Over at the Grauniad, there's a shallow piece on endemic racism in the literature of the fantastic that focuses on fanboy criticism of "diverse" casting in Amazon's upcoming LotR prequel. It's shallow not because the conclusions are inept, or wrong, or unsupported/unsupportable, but because it misses so much that's considerably more disturbing, even from one of the less overtly racist classics of fantastic literature. Just the phrase "Black Corsairs of Umbar" — which is entirely absent from the article — should be enough to get started with.
It gets worse if one starts paying attention more generally. Sticking to Tolkein for a moment, just consider that every dwarf is entirely subject to (ultimately irresistable) goldlust, that every goblin/orc/half-orc is simultaneously an utter conformist and toxic narcissist, that there was no dissent whatsoever in Angmar. Yet Tolkein is less oblivious (and more genteel) than most; I'm not going to mention names (because all three are alive), but three of the larger-selling (white male) epic-fantasy writers of the 1970s through 1990s are vastly, vastly worse in how they equate "tendency toward evil (or at least opposition to the white male socially-conservative protagonist)" with "citizenship and ancestry." It's almost as if the old Monty Python game-show sketch "Prejudice" was/is an unspoken law of nature, sort of like "gravity" (and "Manifest Destiny"). Although I have three particular white male writers in mind (none of whose works bear reading by anyone either over the age of twelve or who has ever read Huckleberry Finn or any of the great works of magical realism), there are a lot more than that whose names could just as easily appear on these white whine labels.
And at that, science fiction is often worse, just shifting from "human social racial constructs" to "quasibiological-handwaving rationalizations of human social racial constructs," epitomized in how the default "humans" are almost inevitably depicted (in text, in graphics, on screen). It gets much more disturbing, too, when one reflects on how a shunned/exceptional minority character from a "biologically incompatible" set of cardboard baddies can really become one of the "good guys" (and it's almost always "guys," but this is yet another Winter of discontent) by adopting the weltanschauung of the protagonist, however inconsistent with survival imperatives in the native environment — or however consistent with the too-frequent idiot plots.
Don't get me started on other category fiction, eh, "Hercule" and "Karla"? It's almost as if the historical/canonical grouping "authors" consists almost entirely of those with the leisure to write — more often than not via inherited/married wealth — instead of scrabble for the next meal; as if the power structure of the gatekeepers (publishing, film, academia) is relentlessly composed of a Certain Subset of the Right Kind of People; as if narrative fiction, regardless of the form or manner of presentation, is drawing its conclusions from cherry-picked data — all of the data points inconsistent with the preferred, preconceived theory have been excluded (intentionally or ineptly) from the published dataset and analysis. Wait a minute…