] Nation" (e.g. cherokee nation, tlingit nation, sometimes "indian nation" in general). that's not reaching toward nation-as-state but more nation-as-culture, or perhaps nation-as-race (if that's how you wanna define it). like YES we're all using the english word "nation" but it's obviously being used/interpreted differently by different groups.

i agree that "nationhood" isn't "natural" (insofar that any cultural artifact is) but i definitely think that people within same/similar culture(s) might end up defining themselves against the Other. it doesn't have to be adversarial (that i think is a racist/colonialist/whatever mindset), and it also doesn't have to be exclusive.

OR, and this is the more flippant answer: sci-fi tends to work in broad stereotypes of people because it's kind of hard to write stories about incredibly vast swaths of people, and also because sci-fi tends to rewrite the scope of irl earth into the scope of a galaxy, so instead of "america, france, zimbabwe" you have "the galactic federation, the dominion, the klingons" and there is an assumed shared culture/race/practices within those groups.

and as for your final paragraph question: i don't fucking know lmao i also struggle with this both in my Job Job but also in personal projects. the question really comes down to

• i do not want to legitimize the concept of race (as defined in the modern world) as a legitimate category of human difference, because I frankly don't think it is; HOWEVER
• this is a story that will be read by real people living in the modern world who have to deal with race/ism on the daily and thus i believe it is worthwhile to not shy away from the concept entirely.

there is no good answer, and thus i usually just go with what feels best. pobody's nerfect

this is a bit more of an off-the-dome comment than a tightly considered one so apologies if it turns out i'm misremembering how these books work but i actually don't think this particular thing is a function of white authorship so much as it is a depiction of a different stage of the construction of race than the modern day. from my read it felt less like race is being collapsed into nationality and more like the empires in these books are just beginning to construct a race for these nationalities they've just started to assimilate. we're only seeing fresh imperial subjects here; we don't get insight into what it might be like to be someone whose people and ancestry might have a longer history of racialization. and racialization, of course, happens according to the needs and eases of the hegemonic culture, so if you want to depict it your best bet in an alternate universe is to imagine what races would serve the interests of whichever culture/power is building them. this is a grim use of imagination but it's what's worked for me in my attempts to depict the topic