Policies by Phenotype?

[Trithemius]

No, I'm talking about the system in which humans are divided into mostly arbitrary, but visually distinct, races according to perceived notions of genetic relation. The words Negroid, Mongoloid, Caucasoid, etc, weren't just old timey ways to skin color, but part of a system that grouped and then ranked humans.

It would be utterly bizarre for an alien species to adopt anything resembling this system and then declare that aliens, total genetic strangers with no shared history at all, were part of the group they placed themselves into.

Let's just imagine racist humans and aliens, for ease. Look at the mammalian portraits for a minute. Do you think that a human racist, who believes there are white people, black people, asians, native americans, and maybe is even aware of Middle Easterners, Polynesians, Austronesians, or Dravidians but doesn't know which arbitrary race to assign them to, is going to just accept that Flying Monkey, Pig Monster, Six-Eyed Ratdog, Click-Clack Eyebrow, and Blind Platypus are in the same category as white people? Simply because they look like they warmed blooded, furred, lactating, sweating mammals whether or not they actually are?

This is what I mean by racism does not make sense as applied to aliens. You would have to throw out your pseudoscience and replace it with pure aesthetics. You'd get the Racist Humans & Sexy Aliens Alliance, securing the dominance of humanity across the galaxy and also being cool with sexy aliens having the vote. They could have gone full racist and enslaved the sexy aliens, but they didn't feel right about wanting to have sex with something that was legally forbidden denied citizenship, I suppose, so they just enslaved members of the Union of Aliens That Humans Don't Find Particularly Relatable.

Are people in disagreement about the use of the term "racism" to describe "xenophobic ethics"?

Maybe the issue is we are saying "race" (and "empire") a lot on the forums when we might better say "species" (and "state")?

This we can can avoid talking about whether racism (classification sense) or racism (exploitation sense) applies to non human sapients.

 

[aitaituo]

Are people in disagreement about the use of the term "racism" to describe "xenophobic ethics"?

Maybe the issue is we are saying "race" (and "empire") a lot on the forums when we might better say "species" (and "state")?

This we can can avoid talking about whether racism (classification sense) or racism (exploitation sense) applies to non human sapients.

It's easy to mistake this for a simple semantic distinction and 99% of the time distinguishing those two would be mere semantics, but the OP explicitly suggested legal classification (and presumably oppression/privilege) of aliens based on visually distinct categories.

That's racism (classification), not racism (discrimination/exploitation) in what I had thought was a rather obvious way.

In case I've been unclear, I totally think exploitation of xenos is both logical and plausible. Slavery is inefficient, but it isn't necessarily undesirable, especially if you're decadent. It's that enslaving some xenos, but not others (because they're sexy), is a very strange place to end up at.

 

[mrinku]

I'm not convinced "racism" is a valid term for "description of race".

In ANY case all these aliens are distinct species and "race" should only refer to variation within each one. Blorg with pink bits, Blorg with green bits, Blorg with yellow bits... those may be Blorg races (or fashion statements, or gender distinctions, or something ineffably Blorg...).

Study and classification of alien things would be Xenology, I would think.

 

[EvilTom]

It would be very interesting if your species had a trait that make it afraid or full of hatred for a certain phenotype.

Perhaps this could be something that a divergent population that is under attack from that phenotype, or a first contact war, might acquire.

This would make diplomacy with certain nations even more difficult.

However I do realise that this is partially sorted with the xenophobia ethos.