Moral scapegoats

[CharlesEBrown]

In 100% US settings like say zombie apocalypse everyone is an American, regardless of skin color, so you can't even claim to be talking about racism in that regard. There's just not a lot of cross-over with different countries interacting in most literature written with a US setting because the US is already large enough that it's believable for all the conflict to be set in the same country. In Europe you can travel from one end of a country to another in a day usually, but it'd take several days in the US by car. If you have people doing so via walking because of an apocalypse or whatever else it'd take months.

In my experience, we have the following types of people in America:

Most (over half) just don't really care about race and either never say anything about a character's race or try to leave it ambiguous so the reader can identify with the character, regardless of what the writer had in mind.

Another fairly large chunk makes a point of making members of one minority better than everyone else - it may be LGBTQ, it may be white men, it may be Asian bishonen, whatever, and makes this a focus. A lot of television writers seem to be in this group, "championing" "under-represented" groups over all others.

And the rest (I suspect I belong in this camp, though I try to be part of the first one) only consider race as an afterthought, partly out of fear of stereotyping or just because we "write what we know."

 

[Deleted member 166076]

In my experience, we have the following types of people in America:

Most (over half) just don't really care about race and either never say anything about a character's race or try to leave it ambiguous so the reader can identify with the character, regardless of what the writer had in mind.

Another fairly large chunk makes a point of making members of one minority better than everyone else - it may be LGBTQ, it may be white men, it may be Asian bishonen, whatever, and makes this a focus. A lot of television writers seem to be in this group, "championing" "under-represented" groups over all others.

And the rest (I suspect I belong in this camp, though I try to be part of the first one) only consider race as an afterthought, partly out of fear of stereotyping or just because we "write what we know."

I wasn't saying Americans aren't racist based on skin color. There's certainly some complex dynamics there. It's just that it isn't based on nationality like the other person was talking about. You don't really see stories where Americans plot against Mexicans or Canadians, trying to screw them over in an apocalypse setting because the states are already too large of an area to manage to be bothered with other countries when the sh*t hits the fan.

 

[CharlesEBrown]

I wasn't saying Americans aren't racist based on skin color. There's certainly some complex dynamics there. It's just that it isn't based on nationality like the other person was talking about. You don't really see stories where Americans plot against Mexicans or Canadians, trying to screw them over in an apocalypse setting because the states are already too large of an area to manage to be bothered with other countries when the sh*t hits the fan.

Yeah - most of the stories like that have another nation invading the US (Red Dawn, The Man in the High Castle), and the Americans are the defenders against another nation's aggression.