A couple weeks ago, I wrote about my disappointment with some of the continued racist tropes that the His Dark Materials television series inherited from its source novels. Some of the responses seemed to indicate surprise that Pullman’s iconic and beloved series contained any racism whatsoever. I want to be clear and careful here: Pullman’s series contains few to no instances of overt racism like we might find in the works H.P. Lovecraft or Rudyard Kipling. But what His Dark Materials (the book series) does contain and what His Dark Materials (the TV show) has unfortunately continued with are a number of subtle racist and colonialist tropes that the show would have done well to rewrite and rethink.
Central to the problematic nature of Pullman’s narrative is its genre. Pullman writes in a mode that is sometimes referred to as “Boys’ Own Stories” (taking its name from a 19th-century literary magazine aimed at young boys). This is a broad category with a variety of entries and subcategories but, at its core, it is fiction either aimed at young boys or adopted as fit for them to read. It usually features an adventurous narrative focused on the unraveling of a sinister mystery or a dangerous journey to far-off places. It has its origins not only in the stories of Boys’ Own magazine but also in the work of late 19th-century novelists like Robert Louis Stevenson (think Treasure Island or Kidnapped) and Rudyard Kipling. It is evenly split between stories written explicitly for boys (Hergé’s Tintin comics, Edward Stratemeyer’s Hardy Boys and Tom Swift novels, and the works of W.H.G. Kingston) and stories intended for readers of various ages but often popular with young boys because of the adventurous subject matter (novels by Jules Verne, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and H. Rider Haggard).
Pullman’s novels are filled to the brim with tropes from Boys’ Own-style adventure novels (it should be noted that his previous series, the Sally Lockheart books, are explicitly an homage to the genre), which is a large part of their charm. The fact that he employs these tropes within a narrative centered around a female protagonist is even more laudable, seeing as the vast majority of the genre traditionally focuses, exclusively, on boys. But among tropes that glorify the candor and wit of children and provide misadventure with a moral, there are also highly colonialist and imperial themes, as well as a fair share of racist caricatures in these works. Let’s talk about some of the specifics.
The Demonization of Non-white and Indigenous Peoples
Boys’ Own stories and Pullman’s novels traffic in the depiction of far-off, “exotic” locales. Much of the first novel (and presumably the first season) in HDM takes place in the unspecified “North.” The region seems to include Lapland (a region of Finland in our world, but expanded into a larger nation in Lyra’s) as well as nebulous regions that include the Witchlands (Lake Enara, Serafina Pekkala’s clan appears to be based off of our world’s Lake Inari in Northern Finland), Svalbard (an archipelago that belongs to Norway in our world but is an independent kingdom of panserbjørn in Lyra’s) and Tartary (which is a nebulous historical region in our world that Europeans invoked to indicate large swaths of central Asia but is an independent nation in Lyra’s). It is this last region that concerns us most.
Pullman includes Tartars in Northern Lights as the hired security at Bolvangar. With their uniformly lupine daemons, they are represented mainly as faceless muscle, meant to appear threatening but devoid of characterization or any deeper specificity. In both the novel and the show, there is delighted discussion of how Mrs. Coulter has fought Tartars in the past. This is presented, not as some kind of international conflict, but as a feature of adventure in the North. Pullman’s Tartars are reduced to a natural phenomenon: a peril of the landscape, no different than cliff-ghasts or the cold.
Pullman’s distasteful presentation of non-Western people isn’t limited to Tartars, either. Early on in Northern Lights, Tony Costa rescues Lyra from kidnapping. His line, immediately following is, “We thought they was Gobblers, but I reckon they were Turk traders” (104). While the Ottoman Empire did, in fact, have slaves and there is the possibility that, in Lyra’s world, with its alternate history, an Ottoman Empire with slaves still exists, Pullman’s worldbuilding is not robust enough to include this detail as anything other than a bit of racist frippery. The reference feels drawn directly from a well of dubious boys’ own adventure tropes rather than a meaningful decision in the text.
The show wisely rewrites this particular plot point so that Lyra is, in fact, kidnapped by the Oblation Board. This rewrite streamlines the narrative while also cutting an unpleasant, problematic sentiment. The series’ handling of Tartars is less graceful. Tartars are still faceless mercenaries guarding Bolvangar. At least, we rarely see their faces during the final battle which otherwise would force the show to either cast multi-ethnic “tartars” or have the gyptians fight against people who look uniformly Asian.
These are two instances where racist subplots and worldbuilding in the novels have either been resolved or muted by the show. But there is a slightly more unavoidable issue represented by the character of Iorek Byrnison. While Iorek is, of course, an armored, sentient polar bear and not a specific caricature of a particular ethnic group, he does generally accumulate tropes associated with the figure of the “noble savage.”
For those unfamiliar with the idea, the noble savage is essentially an indigenous person who is portrayed as culturally primitive but whose absence from “civilization” (read, European civilization) has made them morally superior. These capital “R” Romantic ideas are rooted in scientific racism, but have found purchase in numerous literary examples. One need only look to early White American writing about First Nations people to see numerous examples—e.g., Chingachgook from The Last of the Mohicans, or the historical but mischaracterized protagonist of Longfellow’s Song of Hiawatha. In fact the use of the Noble Savage as a stock character is woven throughout pop culture: Films like Dances with Wolves, and The Gods Must Be Crazy, TV shows like The Lone Ranger, and classic children’s literature like The Indian in the Cupboard all place a Noble Savage at their center.
Enter Iorek Byrnison: a violent, intensely honor-driven character from a “primitive” culture who teaches the protagonist about life by virtue of their (in this case eventual) moral superiority. While the panserbjørn are, of course, not human beings, it is striking that much of the culture Pullman invents for them is based firmly in a series of Noble Savage stereotypes. When this is paired with offhand remarks in both the novels and the show about how Iorek was tricked into dishonorable behavior because he was given alcohol, we have a character that is an amalgam of Noble Savage stereotypes with a hint of First Nations-directed racism thrown in. The show decides not to write around this particular plot point and, though there is not much time in the series to further develop panserbjørn culture beyond Pullman’s novels, this element of Iorek’s characterization remains an uncomfortable relic that surely would not have been included in a fantasy series composed from whole cloth in 2019.
It is important for me to note that the kinds of racism found in Pullman’s novels and perpetuated by the show are few and far between compared with much of our problematic past. Where HDM’s nemesis series, The Chronicles of Narnia, makes the plot of an entire installment out of what comes down to Lewis’ deep-seated Islamophobia, His Dark Materials stumbles in a less overt way, in its inclusion of some European stereotypes about people from non-European places and an over-reliance on outdated and patronizing tropes. I certainly would not argue that Pullman is the kind of frothing, outspoken racist that needs to be publically shunned (though an apology or an admission of prior ignorance would be a helpful step in a more positive direction).
Instead, what I think is unfortunate here is the show’s perpetuation of Pullman’s poorer instincts. These tropes, and their perpetuation, take part in the kind of casual racism that too often floats by unremarked upon precisely because it is less galling than the rants of hopeless bigots. But that is, in and of itself, a problem. The show had a chance to rewrite some minor bits of Pullman’s narrative for the better and instead went with a regurgitation of the same. The Boys’ Own Adventure genre is full of delights; Pullman’s contribution to it is also delightful. But it is in need of an update—a recognition of and separation from the colonial and racist instincts that gave rise to its harmful and outdated clichés—and it is disappointing to see the show fail to do so.
Tyler Dean is a professor of Victorian Gothic Literature. He holds a doctorate from the University of California Irvine and teaches at a handful of Southern California colleges. He is one half of the Lincoln & Welles podcast available on Apple Podcasts or through your favorite podcatcher. More of his writing can be found at his website and his fantastical bestiary can be found on Facebook at @presumptivebestiary.
The criticism of the Tartars seems a bit overblown. Yes, they’re faceless muscle, but who cares? The story isn’t about them and their ethnicity is meaningless, nor is it harped upon. It’s very obviously only brought up because this is a group/region that the Magisterium doesn’t control, and thus, this is a group that won’t cause problems when their “tour” is up or whatever and they go home. The idea that every group needs to be represented in a positive light is kind of absurd, and given the obvious influences here (Varangian and Swiss Guards, one of which is of a similar ethnic background), this doesn’t seem that bad.
As always, this kind of criticism seems informed mostly by a desire to find something to criticize. Anyone looking to be offended will find ample cause, always.
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Something that I haven’t quite understood from His Dark Materials is how “The Church” (supposedly an amalgation of Catholicism and Calvinism) has sway over so much of Russia and Siberia. So not only are other religions besides Christianity not talked about in the series, but Eastern Orthodoxy was kind of forgotten about as well? Muscovy exists, and Lyra encounters priests that serve Metatron in it, but how the Church got over its East / West schism is never addressed, like how the Protestant reformation was.
It’s a very West centered story, so the world building doesn’t go over much how the rest of the world outside Europe fared, even though a good chunk of it happens in Siberia.
Regarding the jive against C S Lewis and The Horse abd his Boy, I never got the impression that Calormans were Muslims. They seemed more like pre Islam polytheistic Arabs. And the tales the post Islam Arabs tell of the pre Islam Arabs do not pit the latter in a good picture.
Different people have different tolerances for such things, as an earlier article on Lovecraft sagely advised. That said, the vast majority of these quibbles seem to be only the sort of thing that people who teach Post-Colonial Literature agonise about. I would be much more exercised by Iorek’s drunkenness, for example, if he was coded as First Nations in any other way whatsoever.
For me the trope His Dark Materials falls most heavily afoul of is kill-your-gays. Much as I applaud the angelic representation, I’m hoping the third series will do something about Balthalmos and Baruch, that pair of quite incredibly stereotyped bitchy queens.
Thank you for this article, Tyler (not least because it feels in part a response to my comment in your review from a couple of weeks ago).
My comment in your original article in particular talked about the portrayal of the bears, and in hindsight it is obvious that Pullman draws on ‘noble savage’ tropes. Something else that comes to mind is Iorek’s future near-total obedience to both Lyra and later Will.
While some are always keen to dismiss these aspects as ‘reading too much into children’s literature’ I believe it is important to engage with these questions, and not to simply dismiss them as they are not large parts of the narrative (regarding Tartars/Turkish slavers). I think part of the problem comes from people reading an article like this as the offended criticisms of a hand-wringing, ‘woke’ millenial, when in reality it is no more than an exercise in literary critical analysis – which is surely (in part, at least) what we all come to this site for in the first place.
I’m reminded of Edward Said’s writings on Jane Austen (I think it’s Mansfield Park) – focusing in on admittedly a small part of the narrative that becomes greatly instructional when viewed through the critical prism of race. Highlighting these more ‘problematic’ aspects of the books does not mean they should be cancelled, or that the books or Philip Pullman are/is racist – it would clearly be absurd to argue so – but neither should these aspects be swept under the rug, ignored, and devoid of scrutiny.
This is always a hard problem with alternative histories: How much of the baggage to carry into the story with the author. There are always alternatives and one need never agree with every choice made, conscious or otherwise, by the author… or critics or reviewers or anyone else. Cold War interpretations of Animal Farm as concerning itself solely with the Russian Revolution — carefully ignoring all of the references to both the English Civil War and the French Revolution built into it, starting with names — are an obvious example. So, too, here; Pullman’s focus was elsewhere, so some of what he did is subject to being “wrong.”
Lyra’s world is not Utopia or an idealized alternative to ours. It has, and inevitably will have, great big warts all over the place; and the characters will have human flaws all over the place. (Problems with latter were one of Milton’s own regrets about Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, which are some of Pullman’s acknowledged source material.) For all of the faults of Pullman’s presentation, it’s nowhere near as problematic as, say, Tolkein’s treatment of the Orcs and of Umbar. That is vastly less offensive than Lewis’s treatment of the Persian-analog (more than Arab-analog, and even saying “Persian” is a problem in itself) Calormenes, particularly with the off-stage “menace” of “the empire” that runs as a thread through the books.
So at least at this stage, I’m withholding judgment on how the TV adaptation is handling these issues. They’re on my list of things to consider; but since the whole point of the three-part novel His Dark Materials is a fundamental change in the state of humanity occuring late in the third volume, I’m going to withhold judgment unless there’s something really outrageous that reflects failure to learn from literary and other forebearers.
I don’t watch the show but love the books, and I really interpret the background racism as successful elements of atmosphere and worldbuilding. I think that Pullman tackled organised religion and olthe corrupt nature of organised power with these novels, and tried not to positively reinforce the racism and xenophobia that tether these novels to the genre.
I find it deeply amusing that you say an original series of 2019 wouldn’t rely on these tropes, when Brandon Sanderson, one of the most popular and prolific authors of the present era, has written every single one of his novels firmly rooted in colonialism, white saviours, and Noble savages. He writes good books and he produces on a regular schedule, but damn me if his work isn’t deeply offensive in ways that Pullman’s most certainly isn’t.
@@.-@ This is a topic that Pullman does address in “The Secret Commonwealth”. Short non-spoiler answer: the Magisterium is a historical big tent, and recognizable Orthodoxy is inside the tent.
S
I had completely missed the existence of the new trilogy, The Book of Dust. From the title of La Belle Sauvage, I’m guessing that it is very relevant to this discussion; can someone speak to that?
Lapland is actually split between Sweden and Finland, with most of it in Sweden- and it’s huge, about 25% of Sweden’s area. It’s nama also comes from the word ’lapp”, a deregatory name of the Sami people, who inhabit the north of Sweden, Finland and Norway. Apropos casual racism- as a Swede I find it pretty shameful the name Lapland is still in use.
@11 It’s immensely relevant. I think Pullman is doing some daring stuff in world building that improves the work as a whole.
Without spoilers, I do think that Pullman remains in a dicey position as regards race/ethnicity at the end of The Secret Commonwealth. He has set up “Middle Eastern” fanatics, and while he had hinted that this is a false flag rather than an honest portrayal of feelings in the region, the whole matter is still quite up in the air until the sixth volume is published. I wish he hadn’t left that particular thread hanging
I’m not convinced that any racism can be attributed to Pullman as an author. It’s more that he’s portraying the racism inherent in the world he built. This would be akin to calling him a religious author because he includes daemons, a (dead) God, angels, and souls in an afterlife.
We can either look at his authorship as complex, or conclude that he is highly confused. Why end with a setting so much like Eden, where a new Adam and Eve initiate a new state of being for humanity? (The scene between Will and Lyra depicting this will itself be highly problematic, depending on how it’s handled in the show, especially as the actors don’t seem to be of the same age.) Why would a self-declared atheist use and recast so much religious imagery and thematic content? Simply using the concept of sin (as felt by Mrs. Coulter), which is a religious construct, would brand him as a religious writer.
In other words, Pullman as a writer is employing/deploying concepts that should not be ascribed to him personally. Reductio ad absurdum: portraying a murder in one’s story does not mean the writer endorses murder. Or, if we cleaned up every instance of abhorrent historical context, we would end up with highly sanitized stories that don’t reflect the past at all.
As a Swede and of the native Samí people I don’t know what to make of the worldbuilding in the North. Are the witches Samí people? If that is the case then it’s a typical example of the ‘magical native’ trope still common in depictions of the Samí today, as well as of other native minority groups. Coram even namedrops Jabme-Akka, the pre-christian Samí death godess. This could have been a rare case of representation if they had cast a native person to play Serafina Pekkala. As it is now it’s just strange and feels like exoticism of a minority group they don’t know is real.
@9 err… I’m almost afraid to ask, but, what exactly do you mean by your second paragraph? I’ve read other articles and comments on this site whose conclusions I find shocking, but this is the first time I’ve ever felt compelled to not merely be a lurker.
@11: La Belle Sauvage is the name of a boat, but I think it escapes more of the complaints here by being primarily focused upon small portion England and British mythology way.
As for Tartars: I suspect that in Lyra’s world it references the same areas and peoples as it was used since the 15th Century in Russia and Europe: “the Azerbaijanis, the peoples of the North Caucasus, the Crimea, the Volga, Central Asia and Siberia, including the Astrakhan, Kazan, Crimean and Siberian Tatars” since most that political map seems to be stuck in the amber of the 18th/mid 19th century. So most likely an army of Tartars in there wouldn’t look any more ‘uniformly Asian’ than an army of Tartars today.
I’ve been thinking about this article for a few days and waiting to make sure I wrote a well-thought out comment. My apologies in advance if that fails, as it’s a very sensitive topic (race, representation, colonialism). And what I want to say is controversial, and I’m still thinking it out.
I think the article makes good points about colonialist tropes in HDM. But, are these tropes not rendered somewhat moot, or negated, or further problematised, by the colour-blind casting?
From every appearance in the TV show, Lyra’s world IS post-racial.
In fact, the only aspect of that social world which does not feature actors of colour, is in the subservient roles (watch the scenes in the kitchens and laundry – there are only white actors as servants). It would appear that black people are not disadvantaged in this world. Indeed, many are in positions of powers.
Which is where the problems come in. The Master of Jordan College is black, and is one of the most oppressive characters in early episodes – willing to kill to uphold the status quo and the establishment.
I realise much of the casting is a result of BBC quota, but it complicates matters of oppression when the oppressive characters are portrayed as black. I can think of other examples: the Empire in Star Wars is now equal opportunities, which somewhat undermines its tyranny. And in recent Disney films, tools of the establishment – like “I was only doing my job” bankers, bureacratic and authority figures in Mary Poppins Returns and Christopher Robin etc – have been portrayed as black, portraying the very social apparatuses that would have oppressed them at the time.
It’s got to the stage where you have to watch these movies on two levels – one, applauding the diverse casting, and two, condemning the very establishment that those actors are portraying.
Another example would be Doctor Who, where British Imperial troops, who would have invaded Africa, had a black officer (something the scriptwriter Mark Gatiss found unsettling himself, as it showed the oppressed as the oppressor. Admittedly he found a work-around by finding the rare historical instance of a black soldier at that time, but still, it’s mental and cultural gymnastics).
It would be a little like watching Hidden Figures, but all the racist white rednecks at NASA are also played by actors PoC instead of white actors, thus onscreen enforcing their own oppression. I mean, this hasn’t happened yet, but we’ve gotten close in other current tv shows:
Watchmen Spoiler ahead (episode 8)….
…. a similar thing occurs in the Watchmen sequel, which goes for a (laudable) feminist and black repositioning. But, when you think about it, while the actor portraying Dr Manhattan now is black, it remains that the character originally was white (Jon Osterman). This remains cannon in the TV show. So while it’s great to see a PoC as Dr Manhattan, the character is an originally white man who now in the 2010s *chooses* to live as black. So instead of empowering, he’s literally living the Rachel Dolezal lifestyle. It would be wrong to say it’s blackface, as the actor Yahya Abdul-Mateen II is black, but the character himself effectively is living in white-to-blue-to-black face.
Imagine if Bruce Wayne decided to go into hiding as a black person, then resurfaced as a black superhero. While the actor portraying this new superhero might be black, the character itself would be one of racial inauthenticity and exploitation.
That’s how I feel the representational casting of oppressive characters in HDM is like. Including Lin Manuel Miranda – we’re supposed to be glad to see him, as it is set up in contradistinction to the colonist tropes of Lee Scoresby, but that only draws attention to the original character as intended. So we have to reconcile that this both is, and is not, racist.
I just don’t understand how we’re supposed to reconcile these two levels of viewing – the superficial level of the celebrated casting, and the inherently problematic tropes of the text, the characters, etc. The article highlights much of what I find makes HDM a difficult watch, but I think it’s further problematised by a blindness to racism that is ironically perpetuated by the colourblind casting.
**** My apologies in advance if I haven’t expressed any of this with the finesse it requires.
@jim: (are you the only Jim on the site? these red unregistered accounts throw me)
You’re right that this is a sensitive subject with multiple levels. It’s not just one problem, but several.
I’d suggest that anyone’s approach and where they end up is related to their prior political/ideological standpoint. Also, a lot has to do with the level of sensitivity we set on our racism detector. There’s enough outright, blatant racism abroad in the world today that very finely tuned arguments about pop culture media sometimes seem overwrought. It seems like hand-wringing to me at times, when it’s more obvious what the true enemy of civility and decency is.
As far as Pullman, as I’ve said earlier, it’s more a matter of portrayal of an environment that was (is?) historically racist, while borrowing tropes learned from childhood/juvenile reading. I think it would be a very hard argument to make that there is any conscious racism there, perhaps not even unconscious.
It does get dicier when casting choices muddle these issues. As you said, if you choose a member of a historically oppressed population to now represent the oppressor, it gets confusing. The Watchmen example doesn’t trouble me much. In the context of the story, Dr M does what he does out of love and his lover chooses the body he currently inhabits. She says, “I’d be comfortable with this.” She’s given agency both as a woman and as person of color. On top of which, Dr M is a god who’s transcended human categories. His birth self wasn’t just white, he was a Jewish child fleeing Nazi tyranny. Now as Cal, he’s a black man in America. But he’s also so much more. Guess we’ll find out how that story ends this week.
Perhaps a better side discussion (in the superhero realm) could be had regarding Iron Fist. Casting a blonde white actor who couldn’t fight as a martial artist was one of the stumbling blocks for that series and led to charges of cultural appropriation. Marvel will get a chance to fix that with the Shang-Chi movie in a couple years.
I think it’s worth remembering that Pullman isn’t American. It’s entirely possible he is (or was at the time he wrote Iorek) unaware of the stereotypes regarding native Americans and alcohol — there are a variety of racist beliefs that are commonplace in the U.S. that those of us in the U.K. aren’t regularly exposed to; I wasn’t aware of this particular one until I was in my late twenties, and I find it entirely plausible that writing these books in the mid ’90s Pullman might not have come across it either.
Thanks for these articles and the discussion. I agree it’s important to bring up these tropes, point them out, and contemplate both their problematic nature and their inherent danger. #Sunspear brought up a serious complication with using oppressed peoples as invaders, torturers, slavers and other bad “actors,” used in the sense of their behaviors and not the individual’s performance of the role.
We are experiencing a cultural moment, a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” scenario. Minority performers must be given starring roles, including villainous ones, and we must have a plethora of diverse voices in directing, writing, producing and a host of other positions. Pullman’s first book of the trilogy was written in 1995, so it’s taken almost 25 years to get to a good adaption of the story. That’s not making excuses for Pullman, but change happens slowly. My I point is, in 1995 most writers would not have even noticed the casual racism in the book, and I confess I did not contemplate it too much, though some of the depictions and language did give me pause when I originally read the trilogy upon their publication.
I guess my point is that, these are important discussions, and acknowledging the existence of bad tropes should not lead us to dismiss creative works because of their flaws. That is not to say that many flawed works are great despite them–many flawed works are completely diminished when we look at them in the full light of our day. But thousands of years of human behavior is going to take a lot of digging to root out. I for one do not want to wait too much longer to see more and more ethnically diverse actors in all kinds of films and series (and books) before we get to the place where these kinds of offenses are neither casual nor praised.
@21 Jim – I hear your point about criticizing the casting for putting minorities in positions of “oppression” which are historically inaccurate, but I feel like this is an issue where you can’t have it both ways.
If you want a story to be historically “accurate” when dealing with a fantasy world that is European in nature, then you are excluding casting minorities from most roles. You have to accept that diversity in casting means shedding some of the original intent/context of the story. I would be more sympathetic to this issue if the people of color that are cast were uniformly bad, or poorly fleshed out, or anything else. But the Master of Jordan College isn’t necessarily defined as an oppressor. He’s a man of dignity and (presumably) learning, who is acting to preserve the independence of his college. Moreover, he’s a far better father figure and mentor to Lyra than anyone else we see when the story opens. Demanding that he be purely good, that his character act in ways that oppose oppression, is it’s own kind of bigotry, and is in some ways equally demeaning as the idea that minority characters be cast as subservient or evil or anything like that. A diversity in what kind of roles are being offered seems to be the main demand of those who wish to see more diverse casting in Hollywood, not a return to Blaxploitation type films. And why not? One can make the claim that putting a black man in a position of responsibility in vaguely-Victorian fantasy England is a historically inaccurate, and furthermore that that person wouldn’t be upholding the status quo, but again you’re then explicitly limiting the roles a person of color can play. And moreover, it smacks of the argument that people of color are somehow less likely to oppress, rather than acknowledging the historical truism that all societies feature oppression and it’s merely a quirk of history that white Europeans were able to impose their own form of it on much of the rest of the world. Which is not to excuse those actions, of course, but your line of argument seems to lean too much in the other direction. And within the context of His Dark Materials, the characters of color are given overwhelmingly positive-associated roles. Yes, Lord Boreal is a bad guy. The Master of Jordan College has mixed (and I think fascinating) motivations and characterizations. But John Faa is an outright heroic character. Will is one of the two protagonists (or should be, to the extent that Ruth Wilson is the show’s real star in my opinion), and his mother is shown as a damaged but praise-worthy woman with real underlying strength. And with the exception of Lord Boreal, the antagonists and villains are exclusively white. You speak of oppression – the Magisterium are the real oppressors, and it would be hard to describe them as anything but a white male organization. Ms Coulter and Lord Asriel are both white, and are both shown to be something short of honorable people.
And by the way, for what it’s worth, the Empire in Star Wars isn’t “racist”. Having a black officer in command, as far as I know of the universe, wouldn’t be considered unusual. The Empire is bigoted against other species; it’s a human-centric institution. You’re welcome to read into that what you want but it seems to me to be a stretch to call that a commentary of racial politics. And again, it comes to the issue of what your priorities are. More and more diverse casting choices for people of color? Or do you care more that minority actors get roles which show them solely in a positive light?