D&D General "Red Orc" American Indians and "Yellow Orc" Mongolians in D&D

[Justice and Rule]

It's nitpicking though. The majority of people at the time didn't care. This was pop culture pop culture means popular.

And that has nothing to do with what we are talking about. Being popular doesn't mean people don't know it's wrong. In fact, stuff like Married With Children were popular because they were regressive. It's part of the appeal.

Not claiming it was universal or saying those people effected who didn't have power. I would agree with that statement.

Yes, but it wouldn't agree with your argument. The idea that it was harder back then doesn't work with the idea that it was harder for the people who were being mocked. In fact, it goes directly against it.

It's against the rules to discuss the wider trends of the times.

Then report me? If a mod comes in and says something, whatever. But this comes across as refusing to engage on the topic.

I did history at uni we were outright taught to examine things as they were might be different overseas.

I mean, I don't think you have a good hang on American history. Not trying to offend, but I don't think your current view accurately captures it from the American end.

Not claiming it's ok or whatever things have changed because of that.

No one is saying this, people are saying that we always knew it was wrong. It was just easier to ignore it.

And a lot of things from there are also subjective based in where you grew up. Nice place in New England's going to be different than Missouri or Alabama yes?

I mean, I grew up in the Metro Detroit area when the auto companies were starting to decline. Even then, while there are bittersweet parts of the 80's and 90's people remember them way more positively than what came afterwards for a plethora of reasons, from job security to relative level of wealth to a more orderly sense of what was happening in the world as well as a sense of "victory" at the end of the Cold War.

Really, this whole "things were harder" idea when it comes to the '80's feels really weird given how hard 9/11 and the decade afterward shook America.

Conversations about race etc coming up now we did that here back in the 70's and 80's it's not perfect but generally it's about 20-30 years ahead of the USA. Not on every issue though. You'll get there or you won't.

I mean, probably not? While America has problems, it's generally way more inclusive than a lot of other countries, particularly on religion and refugees. I know NZ might be good, but it's not 20-30 years good.

Distinct lack of rioting etc probably overdue for some last seen 1981 or 51 depending on what counts.

I have no idea where you pulled those numbers from, and I really don't think you should be speaking on the subject if your first date is not 1967 when it comes to rioting.

 

[Yaarel]

he wasn't in a position for his racist beliefs to influence the lives of many others.

Power is irrelevant.

In fact, he is a perfect example why, people must NEVER give power to someone who is hateful.

Because once the hater has power, the hater will be in a position to impose hateful beliefs and to harm innocents.

The hate itself is unacceptable.

 

[Justice and Rule]

I'm pretty sure when we were in grade school in the late 70s, around us we either didn't have a clue or hadn't thought about it at any level when it was first used as an insult. At that stage they were words people were called and you didn't want to be one. I mean, I remember in 1st grade we all thought "punk" was awful, so it's not like the insults started being used for a particular reason. When it did rise to the level of consciousness a lot of us stopped using it and we're uncomfortable when a relative would. I had never thought about how each person's experience using the words (as oppossed to being a target of them) could change how it's viewed.

I mean, some of that might be simple imitation, though I would say that wasn't the case with the slur I chose. When you used an LGBTQ slur, you knew the implication. It's part of the reason why you used it; it was easy to insult someone because everyone understood the meaning.

 

[Zardnaar]

And that has nothing to do with what we are talking about. Being popular doesn't mean people don't know it's wrong or not. In fact, stuff like Married With Children were popular because they were regressive. It's part of the appeal.



Yes, but it wouldn't agree with your argument. The idea that it was harder back then doesn't work with the idea that it was harder for the people who were being mocked. In fact, it goes directly against it.



Then report me? If a mod comes in and says something, whatever. But this comes across as refusing to engage on the topic.



I mean, I don't think you have a good hang on American history. Not trying to offend, but I don't think your current view accurately captures it from the American end.



No one is saying this, people are saying that we always knew it was wrong. It was just easier to ignore it.



I mean, I grew up in the Metro Detroit area when the auto companies were starting to decline. Even then, while there are bittersweet parts of the 80's and 90's people remember them way more positively than what came afterwards for a plethora of reasons, from job security to relative level of wealth to a more orderly sense of what was happening in the world as well as a sense of "victory" at the end of the Cold War.

Really, this whole "things were harder" idea when it comes to the '80's feels really weird given how hard 9/11 and the decade afterward shook America.



I mean, probably not? While America has problems, it's generally way more inclusive than a lot of other countries, particularly on religion and refugees. I know NZ might be good, but it's not 20-30 years good.



I have no idea where you pulled those numbers from, and I really don't think you should be speaking on the subject if your first date is not 1967 when it comes to rioting.

I don't generally use the report button I'm not offended if people disagree with me.

I'm talking about here that's when we last had rioting. Current generations and GenX have no real experience with it and most of the boomers depending on what counts.

Why I said 20-30 years was overall. Women voting NZ 1893, USA 1920. Maori got a raw deal here but they weren't enslaved and we never had segregation. American troops here caused a riot in 43 over it they got offended at Maori in the bars.

We also had these conversations in the 70's and 80's compensation started to get paid out in the 90's. It's an ongoing process.

Other thing people want we've had since the 19th century or the 1930's depending on what it is.

What's mainstream in the USA is 2-4% of the population here.

 

[Justice and Rule]

I don't generally use the report button I'm not offended if people disagree with me.

I'm talking about here that's when we last had rioting. Current generations and GenX have no real experience with it and most if the boomers.

Why I said 20-30 years was overall. Women voting NZ 1893, USA 1920. Maori got a raw deal here but they weren't enslaved and we never had segregation. American troops here caused a riot in 43 over it they got offended at Maori in the bars.

We also had these conversations in the 70's and 80's compensation started to get paid out in the 90's. It's an ongoing process.

Other thing people want we've had since the 19th century or the 1930's depending on what it is.

What's mainstream in the USA is 2-4% of the population here.

I'm not sure how this is reconcilable with the idea that Orcs of Thar was acceptable in 1988, because it seems to me that you should be harsher on it than me, but instead it is the other way around.

 

[pemerton]

I will start with what I think is your mistake.

On the other hand, these are also potentially valuable learning opportunities.

Why is it valuable for my kids to learn that a certain part of mainstream American thought and literature classified them as "mongrels"? As a general rule white kids don't need to undergo this "learning".

I personally would prefer this stay to the purview of parents. I just see too much of a slippery slope problem occurring.

And why should my kids need me to protect them when they go to the public library? As a general rule, white kids don't need their parent to protect them in this way.

I was involved for a little while with a group that actually got push-back when it wanted to start it's own little children's lending library, where all the works would be by authors of colour. I don't think the concerned liberals had fully thought through their response to the proposal, nor the fact that a white kid might go to a public library and look through work after work after work written by white authors and foregrounding their experiences. I certainly don't think it had occurred to them that white kids never run the risk of encountering works that will frame them as REH and HPL frame all the other kids who might come across them.

But I think you need more than that to assign the word "racism." You can't just see yellow and think red (to use my color analogy).

<snip>

I think there's also the "kewl" factor. Ed Greenwood presumably included Mulhorand as Egypt because, well, ancient Egypt was really cool. This isn't as much lazy or even convenient as it is saying, "I dig me some ancient Egypt."

Where, here, do you see any trading on default responses to people of colour that are elements in a system of ideology and subjugation?

That may be present - ancient Egypt frequently figures in depiction of the "vigour" of civilisation having shifted from the "East" to the "West" - but I don't know FR well enough to express a view on it.

if a world-builder is creating a tropical jungle culture, and the inhabitants happen to be dark-skinned (which makes sense, as they are equatorial), it doesn't automatically mean that they are a stand-in for real world Amazonians or Africans or Papua New Guineans. Or if a tribe of plains warriors rides horses and wears feathers, it doesn't mean the author is "really talking about" Lakota people. But it might mean that they made an association as a starting point, which is understandable.

It seems to me that in cases like this there is more likelihood that conceptions of "jungle" cultures will reflect default responses that are parts of systems of ideology and subordination. Especially if the ideas about those cultures have been mediated in part or primarily via films, comics, pulps and their offspring, etc.

I agree that Jackson probably shouldn't have only or mostly used Maori actors for his orcs.

Should he not have? Would doing otherwise have been true to the works? Would doing otherwise have given so many Maori and other actors of colour jobs?

I didn't make a normative judgement, just an observation. The normative inferences from that observation are in my view not easy to draw.

 

[Zardnaar]

I'm not sure how this is reconcilable with the idea that Orcs of Thar was acceptable in 1988, because it seems to me that you should be harsher on it than me, but instead it is the other way around.

It's because here we have a "she'll be right attitude". More often than not it means you let the small stuff slide and focus on the big stuff.

Theres positive and negative aspects to that but generally it means extremism doesn't have any mass appeal here.

 

[Justice and Rule]

It's because here we have a "she'll be right attitude". More often than not it means you let the small stuff slide and focus on the big stuff.

Theres positive and negative aspects to that but generally it means extremism doesn't have any mass appeal here.

...

That attitude is, like, the opposite of being progressive and forward-thinking. I'm not going to go into the politics of extremism in NZ, but suffice to say that I think you are grossly underestimating its own ability to grow, and in fact the attitude of "let the small stuff slide" is the sort of thing that allows that sort of stuff to take hold.

Really, when you call it "small stuff", you're making a huge judgment on something that largely affects someone else, and you let it slide because, as you have outline numerous times, you have bigger problems. But for the people it actually affects, it is a big problem or a portion thereof.

We have this sort of attitude here, and I've absolutely heard it justify stuff like Confederate statues and such. So looks like you're a lot closer to America than you think in that regard.

 

[MGibster]

His work is widely praised and held up as Important Work in spec fiction and especially horror.

That's why we talk about it but doesn't explain the vitriol. It doesn't explain the need to paint Lovecraft's particular racism as much worse than his contemporaries nor does it explain why some want to see his him no longer named as an influence.

 

[Malmuria]

I admire OPs attention to detail and scholarly manner of critiquing GAZ10 but I'm still struggling how all this discussion is going to somehow turn into real world improvements.

You can't say "Everyone knew this was bad when it came out" and at the same time say "we need to talk about these things so people can learn why they are bad".

Culture changes slowly and unevenly. It's not the case that racism is either super intentional white supremacy or not; there's a vast middle ground where most of culture operates, where certain language, tropes, or representations are taken for granted as permissible until people do the slow, careful work of unpacking their meaning and history (the trope of the "savage, primitive native," for example). Fantasy, by virtue of its fantastical nature, further insulates itself from change. You still see this line of reasoning today--'It's just fantasy, and just a game'--as a way of deflecting criticism.

I don't think you can really judge things in 80s by today's standards. People in that era just did not care what other people thought about pretty much anything and bigotry was widespread. I don't think it is accurate to say people did not know this was wrong, they just didn't care and for the most part no one else cared either.

I can remember my uncle coming to my parents house over the holidays and talking about how he and some of his friends went "gay bashing" the night before. They picked up a guy at a "gay bar" we all knew about and then rolled him and stole his money. They talked about this over Turkey like it was normal and no one really cared, he even complained about how little the guy was carrying. This same uncle was actually bisexual himself, although we called him "gay" at the time. The term "bisexual" was not used, either you had sex with members of the same sex and you were "gay" (or other slurs used to describe that) or you didn't and then you were not "gay". Whether you also had sex with members of the opposite sex was irrelevant to "being gay" or not.

There was an African-American family that moved into the Italian section of Trenton where a some of my relatives lived and his house burned down. I don't know for a fact it was Arson and it was never investigated by the police, but it was widely believed the residents did it because they did not want them there.

We also had an African-American owned house burn down on my street. My neighborhood was an integrated neighborhood, but a couple of the kids who lived in that house were caught breaking and entering and it was widely believed they were involved in a string of robberies that same summer, so they burned down their house and forced them to move. Again, never investigated.

This kind of stuff was as "normal" as smoking on an airplane or putting your kid in your lap for a long road trip.

Sure, there were activists complaining about this at the time (as there were complaining about smoking and carseats) but they were considered a bunch of "whack jobs" and no one really took them seriously.

In that context I don't find it surprising this was written and I doubt many at the time would have even noticed or cared, including those allegedly targeted. That was life at the time.

Hate crimes against minorities still happen in these days, actually! And, at least in the US and UK, are increasing. But the fact that there is such explicit violence going on around us doesn't mean we aren't also concerned about representation in popular media. Culture is layered and complex in that way. Further, there is a connection between the low-grade, everyday implicit (and sometimes unconscious) discrimination that you might face and those more extreme hate crimes.

Personal reflection: this conversation is interesting for me because I grew up in the 80s, a child of south asian immigrants. We loved the same things you loved, for example Indiana Jones. But we didn't watch Temple of Doom more than once; you can tell when your culture is being caricatured, you just don't have the ability to do anything about it because no one cares. Similarly, I loved the Simpsons. I was Bart one year for halloween. But even being little, I turned my brain off during the Apu sections. It's easy to know when you are being mocked. Was Temple of Doom or Apu the worst of our problems? Certainly not! But it doesn't mean we didn't notice.