Alright, so let's get on to the second half here.
I want to talk about media, influence, and racism. First off, I think it's indisputable that media and pop culture influence attitude. How deeply it can cause someone to move or what certain things might influence can be debated, but the idea that it can shape perceptions is basically the backbone of how we influence anything: advertising, propaganda, etc... these things are based on the idea that the media you consume will influence what you think and how you think about it. Watch some of the propaganda films like
Jud Süß or
Der Hitlerjunge Quex, and you can see how these things would shape people's belief.
A more direct example to TTRPGs would be the one
@Minigiant and
@Scribe talked about with the GW Open Statement. GW's setting has elements that aren't
necessarily problematic on their own, but can easily be taken that way. So they didn't address it, and eventually some in the community ran with the xenophobia of the Imperium, and basically allowed their property to become associated with a bunch of racist, alt-right naughty word. And that's not all on them, but it shows how media can direct things: you have something problematic, and the wrong people come to it, use it, help make it into something that it isn't meant to be, and influence others who might be interested. That's a much more direct version of what we are talking about.
With D&D, there are also some more direct versions. The Vistani are the obvious one, where they are based on bad stereotypes based on the Romani, and it's perhaps even worse given that they are meant to look helpful and nice but are secretly working for the overarching bad guy of the scenario. It feeds into classic cultural stereotypes of distrust towards the people, and while it perhaps wasn't
meant to be racist, we all understand it as such at this time.
The problem is the stuff that is less about blunt depictions and more about continuing bad, ill-thought-out ideas or things that fuel greater ideas that feed into systemic racism. With Orcs, there's a lot of unspoken coding going on when we are describing a "tribal, barbaric, untamable people" who are less intelligent than us. That matches a lot of verbiage used when talking about colonized peoples, like Native Americans, Mesoamericans, and Sub-Saharan Africans. It is not as direct, but it's there, and it's easy for people to fill in the blanks when they've been taught to for years through media portrayals and pop culture.
Further, you have the mechanics. Having a -2 to intelligence is nothing on its own, but we also have an entire racial movement based around IQ-trutherism and
The Bell Curve that asserts that African-Americans are simply not as smart as other people. Again, this is not the creators of D&D trying to be racist, but rather what they've made being looked at in the greater context of society: having a brutal, tribal people who are objectively dumber on the whole than other races suddenly looks way more problematic even if it wasn't intended (and that's without going into the implications of Half-Orcs and their relationship with rape, yeesh). This is what people are talking about when talk about "biological essentialism".
How do you fix it? Well, we need to take into account the society we are in rather than just blindly holding on to what we had. Can you fix Orcs? Sure. I mean, taking away the Intelligence modifier is a start, but starting to show Orcs are more complicated than barbaric raiders is better. Moving away from "
Race of Hats" is a solid way of avoiding these pitfalls while also making the settings more interesting. These things also carry for other changes, like the Vistani or D&D missteps in Chult and other stuff. We're long past due at looking at this stuff, and people should look at this as an opportunity to have more interesting and complex takes on the fantasty classics as the standard and not the exception.
