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I dislike this article. It’s a little old now, but there are several things blisteringly wrong with this idea at its heart.
Purely for example, if you read a book on dragonflies and take offence because you see racial similarities between whatever race a person is and dragonflies, that’s an issue with you, not the source. You are relying on your opinion on what the source says. Since opinion varies per person, you should not dictate policy based on opinion. It’s an insurmountable hill to cater to whatever opinions are since opinion will always change - it’s an unsound basis for any form of logic.
Let’s do a thought experiment:
If a trailer-dwelling white person in the USA reads about the Vistani, and takes offence because they also live in a trailer, sees that as a negative, and assumes the Vistani are a potshot at him, is he right to be offended and call for a ban?
If a nimble Canadian POC (which is also a terrible term as it literally applies to everyone on the planet) reads about Elves and assumes they’re talking about him because he also happens to know how to use a bow and is skinny with a lithe frame, is he correct in calling for a ban? What if he sees being nimble as a negative for some reason (because positive / negative characteristics are opinions and what people see as negative is not objective)? What if he sees it as being racist by saying the source is calling ALL Elves nimble and therefore good at sports? “But they stereotypically have a different skin colour!” I hear you saying. So do Orcs. That argument applies here and if you can’t square that circle, then the logic falls apart utterly.
Personal identification with aspects of characters in a source material are not cause for alteration. You are an individual; you are not a group. Grouping people into camps based on visible traits or histories is a disgusting habit.
Treat people as individuals and racism dies. Treat people as groups and call out the differences constantly and you’ll have people fencing themselves in while calling themselves inclusive.
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Treat people as individuals and racism dies?
Not sure about your reality but in this one I constantly treat people as individuals and racism is thriving.
Your response is reductive, intellectually bankrupt and reeks of privilege.
So with you treating others as individuals, are you stating that you frequently still have racist thoughts and ideas then? Or perhaps are those groups still expressing racist ideas treating the groups they oppose as a group and not individuals?
In my main response to the article, I was referring (I thought quite clearly) to those ideas in produced media and on a global scale such as D&D.
For a functional proof, see how media historically treated the Irish or the Polish. Racism against those two groups is mostly dead because it became essentially ignored. Although I’m sure you can find some minor modern examples, it’s more of a cultural oddity than a problem at this stage. Are you able to articulate why this occurred (as well as other examples through history) so that it tracks with what you’ve stated above?
Individualism is the only viable solution to racism that I have ever seen. Every other solution I have seen proposed doesn’t deal with the reality of the world, and instead relies on how we wish things were and discards other opinions as invalid, but keeps our opinion as true (which is deeply condescending). Instead, ALL opinion is invalid for requiring change. It’s the only viable way to find things objectively true and progress things in a logical fashion.
I am not proud of my background, it’s simply how I arrived here. It’s part of me, but does not in any way define me. I do not celebrate it, but I acknowledge it. If you think I should behave in any way because of a perceived group membership, you are wrong. I am an individual and so is everyone else.
We can not, however, force people to only think good things about the groups they may see us as belonging to. That is not an achievable or enforceable goal. The realistic way this horrible thinking dies is simply… removing any presupposition entirely.
It’s the same with many partisan political issues, and it’s the reason they won’t be solved until looked at with a utilitarian lens; again, opinion causes strife and knowledge defeats opinion.
Do you have a functional example of why you would be correct and why my way would be worse?
I get where you’re coming from on this, but I disagree completely. The communities touched on in this article have been discriminated against for centuries, and while I never picked up on it, they have a point. “Dark skin = evil” is not good, and although it’s a fantasy universe, we can’t ignore the parallels between that and our depressing reality.
Same goes for orcs and dreads, if not more - hell, orcs are so similar to a racist caricature of a black person it’s borderline wild. (See “we was kangz” and the rest of the nazi/channer playbook as an example.) I think stripping orcs of any connection to a group that has historically been considered dumber & stronger is objectively good.
I also personally think it’s quite distasteful to tell someone “this isn’t racist” if they’re offended by it, but that might be a different subject. I do think it’s worth noting, since I’m pretty sure this site is 99% white, that we don’t really have the relevant contextual experience to address subjects like this. (said by someone who’s skin is whiter than mayo)
Fortunately i haven’t played dnd in years, not since i got into good games, but that does mean i don’t remember much and could be getting this mixed up better things, so take it with a grain of salt.
Darkness (as in the lack of light) has always been associated with evil and the underdark exists to be a place with no light, and with that in mind the creatures of the underdark more closely resemble deep sea fish than just associating dark skin with evil. The duerger for instance were just as evil but with ashy pale skin instead (only thing we’re missing is a translucent race), the color of the drow alone is an incredible stretch.
For the orcs; they don’t act like black people? At all? They act more like vikings with maybe a bit of Genghis Khan thrown in, and dreads (a hair style that arouse independently all over the world) alone aren’t enough to make that connection.
People can be offended over literally anything, but that doesn’t mean literally anything is offensive. We don’t need to indulge someone if they are coming up with nonsense reasons to be upset.
I appreciate your reply, and I’ve responded to the potential racism elsewhere in this thread and don’t simply want to tread old ground, so I’ll go on a bit of a tangent about the comfort and lack of offence of the players.
From a psychological standpoint, humans are worse-off being comfortable all the time - doubly so in fantasy. There is no positive benefit. Immersion, confrontation, and understanding are more important (there are scads of journal articles about how it actually makes things worse mentally) than trying to enforce that everyone never offends anyone. Because offence is an opinion. Anyone can choose to be offended by quite literally anything, and if literally everything can potentially be offensive, then nothing is.
Think about the inverse though - if you can not be offended by anything, you’ve taken a massive amount of power away from racists. You’ve taken their largest weapon and completely disarmed them. If you do the opposite of the above however, you’ve handed them taboos they can instantly and easily use on you. You figuratively load their clip for them, point it at someone they hate, and ask them politely not to use it.
All WotC has succeeded in doing is stripping the lore from one of an infinite number of world backgrounds and given time-strapped people fewer easy bases for their own campaigns. Congrats to them I guess? They can be lazier in the name of understanding while accomplishing next to nothing positive, but hey, at least players won’t have to challenge themselves or their biases.
Are you able to articulate a functional benefit to the players from them removing scads of lore?
Hm. With all due respect, saying that racism can be defeated via not being offended by it is completely absurd. MLK was so goddamn offended he changed the country. (Then the FBI killed him for being so offended.) When George Floyd was choked out by a pig, America was offended, and we saw (surface level) change. When Eric Garner was choked out by a pig, way less people were offended, and we saw no change. Racist people aren’t racist due to an expected reaction - they’re racist due to inherent immoral beliefs.
While fantasy does not necessarily need to be nice and cozy, having someone deal with similar negative shit they deal with in real life while playing a game is not good. In the campaign I played, one of the players mentioned at the start that they didn’t want any discussion or actions related to sexual assault. Should that request be ignored, since they need to be put in a less comfortable position? Of course not. If you’re dealing with subtle racism throughout your life, you should be able to escape it when you’re engaging in fantasy, should one choose. At the very least, vaguely racist archetypes should not be the default. And while the article you linked makes the point that triggering material does not make PTSD worse, it says nothing towards the inverse - so if it doesn’t help, why make people feel shitty at all?
In my opinion, if there’s a player out there who was made uncomfortable due to the depiction of Orcs and/or Drow, who isn’t after these changes, it’s worth it. These changes make the game more inclusive, which is a net win, and given the staying power of DnD, these changes will not feel like a big deal in 50 years. (Plus, I’d have to imagine they’d rewrite the lore, not just throw it out, no?)
