A Nonracial Imagination: How House of the Dragon Reflects Africa’s Civilizational Ethos

In an era when most film and television continue to reflect the racial categories, supremacist ideologies, and statist logic of the Western world, House of the Dragon, the HBO show that prequels Game of Thrones, offers a surprising and thought-provoking departure from the racialized orthodoxy. A nonracial fictional world where power, conflict, identity, and society unfold without reference to race.

This creative choice, while subtle, is significant. It aligns in unexpected ways with Africonomics and the African worldview. A foundational principle of the Africonomics framework is the philosophical position that humankind is one and distinctly human, not advanced animals in a perpetual, rivalrous struggle for survival and domination—as posited by Western materialist, Darwinian theories.

The Dominance of Supremacist Narratives in Western Media

Western media is a sophisticated apparatus of cultural hegemony, where racism and supremacist ideology are woven into the very fabric of mainstream storytelling. This pervasive influence manifests through multiple forms of representation and narrative construction that collectively reinforce hierarchical worldviews and entrench Western ideologies.

This can be seen in the erasure of African civilizations, the portrayal of non-Western cultures as primitive, violent, or chaotic, and the ongoing centering of whiteness as the universal norm. Most media subtly perpetuate the myth of Western racial, intellectual, and civilizational superiority, despite the West’s historical and contemporary role as a primary source of systemic corruption, oppression, exploitation, and conflict.

Mainstream Western media has long been a vehicle for cultural imperialism and racial ideology. This narrative architecture operates through deliberate historical erasure—the advanced metallurgy of ancient Nubia disappears from the screen, the sophisticated governance systems of pre-colonial Africa are ignored, and the rich intellectual traditions of Islamic civilization are reduced to orientalist stereotypes. From the glorification of aggression and colonial conquests to the erasure or vilification of non-Western cultures, cinema and television have normalized Western supremacy and presented the world through a Darwinian, conflict-driven lens.

When racial diversity is depicted, it is often framed in a tokenistic or conflict-oriented way: characters of color typically appear as victims of systemic injustice, saviors of oppressed groups, or symbols of liberal tolerance. Rarely do we encounter narratives where race is irrelevant, where individuals engage with one another not as racial constructs, but as moral agents navigating questions of wealth, power, ethics, and humanity.

Most revealing is mainstream media’s apparent inability to envision societies where racial categories hold no social significance. This lack of nonracial imagination reflects ideological constraints within Western cultural production rooted in entrenched racism, where stories must ultimately conform to frameworks that preserve existing racial hierarchies, even while appearing to critique them.

Cultural Imperialism Through Entertainment

The Western media ecosystem functions as a vehicle for cultural imperialism, normalizing Western perspectives, social structures, and ways of understanding human relations as universal truths. Colonial conquest is romanticized as adventure and progress, while resistance to Western domination is portrayed as fanaticism or backward traditionalism. The cumulative effect is a global cultural landscape where Western perspectives are treated as neutral and objective while all other worldviews are marked as particular, biased, or ideological.

The perpetuation of these narratives through entertainment media is one of the most effective forms of indoctrination and soft power, shaping global consciousness about what constitutes civilization, progress, and human possibility itself. Understanding these dynamics is essential for anyone seeking to critically engage with contemporary media or imagine alternative forms of cultural representation, as Western media play a crucial role in sustaining the current Western global order based on racial hierarchy, statism, and domination through coercion and deception.

A Refreshingly Nonracial World

This is where House of the Dragon stands out. Despite being produced within a Western media ecosystem and entertainment empire, the show resists racial categorization as a driving force in its world-building. It presents a nonracial world where power, lineage, identity, and conflict are shaped by family dynamics, political interests, and personal choices, not skin color. Characters of different complexions, including Black Targaryens, occupy positions of nobility, power, and central narrative importance without racial commentary or social tension related to their appearance.

In this sense, House of the Dragon is a refreshingly post-racial or nonracial imagination, which contrasts with the typically racialized and supremacist logic of Western media narratives. In Westeros, dynastic legitimacy is derived from bloodlines and marriage alliances, not phenotypic characteristics. Political loyalty is earned through demonstrated competence and strategic value, not ethnic solidarity. Personal ambition drives character motivation, not group identity or racial grievance. Most crucially, moral failures stem from choices about honor, duty, and power—universal human struggles that transcend any particular cultural or racial framework.

This nonracial imagination constitutes more than mere casting diversity or progressive representation. It is a fundamental philosophical break from the race-based social construction that underpins Western modernity. Rather than simply including characters of color within existing racial hierarchies—the typical approach of the media—House of the Dragon imagines a world where such hierarchies never existed.

This imaginative framework aligns with core principles found in African philosophical traditions, particularly those underlined in Africonomics, which recognizes that human dignity precedes all imposed social categories. The show’s fictional society operates according to power struggles revolving around dynastic legitimacy, political loyalty, personal ambition, and moral failure rather than the constructed hierarchies of race, class, or centralized ethnic dominance that characterize both historical and contemporary Western social organization.

Whereas most media subtly embeds the Western worldview—Darwinian, racialized, and statist—House of the Dragon, in this particular respect, offers an imaginative space that does not normalize racial hierarchy and supremacy. This is a small but meaningful cultural shift toward storytelling that honors the full humanity of all characters while imagining social possibilities beyond the constraints of Western racial ideology. In a media landscape dominated by narratives that normalize supremacist thinking, such imagination becomes a form of resistance and a glimpse of alternative possibilities for human relations and meaning-making.

The existence of such a narrative within mainstream Western entertainment suggests the possibility of post-racial storytelling that neither ignores diversity nor reduces characters to racial archetypes. This approach offers a template for media that celebrates human complexity while refusing to perpetuate the supremacist logic embedded in contemporary cultural production and race-based social construction. While the show certainly contains violence and political conflict, these elements arise from individual choices and institutional failures rather than inevitable racial or ethnic antagonisms.

In this sense, the show aligns with the civilizational principles of Africonomics and the African moral worldview.

Africonomics and the Principle of Nonracial Human Dignity

From an Africonomics perspective, House of the Dragon illustrates how societies can be organized around moral principles and peaceful coexistence, instead of racial hierarchy and hegemony. This aligns with a key civilizational principle of Africonomics: human dignity precedes all imposed racial categories, and societies should be ordered by voluntary relations, ethical institutional design, and peaceful coexistence, rather than constructed hierarchies based on race, class, or centralized coercion.

Central to the Africonomics framework is a fundamental rejection of ideologies that rank, divide, or dominate human beings through artificial constructs—whether racial, class-based, or imposed through force and fraud. This philosophical position asserts that just, civilized, and prosperous societies must be grounded in three interconnected principles:

• Natural-Moral Law: Societies founded on truth, justice, and non-aggression as foundational, objective ethical standards rather than coercive domination or exploitative hierarchies.
• Natural Rights: Recognition of inherent human rights to life, liberty, and the ownership of self and justly acquired property—rights that exist independent of any constructed categorization or state authorization.
• Human-centered Social Structures: Economic and social arrangements that affirm human agency, voluntary relations, and moral responsibility as the basis for civilized society.

From the Africonomics perspective, racial hierarchy is not an inherent feature of human society; rather, it is an artificial construct developed in the West to justify dehumanization, domination, exploitation, and centralized control. In contrast, traditional African societies, while culturally diverse, primarily organized themselves around kinship, language, land-based communities, and shared moral codes, rather than through racial hierarchies, aggression, and deception. These organizational principles fostered social cohesion while maintaining space for individual agency and expression.

House of the Dragon reflects this African civilizational principle by creating a world where character, conscience, and conduct determine social position, not ethnic traits. The show’s Westeros operates according to what might be recognized as a fundamentally African organizational logic: power derives from demonstrated moral authority, political legitimacy emerges through ethical leadership, and social conflicts arise from competing values or priorities rather than institutionalized ethnic antagonism.

This approach contrasts sharply with the prevailing Western paradigm—a Darwinian worldview characterized by racial hierarchy, aggression, and zero-sum thinking about human relations. Where Western ideological frameworks tend toward conflict-based models of social organization, African philosophical traditions emphasize humanity’s fundamental unity, dignity, and capacity for peaceful, civilized coexistence.

The Power of Narrative in Civilizational Progress

This matters because storytelling shapes human relations and civilization.

The worlds we imagine influence the systems we build. If the media continues to normalize racial division, supremacist hierarchies, and statist control, audiences, especially young ones, internalize those narratives as natural and inevitable. But if fiction can present a world where race is neither weaponized nor central—a world grounded in the distinctly human and principled framework of Africonomics—it opens the door to rehumanizing human nature, relations, and institutions. It creates space to imagine, and ultimately build, societies that are morally ordered, not racially constructed and coercively managed.

The convergence between House of the Dragon’s fictional world and Africonomics principles suggests possibilities for a post-racial socioeconomic order that transcends both Western supremacist ideologies and reactive identity politics. By demonstrating how societies might function when organized based on moral principles rather than constructed hierarchies, Africonomics and the show point toward alternative frameworks for structuring human relations.

The African worldview’s principle of humanity’s fundamental oneness offers a distinctly humanistic approach to social organization that fosters structural justice and peaceful coexistence both within and among nations. This philosophical foundation provides an avenue for building genuinely civilized societies that respect human dignity while fostering conditions for sustainable prosperity and collaborative flourishing.

In this light, media representations that successfully transcend racial hierarchy and domination—such as House of the Dragon—become more than entertainment; they offer imaginative exercises in post-racial possibility that align with philosophical traditions emphasizing human unity, moral agency, and peaceful relations as the foundations of a civilized society.

Conclusion

Representation matters but it is not enough to address the ideological crisis within Western cultural production. What Africa and the world need are not more characters of color placed within dehumanizing and destructive Western frameworks. What is required are narratives that transcend pseudoscientific racial constructs entirely, that reject supremacist logic, racial programming, and that affirm the inherent dignity of human beings as moral equals capable of peaceful coexistence. It is essential to break away from Western narratives that continue to portray humans as advanced animals locked in perpetual, rivalrous struggle for survival and domination.

House of the Dragon, perhaps unintentionally, has offered a glimpse of that possibility. A nonracial world. A story where skin color is not the basis of identity, wealth, power, or oppression. A subtle yet powerful departure from the dominant model of racial hierarchy. While Africonomics and the African worldview do not endorse all aspects of the show’s content, its successful construction of a fundamentally nonracial narrative world within an entertainment system saturated with supremacist ideologies deserves recognition. It is refreshing and constructive.

This cultural moment reflects a much larger civilizational choice confronting humanity. The fundamental question goes beyond entertainment and media representation to rethink the foundations of social organization and human relations. Will we continue structuring societies based on racial categorization, hierarchical domination, and manufactured division—perpetuating violent systems, injustice, and oppression? Or will we reclaim and actualize the moral vision of human dignity, liberty, and productive peace—grounding human relations in our shared humanity and morality?

Africonomics provides the philosophical foundation for choosing the latter path, offering a principled approach to human relations that moves beyond utilitarian and animalistic frameworks to foster structural justice, human flourishing, and a civilized world grounded in natural-moral law. This transformation requires not better representation within existing frameworks, but fundamental reimagining of the stories we tell about human nature, social organization, and our capacity for collaborative flourishing.