D&D and Racial Essentialism

[S'mon]

The stereotype of Evil = Nazi Germany is very strong, at least in Britain. I recall this caused a bit of an issue when a bunch of us British gamers were playing a Midnight game with a German GM a few years back. Our PCs had been captured by the bad guys (the Shadow forces, who in Midnight are totally dominant over the remnant forces of Good), led by an evil Cleric, and my PC was trying to convince him I was actually a Shadow agent. He gave me an order, my PC saluted and klicked her heels - and I klicked my heels under the table for emphasis; another player laughed and said "Sieg Heil!" - then she was absolutely mortified, looked at the German GM and turned bright red!

I don't think the GM had done anything to make the Shadow forces seem particularly Nazi-esque; she barely even had a German accent, but it was just really hard for us to disassociate "dominant Evil bad guys" with "Nazis".

 

[Rechan]

How very odd, S'mon.

 

[roguerouge]

You asked later in the thread why people were immediately believing you had a particular viewpoint, despite your great wall of text. I believe it's the emotional cues that you're sending out in these passages:

This is psuedo-intellectual claptrap covering for what is in essence an unreflective populist political opinion pared down to such a simplistic axiom that its probably less nuanced than even the typical populist political position is derived from.

SNIP

If you don't believe that, spend some more time in a genetics lab than you do reading polical opinions draped with the psuedo-scientific langauge and statistics as intellectual cover for the fact that the author is just some guy bloviating. No, Marx, your theories weren't 'Science'. Could you and everyone of your descendents of every political stripe on either side of the aisle please get over it.

SNIP

Before any numnuts thinks that he can derail my little rant by accusing me of racism, I should probably say that I have every reason to believe that real genius is found the world over in every culture and race, and that personally, the smartest person I ever met was Nigerian.

Celebrim, just so you know, the tone of these three passages is making it hard for me to really listen to what you have to say, especially before my morning coffee. And that's a shame. In the future, could you maybe tone it down until at least someone in the thread actually does argue you with you directly? Your call, of course, but I thought I'd mention it.

 

[Umbran]

Before any numnuts thinks that he can derail my little rant by accusing me of racism....

Oh, please. Dude, name calling? You're in the middle of breaking one of the most clear rules of the boards. When you're engaged in a none-too-sharp maneuver yourself is not the time to call others numnuts.

 

[Merkuri]

#1: Food is consumed communally and socially.

Have you seen the American family lately? More and more families are eating in shifts or completely alone. When my fiance was growing up his family hit a point where they would all prepare their own food and eat whenever they felt like it.

#2: It's funny when bad things happen.

There are a lot of moral philosophies that say it's wrong to laugh at other people's misfortune.

These two things are hardly universal to all humans.

As far as racial descriptions in D&D, I tend to take those as stereotypes. There are plenty of stereotypes in American and European culture that individuals of those groups go against. Heck, I'm one of them. Stereotypically, women aren't supposed to be into technology or like assembling furniture with power tools, yet here I am!

I also tend to take the races in D&D more like cultures than like distinct non-human species. I've accepted the fact that all D&D races reflect different aspects of humanity. If they didn't have some human aspects they would be impossible to roleplay, since the players behind them are all humans.

So if a player wants to play an elf as a Scottish-accented beer drinking dude who likes to live underground, that's fine with me. He might get some in-character odd looks from NPCs but that's because of the elven stereotype. He's certainly not a typical elf, but he's still an elf.

The racial stereotypes as they're portrayed in the PHB are helpful in the sense that it gives you an idea of what the average member of that race is like, but it's by no way a list of restrictions on what you can do.

 

[Tav_Behemoth]

The thing we call race in the real world is a social construct based on phenotype (what you look like, which is related to your genetic heritage) as interpreted by culture (what meaning the people around you assign to the way you look).

In the real world, phenotype changes over generations (trying to stop this from happening leads to royal family-type inbreeding) but the cultural construct of race can change overnight. You can "pass" for something else, or move to another region where the cultural ideas about race are different. In the US, centuries of immigration result in a multi-ethnic society where people make assumptions about you based on what continent they think your ancestors were from. If you to go to whatever region contributed most of your heritage, people are likely to make assumptions about you based on what part of the country / clan / ethnic subdivision your parents were from - chances are you'll no longer be thought of as "white" or "black" or "Asian" or any of the categories people in the US care about. In a monoethnic society everyone around you is that too so people find more precise ways to discriminate along lines that get blurred in a multiethnic society.

In D&D phenotype is more resistant to change across generations. If you're a dwarf shipwrecked on an island and the rest of the crew are elves, standard D&D thinking says your descendants won't be dwelves or elwarfs. (They might be bullywugs, but let's leave that can of worms for another day). This tends to make it also more resistant to change across culture. It's easier to pass in a society like 19th century New Orleans where ancestries have been enthusiastically mixing for generations, and harder to say "I just happen to be a particularly hairy, stocky elf" if there's no history of dwarven and elven ancestries intermingling.

However, D&D phenotype is highly susceptible to supernatural change. You can be polymorphed into a member of another race. You can become a member of a race of lycanthropes by being bitten by one, after which you can both breed true (at least with other lycanthropes; canon is silent on half-werewolves) and turn other races into your own by nibbling on them. I played an elf cleric whose doctrine was based on using reincarnation to prove that all sentient beings were one. (He was a heretic from a culture of elven-superiority racists, so for him this translated into "look, everyone is an elf"; he thought this was high praise and was upset when people didn't take it this way, or were upset that his raise dead spells brought them back as a halfling or gnoll as proof of his doctrine).

Like many other emergent properties of D&D as a game, exploring the consequences of magical changes in race makes the D&D world both strikingly different from our own and from its fantasy inspirations. There aren't Conan stories in which he worries about a sorcerer transforming him from a Cimmerian into a Shemite, or scenes in the Lord of the Rings where his hobbit friends have to adjust to Frodo being three feet taller, green-skinned, and tusked because Gandalf brought him back from the dead as an orc. (Arguably this kind of racial anxiety is one of the things the lycanthrope represents in literature, but no perfect example springs to mind).

 

[Silvercat Moonpaw]

I've come to think of the issue this way:

There is an understandable tendency to provide easy answers to the question of identity, but that has a disturbing tendency to enable lazy thinking and ultimately leads to treating characters as pieces of their culture rather than individuals influenced by the situation they've lived in.

My proposal is that the easy answers of racial personality/culture be done away with and we allow players to flounder around and create their own ideas of what the race would be like. For those instances when cultural information is important that would be world setting information rather than core information. Ideally the culture would be created and then assigned "common races" to give the implication that culture and race are not a 1-for-1 deal.

 

[Umbran]

As I had noted in a completely unrelated conversation - generalization should not be confused with declaration of universals.

"Elves are a people of deeply felt but short lived passions," taken out of context, can be read to be a declaration of a universal truth. However, the rules also say, "There is nothing wrong with playing against type." This admission that individuals may not match the description means that there was no real declaration in the first place - only a generalization.

 

[Celebrim]

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.

Ok, sure.

And one of the tropes which the LoTR deploys is the threat to Christendom posed by eastern/Turkic invaders.

I think where we keep running into problems is that you are using your language in ways that I consider extremely imprecise. Tolkien creates a deliberately pre-Christian world with a creator deity largely unrevealed to its mortal inhabitants. There is no element of his middle earth that is analogous to Christendom. Minas Tirith is not Rome. Denethor is not the Pope or the Holy Roman Emperor. It would be at least as correct to say that Tolkien is alluding to the threat posed to Western/Greek philosophy by eastern/Persian invaders and probably more so because the Men of the West at this time may hold some unique knowledge, but its not particularly Christian or religious knowledge. There is virtually no practiced religion in ME, and I think that the best reading of the text is that Westerners don't practice religion because - like Socrates knowing he wasn't wise - they know that they don't know how to do it.

But I think it would nonetheless incorrect to say that that is what LotR is about or that the allusion to the threat of Eastern invasion is means that the Eastern invaders are analogous to particular real-world racial groups and that the story is really about a contest between Europeans and non-Europeans. Tolkien is drawing on elements of the European mythic and historical pallette, including allusions to the repeated threat of invaders to Europe and allusions to Numenorean colonialism and its negative consequences his birth in South Africa and his sensitivity to those issues, but again, Umbar is not actually South Africa or any other English/European colony.

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.

Or Lotho. Or Boromir. Or Denethor. Or Gollum. Or the Nazgul. Or Saruman. Or the Mouth of Sauron. Or Sauron himself.

I generally disagree. It's significant to the reading of Tolkien to read into Tolkien racial commentary and doing so fits into the framework of how modern students of literature are taught to analyze it critically, but I think its counterproductive if the goal is understanding Tolkien.

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.

I think for all your recognition of Tolkien's Catholocism, you rather invert the normal Catholic way of looking at the world. How is it that pride has suddenly become a smaller and more forgivable vice or sin that any other? You might as well say that at least Satan isn't orcish in his outlook, because he is traditionally portrayed as being motivated by pride. And furthermore, I think you do the Numenoreans far more credit than Tolkien did to say they weren't motivated by base greed and hatred. The Valinoreans had something that they wanted and which was withheld from them, and they came in their rage and pride to take it.

The story of LotR is about humility. It seems a rather strange take on the story to suggest that Tolkien is somehow writing about the relative nobility of pride or how justifiable it may be in small doses. Frodo was a very humble person, but even his small amount of pride would have been lethal to him had not providence intervened.

If you really want to push this argument, I think you can do a better job showing that Tolkien's treatment of the elves ended up created 'racialized thinking' in D&D than you can with either orcs or humans. In particular, I think D&D elves are blushes on Tolkien elves in a way that highlights the cultural and ethnic divisions that developed between Tolkien's elves (which for Tolkien were primarily interesting as ways of discussing how language evolves) that was racialized when it was recreated in D&D. In particular, I'm thinking about how in 1e AD&D, every single elvish culture required the creation of a new elvish racial group - Sea Elves, Snow Elves, Wild Elves, Grey Elves, Wood Elves, Dark Elves, High Elves, Sun Elves, Moon Elves, and who knows what else.

But I think that has more to do with the cultural baggage of the reader than it has to do with Tolkien.

It's about the literary and dramatic representation of cultural differences.

Is it? When we talk about elves and dwarves is that what is really at stake? Or, when we discuss the Ruml or the Soft Ones, or we really essentially interested in the literary and dramatic representation of cultural differences? I don't think that holds true. I think you could use invented races as less inflamatory standins for discussing racial and cultural differences, but I hardly think that the fact that one author does means that we should force that reading on every invented race we encounter.

Hence the reference to "Victorian anthropology", which (at least as a stereotype) analyses cultural difference by reference to superiority and inferiority

And again, you are improperly conflating two ideas when you do this. This is the heart of my objection to the essay, because essentially the author is accusing everyone who designs and plays RPGs of being racial supremicists or at least tied to racial supremicist tropes. But to ground this back in the RPG mechanics and tropes that are at the heart of this debate, when I assert that Elves have a +2 bonus to dexterity, I'm not really addressing the issue of elvish racial or cultural superiority or inferiority at all. In fact, because RPGs tend to be committed to the idea of 'balance', the presence of mechanical superiority or inferiority in the PC playable races would be considered a negative feature of the system quite irrespective of any percieved commentary this had on race.

he uses as his device for exploring (at least one type of) evil a particular racial concept (roughly, the "eastern horde").

I'm not sure that is the usage he's putting to 'the eastern horde', nor am I sure that the orcs are equivalent to 'the eastern horde'. I think that the Easterlings are probably more equivalent to 'the eastern horde'. The orcs, goblins, and trolls would seem to have a different genesis in Western mythology, like, maybe goblins and trolls.

 

[Celebrim]

In the future, could you maybe tone it down until at least someone in the thread actually does argue you with you directly? Your call, of course, but I thought I'd mention it.

Actually, I think quite the reverse. If someone here was arguing with me directly, then it would be a personal reference and I wouldn't have made it. My over the top language has no target, and hense I felt safer firing off volleys without fear of actually hitting anyone. Personally, I felt it was quite obviously self-parody spittle-flying meant to tone down the seriousness with which you took my rant, but I admit that people regularly don't see the world the way I do. If you think my 'To whom it may concerns' were particularly addressed at you, then I apologize but protest that they weren't and that there very preemptiveness was essential to their usage. If I was really angry I would have thought up some more polite and subversive way to insult someone, like comparing every practically every game designer and game player in history to a sterotypically ractist Victorian anthropologist.

My main regret was overly targeting the OP in the first sentense, but I'd rather let him lodge the complaint.