What should I keep in mind when writing about a fictional oppressed species in a fictional civilization?

What should I keep in mind when writing about a fictional oppressed species in a fictional civilization?

My opinion is that you should always keep in mind how allegorical you want to be, and how subtle you want to be.

If your fictional civilization is oppressing a fictional species and you’re using these as stand-ins for actual oppressors and oppressed here on Earth, either historical or current, then you have to decide how obvious you want to be about it.

The classic case in television/movie science fiction is the episode of Star Trek The Original Series called “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield”. It had these two characters as representatives of an oppressing group and an oppressed group.

As you can plainly and obviously see, one character — Bele, the oppressor — is black on the right side and white on the left. The other — Lokai, the oppressed — is black on the left side and white on the right.

Not very subtle, is it?

More subtle would be the Star Trek The Next Generation episode “The Measure of a Man”, in which a Star Fleet researcher proposes de-activating and disassembling Lt. Commander Data in order to reverse engineer him; this would allow Star Fleet to replace living sentient crews with Data-style androids — and the whole episode comes down to the question of whether Data is a person with rights, or a machine with none. This deals with oppression more in the abstract — the oppression hasn’t happened yet, and if it does happen it will happen to someone — some…thing? — that might not even qualify as life in some people’s eyes.

On the other hand, if your intent is not to depict an allegory of an oppression that exists or has existed here on Earth, you can still use those oppressions as your model. Take something from column A, something from column B, and mix and match to make your own ready-to-order oppressive culture. Be aware that people will choose to interpret the oppression you show in terms of their own — some will see racial oppression, others gender-based oppression, and so on. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing — it allows your work to be accessible to more people.

Lastly…I would say that you need to pay attention to how the dominant culture justifies its oppression. People don’t just choose to oppress because they’re bad guys twirling their moustaches. There’s usually some justification — women are the weaker sex, blacks are less intelligent and advanced, gays are abominations before god — whatever illogical reason(s) that will serve. At its root is usually a desire to feel superior to someone else, and then finding a reason to justify that feeling.