For a while now, I have had the idea of a disease that causes infected nonwhites to behave in accordance with racial stereotypes bouncing around in my head. The idea was that a white supremacist group had engineered this disease by anomalous means to justify their bigotry. However, I know how tricky a bigotry-related SCP would be to pull off. Does anyone think this idea has any merit, or is racism too dangerous a subject?
Somebody tried this exact idea…and it was terrible.
Conceptually it doesn't even make sense- why would white supremacists attempt to justify their beliefs by making people do things that racists already think they do?
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The idea was that they'd be trying to justify it to non-racists by "proving" that their beliefs were accurate. Of course, there's still the issue of why they don't design a disease that wipes out the groups they hate. I should have known better than to suggest this anyway.
Somebody tried this exact idea…and it was terrible
In fact, racism-themed SCPs have been tried many times, and have all failed spectacularly, with the exception of the aforementioned -EX.
Racism is far too touchy a subject for any inexperienced writer to approach, especially in a format that appears to cause or condone racism. Yes, even if you intended it to be played for horror, you WILL offend someone horribly. Probably many someones.
tl;dr: Don't. Just… don't.
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This, or things very like it, have been attempted before. None of these have succeeded. I can think of only one racism-related SCP that doesn't suck (SCP-1851-EX) and that has nothing to do with stereotypes, and is more a study of the effects of real-world racism through a Foundation-esque lens.
The idea you've suggested seems too dangerous, and doesn't sound that interesting to boot.
Rule of thumb: If you say "I just had the worst idea" and it's because the idea is batshit insane (Anomalous anart anthrocon in space, Nazi dinosaur super-soldier project, 'I married a carrot hive-mind', aliens who abduct hats believing them to be the ruling species of Earth etc), that's awesome.
If you say "I just had the worst idea" because the idea involves race or sex, you are doing it wrong.
I want to see that last one as an SCP. Aliens who have learned about Earth culture by playing TF2? Awesome.
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Does anyone think this idea has any merit, or is racism too dangerous a subject?
Racism is too dangerous a subject. I shouldn't say that because 1851-EX did it excellently. Racism requires more spin than this and more writing skill than most people have.
A good rule of thumb is if nobody wants to hear about it in real life because it's invariably correlated with people trying to start shit, they will not want to read an SCP about it.
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Writing racism also requires a very thorough understanding of racism and what it actually means. If someone's bent was genocide, maybe they'd be concerned about warping people to fit their propaganda. An actual racist IS racist precisely because they believe their warped vision of other people is the reality.