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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mannahnin" data-source="post: 9407748" data-attributes="member: 7026594">False for this use case.  Not valid.  Inapplicable.Not that you're being deceptive.I don't know that I'd say it used to be more elastic.  Rather that the meaning changed over time.Race used to be more synonymous with the people of a country or region.  The English considered themselves a distinctly different people than the Irish, and vice-versa.*  They spoke (until pretty close to the modern era) of the English Race and Irish Race as distinct.  Even though we now know that the distinctions between those two peoples are much more cultural than genetic or physical.But then, during the colonial period starting a few hundred years ago, the word started to be used in a different way, more (pseudo)scientifically-based, delineating between ethnic types defined by physical characteristics like skin color or eye shape, more than by nations or cultures.  It was used as part of a justification, on (spuriously) objective grounds, for the exploitation and dominance of some groups by other more powerful groups.  To varying levels, but up to whole categories of people being treated as chattel, more like animals than human beings.And unfortunately the world we live in is still grappling with the aftereffects of this categorization, and using it politically in ways that impact people's lives.  There is documented statistical evidence of people being treated differently, under the law and in other social circumstances, despite legal reforms over the past half century or so.  I was just reading a story about a black baseball player from a few decades ago being shocked when a white player willingly drank from a bottle he had been drinking from.  Many communities in America have lost once-common public swimming pools, because people abandoned them once they were desegregated.  Show Me a Hero is a recent critically-acclaimed HBO miniseries about a small city in New York grappling with the impact of redlining, and trying to block housing integration, in the 90s.  While I was a teenager.  In recent years we've seen a large-scale organized protest movement trying to push reform for police abuse of force, especially some apparent statistical disparities in what "races" suffer how much of it.Given all this political and social baggage that the word still has, it makes sense to disassociate our fun elfgames from this context and the division and categorization of people in it by "race".  Especially given how assigning different "races" mechanical differences kind of reifies the concept of how race used to be seen in the real world in terms of being an objective basis for disparate treatment.*(And, relevant to the Pendragon campaign I've been playing, set in the late 5th century, back before there was a people who called themselves English, that place was occupied by a whole bunch of peoples who considered themselves different "races", including Cymric Celts, Cornish, Saxons, Angles, occasional Bretons, Franks, Scots, Danes, later Normans...)</blockquote>

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