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Message: <blockquote data-quote="boxstop7" data-source="post: 506643" data-attributes="member: 8804">A few points...What you're talking about isn't technically racism.  It's racial stereotyping, to be sure.  But racism goes much, much deeper than mere stereotyping.  Racism is not just a matter of attitudes or labels based on ascriptive status.  Racism involves having the power to systematically discriminate through the major institutions of a society.  Having said that, at the base of the matter I think D&D does have a lot of inherent stereotyped thinking.  When people talk about racism being the notion that one race is superior to another, I think more "eugenics" than anything else.  Of course there's stereotyping in D&D.  There's stereotyping wherever we go.  Stereotypes, in and of themselves, are not necessarily bad things.  They're simply a heuristic used by our brains to process information more quickly.  It's when stereotypes are used to make inaccurate, blanket statements about large groups of people that we get into serious problems.  It's the application of the stereotype that's important.  Do I think that the stereotyped thinking in D&D carries over into real life?  Absolutely not.  All too often I think people have a serious problem with this little thing called "suspension of disbelief".  It's not real.  Never has been, never will be.  Someone could go nuts with the ideas presented by this thread and say "since there's 'racism' in D&D, all D&D players are racist b/c they support a gaming system that champions racist thinking...".  Come on.  Again, I repeat:  It's not real.  Being able to draw the line between fantasy and reality is a key part of our existence.  All in all, I don't think you're asking a "dumb question".  You raise a valid and important point.  The examples you give aren't racist thinking, but they could be viewed stereotypes-gone-wild.  The differences between Dwarves, Elves, etc. are there to create flavor to the game.  It's no different than saying gorillas are better at knuckle-walking and orangutans are better at brachiating.  It's the way nature made 'em, and it's what they're best designed to do.  Now if gorillas started calling orangutans "scruffy red brachiators" and the orangs started calling gorillas "big-headed knuckle-walkers", you're starting to get into borderline racism.  Of course, if gorillas and orangs started talking, we'd all be in a heap of trouble anyway.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />I'm glad to see there's a concsiousness among my fellow gamers.  The awareness and sensitivity to these issues shows the humanity prevalent in this community.  But don't think too hard about it.  Awareness is one thing, obsession and paranoia are another.  Just my humble opinoin...~Box</blockquote>

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