CONTENT WARNING: VERY RACIST CLAIMS, IN QUOTATION
This post is about the way race determines morality in AD&D 1e (1977-1979) and D&D 5e (2014), and the correspondence with scientific racism.
Racial Determinism in D&D
In the
AD&D 1e Dungeon Masters Guide (1979), morality seems to be determined by race. Subsequent publications, starting with Roger Moore's article
Half-orcs in
Dragon #62 (1982), repudiated this until D&D 5e brought back racial determinism, and made it more explicit than it had ever been before. However in 2020, WotC radically changed direction again.
AD&D 1e DMG:
Half-Orcs are boors. They are rude, crude, crass, and generally obnoxious. Because most are cowardly they tend to be bullies and cruel to the weak, but they will quickly knuckle under to the stronger. This does not mean that all half-orcs are horrid, only most of them... They will always seek to gain the upper hand and dominate those around them so as to be able to exercise their natural tendencies; half-orcs are greedy too. They can, of course, favor their human parent more than their orcish one.
This passage suggests that boorishness, rudeness, bullying and so forth are orcish "natural tendencies". When a half-orc does not have these personality traits it is because it favours its human parent.
Roger Moore, writing in
Dragon #62, offered an environmental explanation for orcish evil: "Orcs are like this because of the influence of their deities… and because of their own past. Sages have uncovered much evidence showing that orcs developed in regions generally hostile to life; survival was difficult." By "influence of their deities", Moore meant religious instruction — "This attitude is reinforced in their religious ceremonies."
In
AD&D 1e Unearthed Arcana (1985), not only could PC drow and duergar be of any alignment, it was indicated that even for NPCs the listed alignment was only a tendency (emphasis mine):
Drow are generally evil and chaotic in nature, though player characters are not required to be so.
While the majority of the members of this sub-race are of lawful evil alignment (with neutral tendencies), player characters who are gray dwarves may be of any alignment.
The
AD&D 2e Complete Book of Humanoids (1993) took a similar approach to
Unearthed Arcana but expanded it to include a greater number of monstrous races.
More precision was provided by the
D&D 3e Monster Manual (2000) with the introduction of the alignment modifying categories Always, Usually, and Often. But even a monster listed as, for example, Always Chaotic Evil, such as a demon, had the possibility of redemption: "It is possible for individuals to change alignment, but such individuals are either unique or one-in-a-million exceptions."
In D&D 5e the idea that alignment is unchangeable returned, and was made more explicit than it had been in AD&D 1e.
D&D 5e Player's Handbook (2014):
The evil deities who created other races, though, made those races to serve them. Those races have strong inborn tendencies that match the nature of their gods. Most orcs share the violent, savage nature of the orc god, Gruumsh and are thus inclined toward evil. Even if an orc chooses a good alignment, it struggles against its innate tendencies for its entire life. (Even half-orcs feel the lingering pull of the orc god's influence.)
D&D 5e Volo's Guide to Monsters (2016):
No matter how domesticated an orc might seem, its blood lust flows just beneath the surface. With its instinctive love of battle and its desire to prove its strength, an orc trying to live within the confines of civilization is faced with a difficult task.
In 2020 WotC radically changed its position with the announcement,
Diversity and Dungeons & Dragons: "Orcs and drow are just as morally and culturally complex as other peoples." In
Candlekeep Mysteries (2021), monster alignments were removed altogether.
Scientific Racism
Francisco Bethencourt,
Racisms (2013):
The 1840s and 1850s presented a turning point in which scientific research on the variety of human beings became much more assertive, ideologically aggressive, and politically engaged. I call this new development scientific racialism, as it presented a scientific effort to justify and reify divisions as well as hierarchies of races, supposed to be innate, immutable, and perpetual.
Josiah C Nott,
Types of Mankind (1854):
Whether an original diversity of races be admitted or not, the permanence of existing physical types will not be questioned by any Archaeologist or Naturalist of the present day. Nor, by such competent arbitrators, can the consequent permanence of moral and intellectual peculiarities of types be denied.
History affords no evidence that education, or any influence of civilization that may be brought to bear on races of inferior organization, can radically change their physical, nor, consequently, their moral, characters.
Lothrop Stoddard,
The Rising Tide of Color (1920):
Each race-type, formed ages ago, and "set" by millenniums of isolation and inbreeding, is a stubbornly persistent entity. Each type possesses a special set of characters: not merely the physical characters visible to the naked eye, but moral, intellectual, and spiritual characters as well. All these characters are transmitted substantially unchanged from generation to generation.
Robert Wald Sussman,
The Myth of Race (2014):
Glayde Whitney (1939– 2002)… was a geneticist at Florida State University… He claimed that just as "Pit Bulls raised by Cocker Spaniels grow up to be Pit Bulls," so "blacks will be blacks." No matter what their environmental circumstances, he believed, they display "evidence of maladjustment." No attempt to improve the cognitive skills or morals of African Americans would succeed.
