I would say Vimes gets angry about racism at first because it messes up his city, but in time because it makes him uncomfortable about being human and having the privilege he has had sort of pushed on him by the course of events, and then ultimately in the latest books because it enrages him in a fundamental way; all his repressed anger and class guilt have been mapped onto species prejudice, to the point where it has turned into a giant red button for him.
I think the absence of non-human POV characters, and the reason everything has to be filtered through the empathy or reactions of a human, stems from the larger problem of "species = race" that Becca alludes to. I mean, non-humans make difficult POV characters, because they... aren't human, and all of your readers are. Which then has very unfortunate implication when you equate it to race, and if that is the ONLY way you are writing about race, allows you to indulge lazy habits of thinking and talking about race. In a sense, the real problem is that by mapping race "away" onto nonhumans, you make a world where the human POV is necessarily a white POV.
The characterization and motives of the non-POV non-human characters do get more complicated and... correctly alien, over time, though! In that sense Men At Arms is a very transitional book in terms of taking non-humans seriously as "people". It is not good enough, in retrospect, but it is the turning point where it's stated outright that the way nonhumans had been appearing had never really been good enough, and they begin to slowly shaded in, in a process that is not and never will be over.
It's explicitly highlighted in... I think it's Thud, when Vimes realizes that the first time he ever saw Detritus he was chained to a wall as a possession, essentially, of the Drum. And now he is... well, doing all the stuff Detritus does in that book, to keep things short.
In some ways I think the books tend to be written from an unarticulated, generic human Morporkian POV, even when the narrative explicitly criticizes the deficiencies in that POV. Trolls are a bit dumb and violent, not the kind of people you want to spend time with, and dwarfs are all kind of weird and obsessed with gold, and God knows what goes on behind those loincloths, but of COURSE they're people; of course you can't buy and sell them or just shrug if they get killed. Just... not quite. And every so often the story being told inside that narrative breaks open and it becomes clear that things are a lot more complicated than the narration has acknowledged...
(The most obvious one I can think of is in The Truth, when Otto steps in to save William and clarifies that, no, this guy we have been riding around on the shoulder of all book doesn't really get it! He's actually kind of a racist twerp! But he's trying, and when you are surrounded by racist twerps you have to side with the one who's trying, at least. And then we swerve right back to William's POV.)
no subject
I think the absence of non-human POV characters, and the reason everything has to be filtered through the empathy or reactions of a human, stems from the larger problem of "species = race" that Becca alludes to. I mean, non-humans make difficult POV characters, because they... aren't human, and all of your readers are. Which then has very unfortunate implication when you equate it to race, and if that is the ONLY way you are writing about race, allows you to indulge lazy habits of thinking and talking about race. In a sense, the real problem is that by mapping race "away" onto nonhumans, you make a world where the human POV is necessarily a white POV.
The characterization and motives of the non-POV non-human characters do get more complicated and... correctly alien, over time, though! In that sense Men At Arms is a very transitional book in terms of taking non-humans seriously as "people". It is not good enough, in retrospect, but it is the turning point where it's stated outright that the way nonhumans had been appearing had never really been good enough, and they begin to slowly shaded in, in a process that is not and never will be over.
It's explicitly highlighted in... I think it's Thud, when Vimes realizes that the first time he ever saw Detritus he was chained to a wall as a possession, essentially, of the Drum. And now he is... well, doing all the stuff Detritus does in that book, to keep things short.
In some ways I think the books tend to be written from an unarticulated, generic human Morporkian POV, even when the narrative explicitly criticizes the deficiencies in that POV. Trolls are a bit dumb and violent, not the kind of people you want to spend time with, and dwarfs are all kind of weird and obsessed with gold, and God knows what goes on behind those loincloths, but of COURSE they're people; of course you can't buy and sell them or just shrug if they get killed. Just... not quite. And every so often the story being told inside that narrative breaks open and it becomes clear that things are a lot more complicated than the narration has acknowledged...
(The most obvious one I can think of is in The Truth, when Otto steps in to save William and clarifies that, no, this guy we have been riding around on the shoulder of all book doesn't really get it! He's actually kind of a racist twerp! But he's trying, and when you are surrounded by racist twerps you have to side with the one who's trying, at least. And then we swerve right back to William's POV.)