I gave my definition of what a person is. The only obfuscation I see going on is this insistence that racism can only apply to intelligent monsters in the MM that classify as "a person" while saying others are not people because of their shape or other fluff.
If it's wrong to have a racist description of one monster then it should be wrong to have that similarly racist verbiage used about any intelligent monster no matter what the physical description of that monster is.
It has nothing to do with whether the depiction of orcs needs to be altered. Y'all keep talking about subtlety and nuance but when anyone tries to discuss any tangential subtlety or nuance the dreaded all caps come out.
Ok, let us dig into this a little bit.
What other intelligent monster in the monster manual is considered "brutish and low"?
We've acknowledged that goblinoids are problematic (or at least, I have) and that gnolls are going back to full monster roots with their "only born from slaughter" aesthetic which works for them, because they've never inter-bred with anything. And, double word score, those people who want playable gnolls and having a rich gnoll culture, tend to build societies which are interesting and diverse enough without the racial stereotyping. So win-win on official lore and omakes.
What racial coding can we find with Psychic Fish? I can't think of any stereotypes that falls under. Psychic Squid-faced monstrosity? Again, I can't think of any stereotypes they are fulfilling.
So, we can talk about them, but other than "killing people is bad" we actually can't get anywhere with them. And that gets into questions like whether or not you should kill bandits on the road too. Which is an entirely different discussion about morality within DnD and has nothing to do with racial language.
I was just expressing my opinion that calling an orc a person IMHO does not make a difference. If the language and description is offensive, it's offensive.
Oh, well, yeah. if you are going to be blatantly offensive, than something is offensive. But, the nuance comes in with associations.
Saying that all crocodiles are cannibals isn't offensive, they are creatures that eat anything.
Saying that all Pacific Islanders are cannibals, that would be offensive. Not only is it not true, but it plays into stereotypes that are harmful to their culture.
Making a race of bipedal crocodile people, who live on islands in the vast ocean, practice elaborate tattooing, and have Cargo Cults... well, why they share visual similarities with crocs, it is clear you are making a reference to a certain group of people, so making them cannibals would be problematic.
To lightly tread on what I've observed over the last few hundred posts ....
1. I don't think that there is much debate about whether there has been racist rhetoric / imagery associated with, for example, orcs and drow.
Of course, some people will debate anything, but I don't think there is any serious good-faith debate about this.
2. I think that there is some, marginal, question as to whether or not those historical issues continue into the present, and to what extent.
This is the "yes, Tolkien might have said some bad things, and there might be some use of racist language and imagery regarding orcs today, and there might be questionable issues about some drow artwork and why underground dwellers are black, but we mostly avoid those racist tropes today." I don't think that's a great argument, but I can understand it.
3. From there, we get what a lot of people are discussing and/or arguing about. The specific issue of racist stereotypes (from Orcs, to Drow, to Hobgoblins, to Vistani, and so on) is generalized to a "no evil humanoids, they are all people."
It's the leap from (2) to (3) that is confusing to some people. I think I've sussed out the following positions:
A. Definitional. If it says humanoid, that means you are a person. Fin.
B. Aspirtational. Like real life, or Star Trek, personhood is just a matter of intelligence, and it's wrong to label anything intelligent as evil. Just because something wants to eat your brain doesn't make it evil, it just means it had a different, brains-are-yummy, society than you do. Maybe you're the evil one for not offering up your yummy, yummy brain?
C. Fantastical. This is not real life, and orcs, goblins, and mind flayers are not real. For that matter, demons, devils, and absolute alignments aren't real. It makes just as much sense to have an "evil but sentient race" like an orc as it does to have mind flayers and magic and spells, because of deities, or magic, or fantasy reasons.
Weirdly, even though (A) and (C) probably generate the most heat fighting, they are the most closely alike in that they are both just defining the problem away. (A) by saying D&D can arbitrarily define what creatures matter and don't matter by slapping a "humanoid" label on them, and (C) by saying that it's all fantasy, and therefore since alignments don't really exist, it doesn't really matter if some things are just eeeee-vil.
(B) seems like the most realistic one, but would also require ditching a fair amount of traditional D&D tropes (I would think).
This has given me a lot to think about, but it would seem that the issue goes far beyond merely racist rhetoric around orcs. As far as I know, there has never been a tradition of racist rhetoric around kobolds, or xvarts, or any of the other traditional evil-aligned humanoids monsters, and yet they are all part of the change.
But maybe I am misunderstanding the nature of the problem?
I bolded the assertion, and I think if that is the problem people are having (and from the likes I think it might be) then there is a lot of confusion being thrown around.
The issue with it, that I see, is that it ends up side-stepping a few things. After all, we don't have an issue with evil societies or evil groups. No one here is advocating for the removal of the Zhentarim or the Red Wizards of Thay, right? And I think if you were playing in a game where those groups were prominent, telling you players that a traveling group of soldiers is flying the flag of Zhemtarim is going to be an immediate sign of "those are the bad guys"
The thing is, that the Zhentarim are not the whole of an intelligent race. They are a sub-set with ideas and plans that make them antagonists.
So, if it isn't no evil people ever (which I don't think anyone thought, but I'm building a baseline) then what is the problem?
Evil from Birth.
An orc in the classical sense never has to make any decisions. From the moment of conception til they die, they are just evil. And that is the problem. That leads to it being perfectly okay to slaughter infants in their cribs, because those infants are evil already.
And this is why I don't see the gnolls or mindflayers as the same sort of thing. A gnoll is literally a monstrous man-eating hyena that walks on two legs. They started life as an innocent hyena pup, but through dark magic and consumption of a corpse slaughtered by a gnoll, they were twisted into something else.
Mindflayers used to be good people, until a parasitic, mindless worm was inserted into their head, ate most of their brain, and forcibly morphed them into a brain-washed drone of the mindflayer hive. In fact, stopping the "birth" of a mindflayer would be a good thing, because it saves the life of the person they were about to kill.
Excepting demons, who are literally formed from evil energy, and races like orcs and goblins, you can trace back to an origin point where they were not evil. And that is the problem with classical orcs and goblins. By being born evil, they literally have no choice, they cannot choose to be better, so slaughtering them wholesale is the only possible answer. And I have a problem with that.
