It's a trope that's carried on into sci-fi (particularly Star Trek, where the more animalistic or violent races also tend to be darker - see the Klingons who get portrayed as darker-skinned and more aggressive with each iteration) and related high-fantasy properties like D&D.
it's the oldest metaphor in the world
it's light vs darkness, like white magic and black magic.
Heaven is light, hell is darkness.
Nobody sees "the dark at the end of the tunnel".
The idea that black people mean evil and white people mean virtue is a stretch of the modern thinking, by the same people that believe that blacklist comes from black people.
> where the more animalistic or violent races also tend to be darker
Not true.
Borgs, arguably the most dangerous species in the series, are white
Romulans are pale white.
Cardadsians are pale white too.
All the Dominion races were white, more or less. The Changelings have a whole meta commentary going for them.
You seem to have confused "the world" for "Christian Europe." There are plenty of cultures in which these metaphors are reversed, or don't exist at all.
And the only referent that is relevant to this specific conversation is that of Tolkien, who himself described orcs thusly:
squat, broad, flat-nosed, sallow-skinned, with wide mouths and slant eyes: in fact degraded and repulsive versions of the (to Europeans) least lovely Mongol-types."
>Borgs, arguably the most dangerous species in the series, are white
I wasn't talking about simply being dangerous, since in context even the Pakleds are dangerous (speaking of problamatic portrayals) so much as presenting depictions of animistic or "savage" behavior that hearkens to outdated racialist stereotypes of non-white cultures. The Borg are essentially a force of nature, so not relevant in that regard.
Fair point about the Romulans and Cardassians, although they're clearly metaphors for Colonial Europeans and Nazis respectively, and both are presented as clearly "civilized" in their behavior. Klingons drink blood wine, Cardassians drink kanar. The implications are still there.
Not really
Yumboes are supernatural beings in the mythology of the Wolof people (most likely Lebou) of Senegal, West Africa. They closely resemble European fairies. Their alternatively used name Bakhna Rakhna literally means good people, an interesting parallel to the Scottish fairies called Good Neighbours. Yumboes are the spirits of the dead and, like many supernatural beings in African beliefs, they are completely of a pearly-white colour. They are sometimes said to have silver hair.
Chinese mythology has white foxes and white tigers.
There are similar examples in all the mythologies.
> He's clearly not drawing entirely from "universal" metaphors of "light" and "darkness." And even if he were, mapping that to race is still ignorant and worth calling out.
Tolkien was a well known anti-modern, Roman Catholic orthodox conservative.
But mongol-typed are not actually dark skinned, they were in fact often very pale in the past, and tbf he also wrote "degraded and repulsive versions of".
Same way I could say, as Italian, that "Jersey Shore" protagonists are a degraded and repulsive versions of Italians.
Just keep rolling with basically racist concepts because we like the other aspects of the mythology? Or explicitly overturn the racist parts, and keep the rest?
I like the second one, but apparently many other commenters are perfectly comfortable with "white=good".
Of course we're still left with the archetype of race mapping to moral alignment in general which is gross, but at least it's something.
And of course every single time anyone tries to decolonize (I'm going to use that word specifically because it irks certain people) fantasy and sci-fi, there's a controversy like the one we're in the middle of now. Some people have to be dragged kicking and screaming into the twentieth century.
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