this post was submitted on 22 Feb 2024
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(ARTICLE) Racism In D&D (www.polygon.com)
submitted 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
 

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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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[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

Darkness (as in the lack of light) has always been associated with evil [...]

Darkness, yes, is typically associated with our instinctive fear of the night. Black, however, you may note, is not the night. The night is black. The colour black is associated with all kinds of things in all kinds of cultures around the world (oft-contradictory) and with many things in western cultures alone.

"Black has a wide range of associations. It can be linked with death, mourning, evil magic, and darkness, but it can also symbolize elegance, wealth, restraint, and power."

So black specifically (as opposed to being blinded by insufficient illumination) has not "always been associated with evil" ... even in western cultures. In other cultures it gets even more unexpected. Black is, among its many meanings, the colour of mourning in the west; white is in China. Black is the colour of authority or professionalism in China; it's literally the colour of heaven and of water. In the medieval west it's the colour of the Devil and Hell.