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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7925603" data-attributes="member: 4937">Well, and behavior, and the other things we generally give some weight to when defining good and evil.The important thing is that the alignment tag is not an inseparable part of say an elf's being. An elf doesn't have the tag 'chaotic good' if it doesn't behave in a way that is 'chaotic good'. Elves are tagged as 'chaotic good' because the majority of them engage in 'chaotic good' behavior, and not because they are elves.Moreover, there is a fundamental difference between "elfness" and "Chinese" or "Amerindian" or "Swedish" or (especially) something like "whiteness" or "Asian". When we normally speak of "race" and what it means to have a race we are speaking of something that is at least as much a social construct as it is a product of genetic and biological reality. Racial tags are almost always based on perception of large differences between human racial groups that turn out to not be supported by reality.  Thus for example the notion of "blackness" or "whiteness" gets caught up in a lot more things than just melanin.  But when we are speaking of an "elf", "dragon", "mindflayer", "klingon", "krogan", or "silurian", and so we are speaking of relatively large differences between these groups that are supported by the theorized reality. Elves and krogans, silurians, and klingons don't actually represent human ethnic groups, and I think it is a mistake to closely align them with human ethnic groups, and a tragedy and a misunderstanding to insist that they do or ought to closely align with human ethnic groups, or to insist that underneath they have basically no real distinctiveness from humans beyond superficial traits like bumps on their forehead.In it's most benign form this gives us female lizardfolk or dragonkin with mammary glands because we are so uncomfortable with the other that we have to imagine female defined by simian sexual markers.  It's its more serious form, this unwillingness to deal with the reality of others, suggests to me a unwillingness to deal mentality with the reality of diversity even in minor forms.</blockquote>

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