Designing a race of cave-dwelling people

This came about when I was brainstorming story ideas for one of my jungle huntress heroines. In the scenario I have imagined, she accidentally crashes into an underground cavern world with creatures specially adapted for a subterranean existence. Among these are a unique race of human beings who you might call literally cave-people, or troglodytes. They live as hunter-gatherers scavenging off any other life they can find in the caves, and they have developed a strong distrust of surface-dwelling black people such as my heroine (the sentiment is actually mutual). Nonetheless she might need their help in climbing back to the surface world, assuming they even know where the exit is.

These cave-dwellers have physical adaptations such of these to survive in their cavern habitat:

* Loss of melanin pigmentation (they look like albino Africans)

* Larger noses for a better sense of smell

* Smaller eyes with weaker vision (trade-off for better smell)

* Lower metabolism so that they can go without food for longer periods of time

Now comes the matter of their society. Despite their foraging economy, the troglodytes don't live in nomadic bands but in small territorial clans that stick close to subterranean pools or rivers. Each clan has one special totem, always an animal which they revere and abstain from eating except in desperate circumstances. For example, one of these clans venerates the giant cave-serpent, which is not really a snake but a legless abelisaur (i.e. a carnivorous dinosaur related to Carnotaurus). I think my heroine might end up slaying a cave-serpent, which offends the clan she visits in the story and thus complicates her efforts to escape the caves.

Any thoughts or suggestions?

 

Oh, come on. One of the amazing qualities of the human imagination is the power to read all manner of subtexts into the most innocuous material. That's the main reason anything ever written is going to offend someone out there. Besides, white people in most industrialized countries are hardly the most oppressed demographic in the world.

Now, considering that albino people really are victims of discrimination and persecution in parts of Africa, it's possible that someone might see an anti-albino subtext in this idea. But then my troglodytes aren't proper albinos but their own race, and even if they do antagonize my heroine at times, they're not really a villainous race as such.