D&D and Racial Essentialism

Well, if there are more differences within a group than between groups, what's the point of bringing up African American sprinters?

To refute one of the subtexts of the blogger's essay, which is that I'm morally required to believe that races and species are identical and that the suggestion that they are not is indicative of some defect in my judgment.

In other words, I try to show that the blogger falsely conflates the idea that we can describe a distinguishing feature of a group with the idea that there would be no variation within the group. The blogger starts talking about one thing, but then slips into the other as if he hasn't made a transition.

He asserts:

"The rule books of many dead tree RPGs read like works of Victorian anthropology, full of stony-faced assurances that individuals from one race are more intelligent or muscular than individuals from another."

He's conflating the idea that the race of elves might have +2 dexterity with having a racist viewpoint. Indeed, we could go further. By saying that in those terms, he's implicitly saying that if you design your games where some race is more intelligent or muscular than individuals from another, you are running some racial supremist inspired meme.

Of course, this assertion that my assertion that one race is more muscular than another is akin to the stony-faced assurance of a Victorian anthropologist gets really silly when the invented race in question weighs on average 2000 lbs and is built like an ox. And the idea that in inventing such a race I'm unavoidably trying to say something about present human race relations or past or present human theories of race is equally specious.
 

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Hussar, I agree 100% with the "The only race that doesn't act 1 way is humans (unless you're a subrace, and then it's just different from your parent race)".

Although I will say that I think the PHBs give you those broad categories so tha new players will know "This is how elves differ from, well, everyone else". It's there for newbies. Because really, who reads that fluff when they've been into RPGs for 10 years or more?
 

Hussar:

Where do you find these Dwarves and Elves and Hobbits and Orcs who are so much more like humans? Who is being misrepresented?

Have you met the beings of Faerie in their native habitat? Have you read Tolkien? Anderson? The Lang Fairy Books? The Brothers Grimm? Mallory? The Eddas? The Mabinogion? The Kalevala? Classical Myth? The Thousand Nights and a Night? Ramayana?
 

Tolkien abhored symbolism and allogory, and had a far better understanding of the ideas of 'one to one' and 'onto' than you seem to display. He would have been appalled by attempts claim that he was asserting that the Monguls were orcs or even orcish in nature, or at least, to assert that Asian people were more prone to orcish behavior than humanity in general. The claim that orcs are a Turkish caricature has no more basis in fact than the equally unread claim that the Sauron was an allegory for Hitler and the orcs were Waffen SS.
It's true that Tolkien denied that LoTR is allegory. By "allegory" it's fairly clear that he means allegory in the strict sense. But it's obvious that his writing is "symbolic" or "allusory" in various ways - eg the Silmarillion among other matters very obviously deals with the Fall and Original Sin, both matters dear to the heart of any serious and conservative Catholic thinker. And one of the tropes which the LoTR deploys is the threat to Christendom posed by eastern/Turkic invaders.

I don't disagree with you that orcs are expressive, as a literary device, of certain human habits of mind. But I do disagree with you insofar as I think that it is significant, in reading and understanding Tolkien, to see that he located this study of human moral failing within a racial and cultural group. Not exclusively, of course, as eg Bill Ferny shows. But it's interesting to note that there are no Numernoreans (to the best of my recall) that are orcish in their outlook - even when they invade the island of the Valar, they are motivated by pride - which is, in the right degree, a noble sentiment - and are not aiming at the destruction of beauty and civilisation, nor motivated by the base greed or hatred, in the way that orcs are.

Is there anyway to present races that isn't expressive of 'racialized thinking'?
That's an interesting question. As I said, I don't know enough about sci-fi games or sci-fi literature to answer in relation to that genre.

In fantasy I know that the Earthsea trilogy deals with differences in human race and culture in a way that I would not describe as racialised. (The last two books head off in very different directions, and I'm not really sure what to think about them.) The contrast with, for example, REH is extremely marked. To put it a bitcrudely, Earthsea reads like its written by a thoughtful, historically-informed liberal intellectual, while REH, in his treatment of issues of race and culture, verges on (or actively embraces) the rabid. Lovecraft is another "fantasy" writer whose treatment of human races is quite racialised.

When it is non-human races in fantasy literature (as opposed to fantasy RPGs) I don't have a particular wide knowledge - but given the huge influence of Tolkien on a lot of this I wouldn't be surprised if racialised thinking was widespread.

Why in the heck are we fighting the 'nurture vs. nature' fight in proxy through fictional alien species, and why in the heck would you think thats the only thing the author is interested in when he creates an alien species? Tolkien didn't really even have a bone in the 'nurture vs. nature' fight as we'd normally phrase it in modern terms; as you pointed out he's not really writing about biology or upbringing, but rather a fight between 'the better angels of our being' and our 'demons'.
I don't think it's about nature vs nurture (hence my view that biology is a bit of a distraction). It's about the literary and dramatic representation of cultural differences. Hence the reference to "Victorian anthropology", which (at least as a stereotype) analyses cultural difference by reference to superiority and inferiority ("civilisation" and "backwardsness") and explains superiority and inferiority in racial terms (what I have called "racialised thinking").

Thus, as I've said above, my comment on Tolkien isn't that he takes a silly view about the link between biology and evil, but rather that he uses as his device for exploring (at least one type of) evil a particular racial concept (roughly, the "eastern horde").
 

I think the folks who did the Human Genome thing, one of the first things they announced is that there is no genetic marker for race (in humans).

There's no single genetic marker for race, but it's very easy to determine someone's racial ancestry through a DNA test that looks at a bunch of markers. Eg my father in law tested as 91% white/Caucasian, 5% east-Asian (due to being half Finnish) and 4% African (due to being old-stock Southern US on his non-Finnish side).

I basically agree with Celebrim's rant above - human population groups obviously do vary, on average, in lots of ways, both cultural and genetic - but anyway I tend to think this thread should have been locked immediately for being 'political'.

I do think Tolkien's concept of non-human races (Elves, Dwarves, Halfings, Orcs) bears almost no resemblance to modern American concept of Race, they are if anything closer to social class - Class has traditionally always been more important than Race in England, unlike the USA. Calling them 'species' would be equally ridiculous, though.

But American authors and games designers working in the Tolkien tradition have tended to bring in baggage from their own worldview and milieu.
 

We have no problems with humans in D&D having a multitude of cultures. But every dwarf lives underground and has a strong love for Law. Every elf lives in a forest and loves magic. Every orc is savage and destructive.

I think they're presented more as tendencies than "every dwarf is X" - dwarves are typically honourable, but you can have dishonourable dwarves. Likewise the Swiss are typically neat and tidy, but you can presumably have messy Swiss.

In my campaign there was a dwarf Rogue who went against a lot of stereotypes, which explained why he was a wandering adventurer rather than a miner or soldier.
 

Thus, as I've said above, my comment on Tolkien isn't that he takes a silly view about the link between biology and evil, but rather that he uses as his device for exploring (at least one type of) evil a particular racial concept (roughly, the "eastern horde").

Well, then you can use a different concept of evil in your own game, then. Gygax had the Suel humans, whose evil appeared to be linked to their blond hair and pale complexions. Mystara had the Hattians, who were evil because of their stereotypical German names and accents. There was even a Hattian SS warrior society.

And the Hattian-derived Heldannic Knights are an excellent example of a sterotypical evil force that is the opposite of Tolkien's orcs - rather than the 'eastern horde', the Heldannic Knights are Evil because they're based on the Germanic Teutonic Knights' and their wars against the 'eastern hordes'.

Fantasy is broad, you can make anyone you like into your stereotyped villains!
 


human population groups obviously do vary, on average, in lots of ways, both cultural and genetic
More seriously - this may be true, but it's something which has proven, both historically and in contemporary circumstances, very difficult to think about and respond to in a reasonable sort of way.
 


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