Everything has its problems, this story is no different.
Its just a "Wrong place wrong time" type of thing
Stephen - you miss my point. The existence of underclasses on Earth does not disprove my argument about a near future near-space based human society.
Racism is a belief or doctrine that inherent differences among the various human racial groups determine cultural or individual achievement, usually involving the idea that one's own race is superior and has the right to dominate others or that a particular racial group is inferior to the others.
Thus, Belter extremists are certainly racist about Earth and Mars living humans. Further exemplified and illustrated by the Belter 'grievance' that they can't have any benefit from the new planets as they have evolved to live in low or zero gravity. Marcos expresses much that is a racist assumption.
It's not racist. It's tribalist. All sorts of "-isms" are just different flavors of tribalism, and tribalism has been an inherent part of humanity for a long time, probably since before there were even proper humans as it's even observed behavior in non-human animals. We're really good at ordering things according to what we perceive (or according to our reality, since perception = reality). It's simple enough to classify people into two primary groups based on whatever real or imagined, important or unimportant criteria we want: "us" and "them". Once divided as such, it's pretty easy to paint "them" as the enemy of "us" and responsible for all the problems that "us" face. Us and them could be black and white, Republican and Democrat, rich and poor, Catholic and Protestant, North and South, capitalist and communist, penis and vagina, Muslim and Jew, innie and outtie, Star Trek and Star Wars, Belter and Inner, or any number of other largely-arbitrary distinctions that ignore what we have in common as H. sapiens. All the "progress" you cite as evidence of how civil and evolved we've become and how unlikely it is that there would be tensions on an existentially-threatening scale in a universe like The Expanse is pretty tenuous. Genocide, slavery, racism, every negative mindset and action we've ever devised, all of it's still going on today. Many of us just don't see things like the ongoing genocide and slavery perpetrated by the Chinese government, or any number of other current atrocities going on around the world, firsthand. If it doesn't affect our tribe and we don't have to see it in-person, it's generally a non-issue, and 99% of the population of The Expanse's Sol system never see the Belt outside of news. How many people today refuse to use products like smartphones or clothes that are manufactured by slave and/or child labor with materials mined/harvested by slave and/or child labor? And you think people are going to give a damn about the Belters stuck living in the 24th century equivalent of the "company town" millions of miles further away from them than the Malaysian girl who hemmed the seams of your T-shirt is from you, as long as the materials those Belters procure and the products they manufacture keep rolling in nice and cheap? The Inners treated Belters like crap for logical reasons; the Belters have a resulting enmity toward Inners for logical reasons. Everybody can behave nice and logically, and we'll logically blow ourselves up as a result, because logical, rational action doesn't necessarily lead to the best outcome. As long as scarcity is the absolute economic tyrant, i.e. the foreseeable future for a very long time, game theory dictates that rational people will behave adversarially. We find those we feel are most like us and that we can trust not to behave as adversaries towards us, including them into our tribe of "us", and turn that adversarial behavior outward, toward our enemies "them". One of the most realistic aspects of this whole damn story is that humans are wildly tribal POSes, rather than some utopian, kumbayah-ing drum circle of hippies. You want to see post-scarcity utopia (done poorly, I might add, given the ignored implications of post-scarcity), Star Trek is what you want. You want to see something that acknowledges the reality of human psychology, this is it.
Well, it's needed because then who would attend as our devices showed us the story? Someone needs to be the Antagonist, someone a Protagonist, or it would be a completely wasted idea.
So part of this discussion is that terminology is important, so don't use racism when it isn't correct to identify the form of discrimination. While there might be racism portrayed in The Expanse, the discrimination of Inners vs Mars vs Belters is not racism.
One of the best things about the series is that it isn't the idealised vision of humanity you see in something like Star Trek and far more realistic and likely.
Essentially we get into space and make great steps forward but keep doing the same stupid things.
Earth is prosperous enough to give everyone a basic income but inequality is so great that you have a massively stratified and unequal society, Mars is a former colony which has broken free and many can only see war as a way of life, the Belt has been oppressed and controlled for it's mineral wealth to the point where hatred and large scale massacre is seen as the only way out.
Everyone who comes across the protomolecule has one idea - turn it into a weapon.
It sounds about right to me.
MerCorp said it best, it's tribalism. As long as there are different religions, different political factions, different beliefs, or even different countries/states/neighborhoods, there will always be tribalism.
The moment we set out to colonize different planets/moons/systems there will quickly be lines drawn between "us" and "them" and colonize seeking independence. There will be those who have resources and those who want/need the resources of others, and the desire to barter when it's feasible or "liberate" those resources when it's not feasible, aka war. And the people with the most guns will always conquer the people who have fewer guns, either because of arrogance or fear of being conquered themselves.
Basically true, but a bit simplistic. The people with the most guns won't always conquer... they just might kill more people... often their own.
What Fred Johnson once said "In order to survive you must pick a side" or something like that. You can't get out without doing something wrong, the Sol system is a much darker place than you think it is.
What do you think?