The problem with Evil races is not what you think

[pemerton]

The use of primitive culture has been used from the nineteenth century to the present day to justify colonial appropriations. It is inherently judgmental and used to assert the intellectual superiority of the West (in which technological advancement was associated with the concept of "Civilization"). It treats contemporary people as if they were in the "stone age," and thus relics of a different era, minimizing their knowledges and world views. Until the mid 20th century (at best), the "primitivism" of groups was thought to be biologically determined.

It's that last sentence in particular that I think is important.

As I've tried to set out in a few recent posts in this thread, there are good theoretical frameworks available for thinking about processes of the diffusion of technology. These weren't available to the "scientific" racists - they emerge out of the sociology that is developed/invented in the second half of the nineteenth century and the early part of the twentieth century; which is to say that they emerge during the heyday of "scientific" racism.

Once we have these theories available, we can see that biological explanations are (i) silly and (ii) themselves the expression of the sorts of ideological processes that good sociology explains.

And we can also see that to the extent that FRPGing clings to these sorts of biological explanations - as it clearly does, per the discussions in this thread and especially @Doug McCrae's exegetical work - it is rejecting realism in favour of racist tropes.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

The only silly thing here is to argue that all toolkits are equal. They simply are not. A simple (primitive) toolkit for the Amazonas simply far behind the toolkit of developed nation. Just look at for example medicine, including treating diseases prevalent in the Amazonas. Even the "foreign but more advanced" toolkit would be better suited for living in the Amazonas as the one of the natives themselves, simply because it gives you more tools to alter the environment.

The reason why the traditional land management in the Sahel are more suited to the region is because they do not have the tools in their kit to implement all the suggestions. If they had access to equipment like the western world has then their traditional form of land management would be clearly inferior.

No, they are superior BECAUSE THEY HAVE A TECHNOLOGY (knowledge, tools, and procedures) which the supposedly 'more advanced' western 'development experts' didn't have. Nor did they bother to even ask about it, because, like you, they ASSUMED they were 'more advanced' and had nothing to learn from the locals. They learned the hard way through FAILURE that they were wrong!

Same with the Masai, British ranchers kicked them off a lot of the range, now the British have given up ranching because they cannot manage the range effectively, but the Masai are still there, and now they're reclaiming the rest of their land. I saw it, I was there.

What you are displaying here is simply cultural chauvinism and an arrogant lack of appreciation for what you don't understand and automatically assume is inferior. This is largely because of an ideology which was developed in Europe in the 16th through 19th Century in order to justify exploiting other people, colonialism, slavery, etc. It is worth stepping away from and looking at objectively.

No. Iron and especially steel tools and weapons are more advanced than bone and stone weapons, not only because they are more effective but also they require much more knowledge to craft. The same way a laser edged tungsten steel blade would be more advanced than a hand forged steel sword.
The idea that everything is equal is simply not true.

Steel can be a better material. If you had the choice of either or both, that would be nice. However, what is a steel blade going to do in the rainforest? Besides rust? You better bring something with you to sharpen it. See what I mean? Nor are we talking about 'equal', we're talking about more or less primitive. I have said a dozen times that primitive vs advanced and more or less effective are two different measures. It may be that you simply won't get the most effective item in every place. That doesn't mean the local culture is unsophisticated. It simply means that they operate under different constraints.

 

[transmission89]

I honestly think far too many people are reading way to much into way too many elements of various fantasy settings.

Also, things like "Since animal comparisons were used to demean ethnicities" is being used to falsely accuse anthropomorphic and/or uplift animals of being racist content about those ethnicities... Overgeneralization. Looking for offense by misattribution of causality. Anthropomorphs in fantasy are usually not stand-ins for some historic group; they're usually there specifically to NOT be some other ethicity.

Just because Tolkien's Orcs are evil and deformed Mongols, that doesn't mean that those in other works, even those which draw heavily from Tolkien, are aware of Tolkien's inspiration/source, let alone share it. Fundamentally, the trope of orcs isn't related to Mongols anymore. It's outgrown the origin. It's become a species, not just a culture, outside of Tolkien's works and the games directly derived from them.

These are the logical continuations of the initial arguing points . If you accept the argument that Orcs have problems, this is the absurdity you open the door to. Then we have the “trope problems” of barbarians as a class (certainly far more problematic from a rw perspective than fantasy creatures as it actually has rw connotations of views of human cultures- yet strangely is never brought up) , sexist tropes of witches and hags, feudalism which defines people’s places in “the natural order” etc. And again, his Orcs are categorically not Mongols. It was a racially loaded physically descriptive simile. I already discussed this in post #53, so please, let’s not have that quote thrown up yet again…

And you’re right, even were the origins the most problematic that ever were, the use in game has outgrown them (the genetic fallacy) I was also talking about.
But alas, given the lengths that some have gone to draw these tenuous connections between an apparently ready well of racist literature, as well as descriptive othering (which has been used as a literary device for fantastical monsters before being applied by racists to different ethnic groups, to dehumanise them and make them seem like fantastical monsters *) you’ll reach the same conclusion I have that it’s akin to shouting in the wind with this dogma. Though take comfort, as I have, in the fact it’s only really a small minority of posters (let alone playing population) that reach this far.

As for POC gamer’s work. Meh. He makes the case against himself in his two part complaint about feeling hard done by. He outlines in part 1 how wotc operates with outside writers, then complains how they do just that. His writing of his initial adventure was so far beyond the scope of what had been asked, and tried to bring in wide reaching lore changes to the forgotten realms with it. You bet that was going to be cut. I believe also the word primitive used in that adventure was only used to refer to the state of the structures in a Grippli faction hideaway camp (having fled from the problems detailed in the adventure) rather than to the grippli themselves (though I’m happy to be corrected on this as I’ve not looked too carefully at the adventure).

*people of colour have not been the sole recipients of this. The Roman view of Celts for example, or the Anglo Saxon view of Viking raiders upon their shores etc. Nor have people of colour been free of using this, Japanese views on Koreans and Chinese prior to WW2 etc. Pretty much all humanity has been awful to one another throughout history. Which is why monsters are great, so specific links to human groups are avoided in classic tales of good vs evil, or, if you want to go the other way, challenging perceptions of what it means to be humans when we see aspects of all of us reflected back to us. They’re flexible like that.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

I honestly think far too many people are reading way to much into way too many elements of various fantasy settings.

Also, things like "Since animal comparisons were used to demean ethnicities" is being used to falsely accuse anthropomorphic and/or uplift animals of being racist content about those ethnicities... Overgeneralization. Looking for offense by misattribution of causality. Anthropomorphs in fantasy are usually not stand-ins for some historic group; they're usually there specifically to NOT be some other ethicity.

Just because Tolkien's Orcs are evil and deformed Mongols, that doesn't mean that those in other works, even those which draw heavily from Tolkien, are aware of Tolkien's inspiration/source, let alone share it. Fundamentally, the trope of orcs isn't related to Mongols anymore. It's outgrown the origin. It's become a species, not just a culture, outside of Tolkien's works and the games directly derived from them.

Once someone has been made aware that images, terminology, etc. have their origins in bigotry, they can no longer claim clean hands if they continue to use them. By doing so, you give the bigotry a life preserver. Imagine if, for some reason, instead of using RW racist slurs in their descriptions of certain species, game designers lived by the adage “a picture is worth a thousand words“, and used slightly altered images of Mammy, Sambo, Mandingo and The Black Brute in monster stat blocks.

Simply using the negative stereotypes in written form sans actual imagery is no less reprehensible, just easier to spin.

I have done this myself with various slurs that I learned because they were in common usage in my social circles, and I had no idea as to their nature. Once I knew better, I stopped. I excised those phrases and slurs from my speech and writing.

Honestly, it’s not a difficult thing to be so minimally respectful of others.

 

[Doug McCrae]

Also, things like "Since animal comparisons were used to demean ethnicities" is being used to falsely accuse anthropomorphic and/or uplift animals of being racist content about those ethnicities... Overgeneralization. Looking for offense by misattribution of causality. Anthropomorphs in fantasy are usually not stand-ins for some historic group; they're usually there specifically to NOT be some other ethicity.

I should stress that I'm not saying all use of beings with both human and animal features in fiction is racist. The purpose of the quotations from Katie Hopkins et al. in post #245 upthread was to demonstrate that such usage can be racist. It's part of a counter-argument to the potential objection that the use of animal people in fiction can't be racist because they are more like animals than people.

Post #32 upthread summarises my full argument and the posts linked from #32 develop it and provide evidence.

 

[John Dallman]

And we can also see that to the extent that FRPGing clings to these sorts of biological explanations - as it clearly does, per the discussions in this thread and especially @Doug McCrae's exegetical work - it is rejecting realism in favour of racist tropes.

Would you settle for "quite a lot of it does?" Because I, and several others who started FRPing early on, found a different kind of setting emerged from the wide variety of sapient species and non-sapient monsters that D&D presents, if you try to rationalise it at all.

It's completely implausible that they all evolved in the same world. That can be tossed out to start with. So there needs to be a different explanation. Those fall into two families:

Creation: somebody deliberately created all these species. The best-developed version of this that I've seen has the primal inhabitants of the world creating species for particular tasks. Dwarves were created to make material things, elves to make art, trolls that can eat anything as garbage disposal units, and so on. Gnomes were a variety of dwarf that tasted nicer to the dragons who made these species; giants were for earthmoving or war and humans and orcs both seem to have been made as fast-breeding species suitable for war, by different factions that had slightly different ideas about ideal soldiers. Obviously, this kind of large idea influences just about everything in the setting, and makes it seem weird to present-day gamers. That's OK, because the chap who created it did so long before TSR published any settings, and was never interested in running those worlds.

Refugees: by some means or other, groups of people have been able to travel between the many, many worlds of the multiverse. The setting of the game is a world where many different groups have arrived. They have influenced each other, of course, but all of them have wanted to maintain their own cultures. This is my preferred method, and it discards the concept of "intrinsically evil races" completely. Different species have different cultures, but they're all workable cultures, which allow for a functioning society. They may seem strange, crude, over-refined, violent, or over-repressive to different species, but they can all work, and adapt to having contact with other societies. I've seen a half-orc paladin played, and yes, he was a genuine paladin, although quite a few of the people he met didn't believe it at first. Again, this approach is completely incompatible with many published settings, and this is just fine with the people who run and play these homebrew settings.

 

[Ixal]

I don't need to. I know! The designers drew in pulp tropes, which in turn reflect "scientific" racism. That's the point of (much of) this thread.


There has been. I don't know how much time you've spent in central Africa, but if you go there you will find that people live in houses modelled on European designs, wear clothes that are European or North American in conception, use mobile phones that have been imported, etc. One effect of colonialism has been to generate this sort of rapid diffusion of technologies.

If you are suggesting that there was not diffusion of technology from China to other parts of Eurasia prior to the period of European domination of world affairs, then you are wrong. There obviously was.


Shaka Zulu is one actor in a brief period. The ANC used guns.

PNG has been colonised for around 100 years, and some parts of PNG have had "contact" for less than that. People in PNG wear t-shirts.

There are some Masai who are self-conscious about the maintenance of tradition (of course this is a comportment towards material and other culture that only becomes possible in the context of rapid social change). They use mobile phones.

How long have the Grippli existed in Cormyr? What are the social processes they are participating in? Obviously there is no in-fiction answer to this. But the answer to the question why are they authored in that fashion is straightforward, as I already posted.

That was because through colonization technology was forced upon them.
I was talking about the time before colonialization. There has been contact and in many cases trade between the cultures for centuries, but technological diffusion didn't happen, or only very slowly.
The pulp tropes as you call them happened exactly that way in history as could the difference between Cormyt and Grippli.

Frankly I have no idea why you inject modern situations into the FR with a more or less medieval/renaissance technology base.

 

[aramis erak]

I accept that Orcs as Tolkien envisioned them are an outgrowth of the casual racism of his era. A casual racism his later years made him more aware of, and that he regretted the original correlation. I don't accept that reading about them has changed my worldview in any negative way towards any actual humans

Meanwhile, while I see no point in defending institutional racism, nor in defending past social constructs, but I also don't see deconstructing in a witch-hunt-like manner as a valuable discourse.

Once someone has been made aware that images, terminology, etc. have their origins in bigotry, they can no longer claim clean hands if they continue to use them. By doing so, you give the bigotry a life preserver.

I also flatly reject such absolutist BS.

That kind of thinking gives more power to the original racists than they deserve. It does far more harm to the search for genuine legal and social equality, too: It poisons the moderates against the progressives far more effectively than the far right can. The Far-Right is ugly; so are witch-hunts by either side.

 

[Ixal]

No, they are superior BECAUSE THEY HAVE A TECHNOLOGY (knowledge, tools, and procedures) which the supposedly 'more advanced' western 'development experts' didn't have. Nor did they bother to even ask about it, because, like you, they ASSUMED they were 'more advanced' and had nothing to learn from the locals. They learned the hard way through FAILURE that they were wrong!

Same with the Masai, British ranchers kicked them off a lot of the range, now the British have given up ranching because they cannot manage the range effectively, but the Masai are still there, and now they're reclaiming the rest of their land. I saw it, I was there.

What you are displaying here is simply cultural chauvinism and an arrogant lack of appreciation for what you don't understand and automatically assume is inferior. This is largely because of an ideology which was developed in Europe in the 16th through 19th Century in order to justify exploiting other people, colonialism, slavery, etc. It is worth stepping away from and looking at objectively.

Steel can be a better material. If you had the choice of either or both, that would be nice. However, what is a steel blade going to do in the rainforest? Besides rust? You better bring something with you to sharpen it. See what I mean? Nor are we talking about 'equal', we're talking about more or less primitive. I have said a dozen times that primitive vs advanced and more or less effective are two different measures. It may be that you simply won't get the most effective item in every place. That doesn't mean the local culture is unsophisticated. It simply means that they operate under different constraints.

The western world had this knowledge in the past, but ditched it for something more effective.
But when you really think a steel blade is useless in the rainforest because it would rust away then I do not think that there is any point in discussing with you any further as you are dead set in your "everything is equal" thinking and are not willing to hear any counter arguments.

 

[Doug McCrae]

Grippli first appear in the AD&D 1e Monster Manual II (1983). The word "primitive" is not used in the entry.

They defend themselves with snares, nets, poisoned darts and bolts, and occasionally a sword or dagger.

A grippli lair is built on the ground and consists of mud and wood huts.​

The entry in the AD&D 2e Monstrous Manual (1993) states that they "have a primitive culture."

I think one (but not the only) problem here is as others such as @Monadology and @pemerton have said. The word "primitive" is not being applied to one particular technology but to an entire culture.