Actually, the sister is one of the worst offences as far as this story's lack of respect to its subject matter goes.
Wait, wait, wait. Did you really just follow "all the racists are shown to be evil and that's petty and self-congratulatory" with "and the worst thing about that is the one that isn't"? That can't be right, eh? Say again, please.
She is introduced as someone who has been a racist in the past, but has come to overcome them due to a family tragedy. So far, so good. But note that there doesn't seem to be any process involved. She shows up on the doorway, contrite and ready to start a new page. And from that moment on, she is on the same page as the narrator. When she sees the boy, she doesn't recoil, or show any sign of her cultural conditioning. She shows surprise, at how she finds him beautiful. The overall message the sister offers is: "to overcome racism, all you need to do is try, and you'll find out that the racism was totally misguided to begin with".
Hmmm. My takeaway on this was completely different than yours. Although I'll easily concede (and have already conceded, actually) that the story doesn't nuance well, I can still try to explain what I took from the sister, whom I don't believe is a magical non-racist at the end of the story, but who I do believe takes steps in that direction (which is why I said in my OP "moves toward" not "gets there") . So frex, I notice that it's not until the graveyard that she's willing to talk about and/or touch the boy, right? She shows up on the doorstep before the funeral and helps them get ready (the story is not specific on whether 'helping to dress' the son means touching him or fetching clothes or some other thing), but the first real touch we're told about and see isn't until they're ready to get out of the limo (when the boy is passive and asleep, btw, affording a measure of safety to someone who wishes to scrutinize). She also calls him "the boy" which is oddly standoffish for someone referring to their nephew, as if she doesn't know his name. I do see her struggling to overcome her bias, but I certainly *don't* see her as having shown up with it already overcome. And actually, I took her surprise at his beauty to be *deeply* racist. What, he's supposed to be naturally ugly? The tropes for othering encompass two extremes, right? Revulsion/Racism and Exoticizing/Fetishism. Which btw, protag is exoticizing all the way, isn't she? Problematic, to say the least. Without getting into the mind-reading business, I think the protag is intended to be problematic. There's a lot of clues for that, most of which have been enumerated on this thread (most of them by you, in the 'positive racist' portion of your post). So yeah, they're definitely meant to be foils, imo, and I don't think there's any magic wand going on, for anyone. I think there's a reason the protag isn't a Neanderthal herself. But I digress. We're on the sister. She shows her ass, so to speak, when she finds it unbelievable that people would hold a hateful demonstration at a funeral. She has no idea what it's like to be from the hated class. She has taken her blinders off. She finally SEES: the son, the grieving sister, the hatred directed at them. But I don't believe that's an endgame, I believe that's a first step. An end to ignorance, maybe, but not an end to racism. So no, I'm not getting the same overall message you are. The plot of the story, where the pacifist 'let's all just get along' Neanderthal gets murdered might suggest an opposite overall message: it doesn't matter how hard you try to overcome racism, there's still a price, and that price is usually a bloody one.
Again, I'm not going to say there wasn't blunt applications of concepts, because I agree that there was. But if you think the story says the sister was magic-wanded into a happy Neanderthal lover you heard a completely different story than I did. Which happens, because people bring their own junk to the story and it's all through a lens and relative.
I think you're totally missing the point here. The problem I believe that yicheng was trying to illustrate is that the story itself is highly problematic as far as racial dialogue goes. On the one hand, it is concerned with showing the evils of racism and hate, but at the same time, the entire narrative is dedicated to establishing the neanderthal as other. It - and the narrator - is not interested at all in finding common ground, but in highlighting how different the two racial groups are. "They are not like you", it says "they are better than you. And you are evil for refusing to accept that". That's no different than the racist discourse that, for example, aimed to justify slavery by making Africans (and African-Americans) to be animalistic. Just because the story's take on this is positive doesn't make it any less racist.
Yeah, I think it's kind of interesting that the author took the whole idea of the other one step further. Ok, so races are made up, a social construct, as yicheng indicated, though there was plenty of fabricated science to support the position that race was real and enable lots of racist bullshit in the past. So IMO the story plays what-if. What-if the science stuff, that these beings are actually separate species, was real? Would that make a difference in the dialog? In the action/reaction/social fallout? In the possibility of integration? Revolution? Social equality? Could things play out differently? It's possible this take, where the differences are real and measurable, muddies the waters of the story's applicability to the idea of race in our own world, which we know is not supported by scientific data, not real, and just a means of social control and oppression. But the question is an interesting one (and I think, one of the shiny sf bits that author would very reluctantly have parted with -- though that's speculation on my part, of course). Does it make a difference if the other is truly other or we're just pretending it is?
Now, you may argue - and maybe you are arguing - that the narrator is meant to be an example of a positively-biased racist.
Yeah, I am. See above.
So, still a failure as far as being an affective anti-racism story.
This is a well-written, well constructed story. It raises a lot of interesting ideas. I don't dispute that. But its way of handling those ideas is deeply flawed and unhelpful.
I'm curious as to what would be a helpful way to handle an idea such as racism in a story. It strikes me as a strange assertion, to demand or hope or expect that stories be helpful. Helpful to what? To whom? How would a story be an effective anti-racism story? Can you show me an example?
One of the things I think this story is doing, or trying to do (and in some places it fails, worldbuildy places mostly) is to compress the history of racism. To sort of have all the different things going on at once. So the narrator, she might represent a sixties style integrationist, right? And then, side by side, simultaneously, we're getting the political PC stuff with the constantly changing census/application forms, the view of the Neanderthals as the objects of scientific experiment, and the extreme Klan stuff, and the "Turner Diary" style declaration of all out race war by the narrator, and the enforced quota bits, and everything else, except instead of happening over hundreds of years it's happening over one generation. Which was another shiny thing that completely held my attention.
