D&D General Old School DND talks if DND is racist.

[Scribe]

The intentions may not have been racist--it's possible to make arguments they weren't, which is what my second sentence was about--but it's nigh-impossible not to look at the drow--black-skinned and cursed to be evil--and not think of the Curse of Ham (as interpreted by the founders of the LDS).

LOL as someone raised Mormon, I didn't default to that ever in my life.

I just see a fantasy race of elves. /shrug

 

[prabe]

OK,

what are white supremacist idiots saying about black population?

That they are lazy, dumb, uneducated and other vile stuff that are too many to count(I have no interest in venturing to some obscure KKK sites to read more)

The Drow society in described completely OPPOSITE of the racist narrative towards black people. They are described as highly intelligent, highly trained, highly organized. They are super-elves.

If Drow are a caricature of someone, then they are caricature of National-Socialist party of Germany. They think about themselves as Drow are described. And they are evil to the core, as was the leadership of NSDAP

I think many--especially in the US--aren't going to see past "evil" and "black skin" and notice "Nazi Germany." Given the history, I don't know that I particularly blame them.

 

[billd91]

So what you consider obvious you immediately admit in the next sentence is incorrect. So you are seeing racism because your conditioned to see it by US culture, not because it is actually there.

The modern social context is pretty important here. An immediate visible differentiator between a good race and one that is evil is that the evil ones are black. It doesn't matter that it's about a particular race of elves or that it's drawn from some old mythical terminology, the whole parallel causes a lot of problems because real people are affected by the same judgments now in real life because of their skin color.

You'd have to be pretty clueless, maybe even willfully so, to not see that these days.

 

[prabe]

LOL as someone raised Mormon, I didn't default to that ever in my life.

Good for you.

I just see a fantasy race of elves. /shrug

That just happen to be making all sorts of allusions to black skin being evil, not to mention the fetishization of African-American women, which goes back further than TJ and Sally.

 

[Scribe]

Good for you.

That just happen to be making all sorts of allusions to black skin being evil, not to mention the fetishization of African-American women, which goes back further than TJ and Sally.

Maybe it's just an American thing? I don't make these assumptions and associations.

Drow are not onyx skinned because they are evil.

They are evil because they have an evil racial god.

If we wish to get into objectification of women in Fantasy art well that's been done, and it's a product of the timeframe in which it's foundations were established.

I see a fantasy race, and I don't associate it with reality.

 

[prabe]

I see a fantasy race, and I don't associate it with reality.

I didn't associate the "monstrous humanoids" with reality, at all, until I did; now I can't choose not to see it.

 

[Haffrung]

That‘s one infamous illustration that bears no resemblance to how drow are described in their original appearances in the G series, or the folklore that Gygax got his inspiration from.

 

[Scribe]

I didn't associate the "monstrous humanoids" with reality, at all, until I did; now I can't choose not to see it.

Thankfully I continue to not see reality when I look at Orcs.

 

[CleverNickName]

That's the problem; there is no agreement on what else is needed. Is removing the alignment tag from orcs enough? Do we need to remove the negative stereotypes like raiders or savages? There evil racial God? Thier primitive lifestyle? Do we remove all cultural elements? Do we remove all alignment? There is no general consensus and that is frustrating the conversation.

It's possible to write about something and even build on it and reference it in your own works, without appropriating it and without reinforcing negative stereotypes. It's easy, but it's different from the way we have all learned to do it. Learned, I might add, from older adventures and modules that were branded as examples to follow.

Like X1 - The Isle of Dread, which was presented as an example of how to do a wilderness adventure. It's a classic D&D adventure, with pirates and dinosaurs and ancient ruins, and it set the standard for jungle adventure settings. Unfortunately it also contained many unsavory racial stereotypes of real-world cultures, which also became part of that "standard D&D jungle adventure" setting.

So perhaps a good first step for us would be to acknowledge that the examples we have learned to follow were flawed, and have given us a flawed view of how the game should look. Then we can set about the task of un-learning those flaws.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

That‘s one infamous illustration that bears no resemblance to how drow are described in their original appearances in the G series, or the folklore that Gygax got his inspiration from.