"
Fantastic" as in "
Fantasy",
not as in "
Great".
A subset of the old trick of dealing with thorny issues through
metaphor. Instead of having the hero encounter racism between, say, whites and blacks in the American
Deep South, or between ethnic Czech and Roma in the Czech Republic, or between Ainu and Japanese, or any other sets of real-world groups, they encounter racism between two-headed aliens and three-headed aliens, or between
Elves and Dwarves, or
Werewolves and Vampires,
witches and wizards, humans and
super humans or
humans and intelligent robots, or even
robots and robots.
Note that this can also cover other types of prejudice; anti-homosexual sentiment, religious differences, and so on.
Related to
Space Jews, in which
the story has dubious racist overtones. Also related to
Have You Tried Not Being a Monster?, when monsters are used as a metaphor for alternative sexual identity, rather than race.
Fantastic Slurs are often involved, as are
Monster Rights Movements.
Real Life weaselly lines like
Some of My Best Friends Are X may feature. The undesired minorities may be rounded up inside a
Fantastic Ghetto, they may also be the targets of
Super Human Trafficking.
If the point of the story is to show the evils of racism, this trope can lead to a
Broken Aesop if there are in fact
good in-universe reasons to discriminate against a certain type of creature (say, because they need to drink human blood in order to survive, or they genuinely don't have free will or a sense of ethics like humans do).
Also note that
Tropes Are Not Bad: most people wouldn't believe in a world where elves, dwarves, aliens, etc got along with perfect harmony, because their own experiences of different groups' interactions don't bear that out. It's called
Fantastic Racism for a reason.
If the racism appears to be spilling into something a little less fantastic and into something more real, it's
Values Dissonance.
Compare
Superior Species, in which one species actually
is objectively superior in some way, and
Master Race, when it's just in their head.
See also
People of Hair Color, which can be another occasion for racism in fantasy.
Examples