Diversity & Dungeons & Dragons

But it's very easy to see that western culture has ingrained components seeing non-white folks as lesser.

Westerns? White? or Americans? This sentence also bags a lot of cultures together. Would you say that current german culture has ingrained components seeing non-white folks as lesser? I mean, they keep taking all those refugees despite all the opposition and terrorist attacks they suffered and are pretty committed to not making the same mistake. Or estonian culture? Icelandics?

This goes back to that point I made earlier: I feel this is mostly an "american-centred" discussion with american-centred views on black vs white being projected into the game. Again, the way things are dealt with in the States are questionable at many levels and from various perspectives (like anywhere else I believe). And again, I agree that reducing discrimination makes perfect sense. Just focused on the relativity of all of this

Anyway, just listening to this "black people" and "white people" feels weird. It's just people. An American citizen was brutally killed by the police for no reason.

Thank you. We can only move forward if we stop seeing ourselves as different races and start seeing ourselves as a singular species.

Thank you. We can only move forward if we stop seeing ourselves as different races and start seeing ourselves as a singular species.

But again - this discussion is not about any of that. It's about what non-white and marginalized people say about the published D&D material and the efforts, however belated, by WotC to address the concerns. Why the continual effort to widen the discussion to matters not directly on point?

But again - this discussion is not about any of that. It's about what non-white and marginalized people say about the published D&D material and the efforts, however belated, by WotC to address the concerns. Why the continual effort to widen the discussion to matters not directly on point?

In my case, it was to ask why religious intolerance is still ok and where do we draw the line on not having predefined alignment? (which totally got lost) Why should sentient and highly intelligent creatures such as demons be strictly evil? I mean, all of them?

The discussion has narrowed to distribution of ability score bonuses when making player characters, but I think important context is gets lost unless you look at the bigger picture.

The fact is that in some D&D settings there exists races of people that are born inherently dumb, irredeemably evil, or both, and that they are a plague upon the land coming to kill you, and it is virtuous to slaughter them and their children. "The only good Orc is a dead Orc." This matches really close with white supremacist beliefs and narratives, and how white supremacists describe Muslim and Black people and justify their hatred.

It is a reasonable thing to wonder why the Orc gets paired with dark skinned people. But that has been going on since Tolkien invented Orcs, which were dark-skinned. Since the publication of the Lord of the Rings, white supremacist groups have taken his work to be an allegory of the struggle of the aryan race*.
To this day, I've seen white supremacy groups making memes about immigrants being depicted as the Orcs in the LotR movies.

Anyway, all of this isn't D&D's fault exactly, but the creators built the game and its fiction and its language on top of this mess. Sure, Orcs are green now and not black but the association remains. And it's bothered people for a long time, especially people of color.

I think it's worthwhile looking at this connection to our hobby and untangling it.

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* Tolkien was very vocal about not taking his work as allegory.

The problem there is it erases part of the problem. Yes, there's a problem with police killing Americans, but there's a bigger problem with police killing a particular group of Americans at a rate higher than another group. Yes, the goal is to see everyone as one, but you only get there by actively recognizing that's not the case right now.

Actually, if you take into account the number of violent crimes committed by said group, then they are actually statistically under-represented in police killings. not saying it's okay, I'm just making the point that there's more than one way to look at it

Deleted by Keleth

I have no idea how this is relevant. Have you felt excluded or demonized (heh) by D&D published materials as a result of this? Have you registered this as a deeply felt bigoted exclusion with WotC? Or is this one of the whataboutisms I mentioned earlier?

So, just for teasing, you're saying that orcs and drow can't be evil because minorities or non-white think it is wrong to assume a race is evil as that is the permisse for racism which they are victims of... but it is ok to say another race is evil to the core because... bible I guess?

Also, I think religious intolerance is an issue as serious as racism nowadays, so if one is raised, why not the other? Hell! I could even question the social rules and how they apparently tend to end with male PCs harassing female NPCs! The question is, if they are going for this and are truly worried, are they going far enough?

ooo fire here 😅 Though I understand this is not meant to be in favour of the "crimes" from either "side", others may not understand this that way (That "it's not okay" will be missed for some reason or another). I would support the context behind the numbers argument someone used earlier. Assuming those number are right, them I'd suggest they are confounded with social status and wealth, making it not directly interpretable. I mean, in a brutal statistical way :D

How dare you say this is a white thing. Look at the major genocided in the 20th century, few of them were white on black violence. Rwanda, Cambodia, the current anti Muslim pogroms in China. I'm deeply offended. Not as a white supremacist, but singling out the one race it's fine to do so to. This is a human problem, and truth be told, the white plague has been toward more freedom and equality not less.

My issue with this is that you don't use the word bigots or racists. The default for "bad people who were racist" is by default White. Anyone from any country I see talk about this issue, it automatically defaults to white people.