I suggested kin at the begining of the thread but nobody paid attention to me... in the end it could be any word. I still don't get what deity you talk about.
Does kin reasonably connote things like nonorganic categories of sentient beings? If you feel it does, fine. "Kinship ties" almost always means relation by blood (or marriage), though, so I don't really know if it overcomes that particular conceptual hurdle. And while it's not dysphemistic now, does using a different word for "groups of individuals to whom we ascribe a common foundation of behavior and performance primarily because they share phenotypic traits" actually "solve" the problem, or does it just create a new euphemism for a concept some people find troublesome?
As for the deity, it's Corellon, as I've said a couple times now IIRC. Corellon is explicitly stated to be "seen as androgynous or hermaphroditic," and we're further told that "some elves are made in Corellon's image." This and other highly trans*-supportive statements can be found on page 121 of the PHB, in the "Sex" section of Ch. 4, Personality and Background.
I'm not sure I follow this, is it the ethnicity? or something in the way different ethnicities are forced to live? is there ethnocentrism in the testing methods? is it just that some other factor like poverty, occupational typecasting or something else that causes children to grow in less than ideal conditions? Reality isn't racist, people is.
It's an insanely thorny subject fraught with ad hominem, vindictiveness, and moral crusading--on
both sides. Some say the statistics demonstrate differences. Others question the bias of the test-makers or test-givers; some question whether different cultural values lead to behaviors which emphasize different cognitive methods that produce equivalent results but in a way unexpected by the tests; some question whether it is in fact an issue of race or rather of education (e.g. in the US, African-Americans struggle, financially, to get access to the same level of nutrition, education, and extracurricular activities, and because they are disproportionately poor, tend to face many stressors which are known to reduce academic performance for other groups facing similar circumstances). Yet further people say that questioning the statistics reveals the bias and dishonesty of the questioners, that they would never be satisfied with any method or system that could demonstrate differences at all. Etc., etc., ad nauseam, ad infinitum.
Will miss the old name though. Why not just KM as a compromise?
According to the principles set forth in the thread that might be just as bad. That is, if "KM" still stands for "Kamikaze Midget," it's just burying the lede, concealing the continuation of an insensitive term. How is this any different from the "orcs being considered a different 'race' from humans is racist, because orcs have been associated with so-called 'mongoloid' features in times past"? Or from "the presence of Lovecraftian horror elements contributing to D&D being racist in the here-and-now because Lovecraft's own work was often explicitly racist"?
Different countries have different sensibilities, and the stuff isn't uniform even within a single country. In my country we don't consider ourselves racists, yet we do things that by proxy end up looking as if we were.
I find that these topics are often
extremely difficult to detect in your own in-group. I live in one of the most liberal cities in the United States, and even here there are still distinct undercurrents of racism--it just takes a different, and often quieter, form, a form that resists simple analysis like "check for terms or phrases which are offensive or unnerving." Things aren't much different in the Seattle area, only a couple hundred miles north of here--where WotC itself is headquartered.
Edit: It has occurred to me that I confused you with a different poster, and thus don't actually know that you are from Japan or speaking about Japan. The following stuff was written with that assumption, which could be wrong. I'm not removing it completely because it demonstrates one example of how a nation can politically and socially commit to ideas that sound egalitarian, but still create a situation and system where things very much are
not egalitarian. Should you actually be from Japan, Moonsong, then this would pretty obviously still apply--I just shouldn't have assumed that you
are without further information.
[sblock]That said...well, at least for those I've spoken to on the subject (including a few self-admitted Japanophiles and some people actually
from Japan), the general problem for the Japanese as a whole isn't "racism"
per se though it is very
like racism. The more common issue is
xenophobia. Even anime picks up on a decent amount of this; it's not uncommon to have a character who is only half-Japanese, possibly raised in the home country of their other parent. Even when said character is rich, powerful, articulate, well-read, and all the other characteristics that should endear them to Japanese society in general, they may be stigmatized because they're outsiders, and this can easily be a source of drama . This does not mean
all people from Japan are xenophobic, nor that those who behave xenophobically are even necessarily aware that they do. Just that xenophobic behavior is alarmingly common in Japan. (Though, to be fair? Xenophobic behavior from
US tourists is all-too-common as well.) Part of the problem lies in a nominally egalitarian-sounding argument often presented by Japanese society and the Japanese government in particular--the idea that Japan is a nation of
one, unified ethnic identity ("one race, one civilization, one language and one culture," according to former-PM and current Deputy PM Tarō Asō), when in fact it is a multi-ethnic and multi-cultural society. The Ainu peoples, for example, demonstrate how the nation of Japan, if it embraces the whole archipelago of over
six thousand inhabited islands, cannot be "one race" and "one culture."[/sblock]
I find wizards the very embodiment of classism... that's why I prefer sorcerers, the idea of sorcerers is more democratic and less classist.
And yet if we exclude Wizards, doesn't that seem to say that a medieval society cannot possess learned scholars? Or at least that the only learned scholars are priests? After all, the methodical study of magic that Wizards represent is clearly an analogue to the methodical study of natural philosophy, or "science" as we would call it today.
I give the same example from above, checking the 1e PHB, all I see is people, cartoon people in black and white lineart doesn't tell me about a particular ethnicity, I just see a blank slate. Browsing Pathfinder and the 5e PHB makes me feel more excluded ethnically than good old AD&D PHB. I just can't find any light-skinned member of my ethnic group that is traditionally depicted as brown skinned, all light-skinned people in there are caucasian on purpose, how is that not exclusionary? From my cultural point of view D&D has gotten more and more racist with every edition! <true, yet I don't make a big fuss>
I would say that your view is...rather unusual, shall we say. Though it might, in point of fact, be influenced by your culture! That is, I know a great many people in the United States who look at characters in anime and manga and ask, "Why are these characters all being called Japanese? They look white to me...blonde or even
red hair, blue or green or even purple eyes, fair skin..." Even when you ignore works that feature justifiably strange hair or eye colors (e.g. people with 'magical' ancestry or whatever), there are still a great many depictions which Japanese readers are perfectly comfortable considering as "clearly Japanese," while people from the States are perfectly comfortable considering "clearly Caucasian." Thus, the standards by which you judge a stylized depiction of a human, and their ethnicity, may be very different from those used in other countries.
The same would happen if they removed the word race from the book. So remove the word race in order to remove the implication of ethnic bigotry. Wait so D&D races are stand ins for real life ethnic groups! and mine isn't being represented! HOw barbaric conflating skin color with ethnicity!
Yeah even though I'm no big proponent of changing the term, I sincerely doubt this would be the reaction of most readers, at least here in the United States.