Two answers. First: because you can identify an unconscious, naked member of a particular race (that is, without any ability to refer to behavior or equipment it is entirely possible to identify an individual's race/species, but almost impossible to identify their class).
Second: Some people totally DO do that. Especially in 4e, lots of people talked of doing it. An example that comes to mind: a "Dwarf Noble" character, who was actually an Earthsoul Genasi. Her different stats and magical abilities were explained as a result of her noble heritage and (IIRC shamanic?) education. But she totally looked, talked, and acted like a (high-status) dwarf would.
The degree to which you can identify a naked, unconscious member as belonging to a race depends on a lot of social factors. One, the degree of mixing. Two, relatedly, the degree to which your culture places a premium on identifying distinct races as a "thing". That's why there used to be such a phenomenon as "passing". That's why, in the Jim Crow south, they had racial miscegenation laws, that stipulated that you were a member of the "black race" if you were 1/32 of African origin. They had to put a numerical value on it, precisely because they couldn't point to self-evident physical features.
The fact that some people "totally do that" doesn't mean it's universal, and universally important, in game or out.
Actually, at least in 4e (and I *think* 5e as well? Correct me if I'm wrong), half-elf and half-orc are true-breeding, a distinct type of being from both 'origin races.' 4e, of course, actually gave some heft to the distinction, since both half-elves and half-orcs have unique abilities that aren't found among humans, orcs, or elves. We have no real standard of comparison for 5e orc vs. half-orc, but half-elves aren't super different from their parent races (especially Variant Human + pre-subrace Elf).
I'm not sure what point you're making here, but if half-elves aren't super-different from elves, then there is no reason to consider half-elves as a distinct race (as the rulebooks, and the vast majority of players, do). Which means, of course, that "race" in the game is not as concrete as you think it is.
As for the IRL vs. in-game thing: the terms really aren't used the same way. They may have a common origin, but they're pretty heavily divergent at this point. When "Fighter" can apply just as much to a Noble as a Street Urchin, it cannot possibly be the same kind of "class" as referred to in Marx's "class struggles."
It's not the same thing, but the point is, class in game is still what in sociology is called achieved status, and race is still what in sociology is called ascribed status. So the fundamental distinction is based on metagame considerations.
That's the point - not that what we call class and race in the game are
identical to what we understand by these terms in RL.
QUOTE=EzekielRaiden;6762554]"Race" is much closer, I'll grant you that, but the assumption that cultural groups are defined along lines of genetic incompatibility (or un-hybridized states, for human/elf etc.) is not necessarily unwarranted. It requires a level of cultural adaptation to be able to process and accept, for instance, dynastic marriages between biologically incompatible parents (e.g. a dragonborn and a human, a dwarf and an elf, etc.) If the associated species also have dramatically different lifespans and physiological needs, the likelihood of tension and/or separation between the two is high. There's also the very simple "looks like us GOOD, not look like us BAD" tribalism, which has defined
human social interactions practically from the dawn of time (just check out tensions between North African and Sub-Saharan African peoples, or the tensions between the various ethnic groups of East Asia,* or the hatred between the Arab and Kurdish populations of Iraq, or the current racial divisions which contribute to the horrible situation in France); differences which are both more dramatic and more fundamental than anything appearing among anatomically-modern humans could easily foster even deeper tribalist feelings. I mean, if Europeans were willing to burn people at the stake for having warts in the wrong places or something, can we really say that pseudo-medieval humanoids would
never act that way toward beings that are demonstrably different from them biologically?
*One of my high school teachers was a wonderful lady of Korean descent, though she was born and raised here in the States. Her husband, also a native-born American citizen, was of Chinese descent. Her (maternal, IIRC) grandmother, a native-born Korean, never quite got over the fact that her granddaughter had married a Chinese man, and had a tendency to express...uncomfortable opinions in private conversation. These sorts of lingering ethno-cultural attitudes are hardly uncommon
even today. In a medieval kind of society, where average education levels are far lower and overall violence higher, it seems
very plausible that such straightforward, obvious distinctions would be ready-to-hand justification for exclusion...if not worse.[/QUOTE]
Yes, but the reason for recognizing these differences as important is a cultural reason. I can come up with all kinds of counterexamples. In Ireland, Protestants and Catholics look more or less the same, but there are long-standing tensions between them that are much more important than tensions between people there on the basis of perceived physical markers. Ditto Jews and Arabs in Palestine. Ditto Serbs and Croats in the Balkans. In Russia, in the 18th and 19th century, there was a system of serfdom that in key ways resembled North American slavery,
except the racial dimension. Landlords and serfs recognized one another as "Russian" - race as a category was not applied at all - but the landlords still saw the serfs as little better than beasts.
