Yet the characters of a work of fiction seldom slice up the human race into divisions much different than modern day ones.
This leads to some serious historical misunderstandings. For instance, very few writers (Steve Stirling was a welcome exception) grasp that the ancient Egyptians considered themselves to be the ultimate race of humans, and looked down upon both what we would see as "whites" and "blacks" as inferior because they weren't the exact shade of brown-ness most common in the Two Kingdoms. It also leads to the assumption that human "races" will be very much the same centuries or millennia in the future, and occupying the same relative roles to boot.
What's weirdest is when these racial typlogies are applied to aliens -- for instance the assumption that the Vulcan T'pol is "white" and the Vulcan Tuvok "black" in the human sense of the word. This is parochialism with a vengeance!
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This leads to some serious historical misunderstandings. For instance, very few writers (Steve Stirling was a welcome exception) grasp that the ancient Egyptians considered themselves to be the ultimate race of humans, and looked down upon both what we would see as "whites" and "blacks" as inferior because they weren't the exact shade of brown-ness most common in the Two Kingdoms. It also leads to the assumption that human "races" will be very much the same centuries or millennia in the future, and occupying the same relative roles to boot.
What's weirdest is when these racial typlogies are applied to aliens -- for instance the assumption that the Vulcan T'pol is "white" and the Vulcan Tuvok "black" in the human sense of the word. This is parochialism with a vengeance!