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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Kahuna Burger" data-source="post: 1307128" data-attributes="member: 8439">unfortunately, the whole idea of drawing a fantasy world as you look does have something to do with racism, bigotry and prejudice. Its not as strong or sinister as those terms have come to be connotated, but it is from the same base impulses. "I am normal, I am the default, if I'm asked to draw a person without reference to race, I will universaly make them my own race, because thats what a 'person' looks like."I'm also gonna go out on a limb and say that you are problably wrong in the second paragraph. If the main artists and editors of the D&D books had been black, or hispanic or asian, there would be many more examples of those races, but there would still be a healthy representation of caucasians. It is the self reference you mentioned joined with the constant reinforcement of the media which allows this sort of thoughtless whitewashing of the world. When you have a non-dominant personal expereince coupled with the input of the dominant media, you end up with a more mixed output. The responses to this thread have been very enlightening to me, and I'd like to thank the orriginal poster for broaching the question, even if there's been a lot of dodging of it. My view is that if you want to represent a world, you have to make an effort to activly think outside of the tiny corner of your life, and racially diverse models for both humans and non humans would be a good idea. Its very easy to stick a emotionally charged dismissal lable like "politically correct" on these ideas, but its really no better than calling the original situation "racist" - because once you boil the 'evil' connotation of that word out, it actually describes perfectly the benign mindset you credit for the non diverse illustration style. The unthinking assumption that the entire universe looks like you unless there's a "good reason" for them not to is essentially a racist one, though a mostly benign form of racism. Kahuna Burger</blockquote>

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