Race in Fantasy

"Some live for the bill, some kill for the bill (girrrrl)..."-Wyclef Jean, Sweetest Girl

Alright, continuing with the theme of how taking classes completely outside the average creative writing curriculum can influence your writing in incredible ways, a discussion of race in fantasy.

I've been taking a class this semester about the origins of race as we know it in society today, and aside from completely turning upside-down my own thoughts on race (and helping me to finally eliminate some issues I've had with race since I first started encountering it), it's really gotten me thinking about how race is treated in fantasy.

Most notably, it's treated as a given. In most fantasy worlds, whatever equivalent there is to God created the different races as different races, and never the twain shall meet. There are half-breeds, but races never get more mixed than that. You never see, for instance, an invidual of mixed dwarvish-human-elvish-gnomish ancestry...the sort of genetic mixing that would happen in any world in which the races were races and not different species.

So most fantasy worlds treat races as species, but still use the term race, and incorporate all the racial tensions and hatreds that have accompanied that term in the real world. My question is, "why?" For all the sun-shiny stories out there in fantasy about interracial marriages and overcoming prejudices and hatreds, the prejudices and hatreds overcome are never really intrinsic to the worlds they're supposed to come from. They're just imported from ours.

I'd love to read a work of fantasy in which racial mixing was treated realistically and one of the major themes of the story. In fact, I'd love to write it. Dibs.