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I dislike this article. It’s a little old now, but there are several things blisteringly wrong with this idea at its heart.
Purely for example, if you read a book on dragonflies and take offence because you see racial similarities between whatever race a person is and dragonflies, that’s an issue with you, not the source. You are relying on your opinion on what the source says. Since opinion varies per person, you should not dictate policy based on opinion. It’s an insurmountable hill to cater to whatever opinions are since opinion will always change - it’s an unsound basis for any form of logic.
Let’s do a thought experiment:
If a trailer-dwelling white person in the USA reads about the Vistani, and takes offence because they also live in a trailer, sees that as a negative, and assumes the Vistani are a potshot at him, is he right to be offended and call for a ban?
If a nimble Canadian POC (which is also a terrible term as it literally applies to everyone on the planet) reads about Elves and assumes they’re talking about him because he also happens to know how to use a bow and is skinny with a lithe frame, is he correct in calling for a ban? What if he sees being nimble as a negative for some reason (because positive / negative characteristics are opinions and what people see as negative is not objective)? What if he sees it as being racist by saying the source is calling ALL Elves nimble and therefore good at sports? “But they stereotypically have a different skin colour!” I hear you saying. So do Orcs. That argument applies here and if you can’t square that circle, then the logic falls apart utterly.
Personal identification with aspects of characters in a source material are not cause for alteration. You are an individual; you are not a group. Grouping people into camps based on visible traits or histories is a disgusting habit.
Treat people as individuals and racism dies. Treat people as groups and call out the differences constantly and you’ll have people fencing themselves in while calling themselves inclusive.
Fortunately i haven’t played dnd in years, not since i got into good games, but that does mean i don’t remember much and could be getting this mixed up better things, so take it with a grain of salt.
Darkness (as in the lack of light) has always been associated with evil and the underdark exists to be a place with no light, and with that in mind the creatures of the underdark more closely resemble deep sea fish than just associating dark skin with evil. The duerger for instance were just as evil but with ashy pale skin instead (only thing we’re missing is a translucent race), the color of the drow alone is an incredible stretch.
For the orcs; they don’t act like black people? At all? They act more like vikings with maybe a bit of Genghis Khan thrown in, and dreads (a hair style that arouse independently all over the world) alone aren’t enough to make that connection.
People can be offended over literally anything, but that doesn’t mean literally anything is offensive. We don’t need to indulge someone if they are coming up with nonsense reasons to be upset.
Darkness, yes, is typically associated with our instinctive fear of the night. Black, however, you may note, is not the night. The night is black. The colour black is associated with all kinds of things in all kinds of cultures around the world (oft-contradictory) and with many things in western cultures alone.
So black specifically (as opposed to being blinded by insufficient illumination) has not “always been associated with evil” … even in western cultures. In other cultures it gets even more unexpected. Black is, among its many meanings, the colour of mourning in the west; white is in China. Black is the colour of authority or professionalism in China; it’s literally the colour of heaven and of water. In the medieval west it’s the colour of the Devil and Hell.
I want to preface this by saying that I really shouldn’t be the one making this argument. See the disclaimer at the end of this previous comment. It’s a super tricky subject and I have neither the experience nor education to make my point properly. i’m gonna make the argument anyway though lol
For the drow, I’d like to point at the banger dungeons and dragons Community episode that they felt pressured to take down due to Chang doing blackface. I feel like that says enough. I don’t think the original creators meant to draw a parallel to dark skinned people with the drow, but it is what it is, and again - “dark elves = evil elves” is not good on its face. If the drow truly resemble fish (I’m not huge on DnD myself, have done one online campaign) then it’s way less bad, but in my experience the popular depiction is basically a black elf. (Why do the drow have dark skin if they live underground? That’s like the opposite of how that happens - translucent makes much more sense.)
As for the orcs - how would you say “black people act”? That’s a tough argument to maintain without quickly devolving into stereotypes. Historically, pseudoscience has been used to justify slavery and other mistreatment of black people for centuries, and the majority of that pseudoscience is “showing” that black people are both naturally stronger and dumber than white people. “Savages” was also a commonly used term - sound familiar? While this doesn’t make a direct correlation to orcs, who are both naturally stronger and dumber than humans, the dreads make it a bit iffy. And although dreads can be found all over the world, DnD was created by two white guys in America, so we really can’t ignore the context with regards to subconscious racism.
I understand your point about taking offense, but given the points I’ve made, I think calling this a “nonsense reason” to be upset is dismissive at best. If people truly take issue with the subtle racism embedded in this game, it should be changed - especially since the stereotype for nerds already has a lot of overlap with being racist. I, for one, would like to tell people i play games without them making jokes about me dropping the “gamer word”. Given that a lot of historically mistreated communities are just now getting a louder voice, change like this will come, and the best we can do is let it happen, even if we don’t quite get why it needs to be changed.
Been playing since I was 13, so just for reference, I’ve never seen a Drow that looked like a fish. They’re basically just purple-grey or black-skinned Elves with white hair. They are often portrayed as in shape, and extremely attractive. They are matriarchal and were considered “evil” because of their worship of Lolth.
(More info: Even Yveette Nicole Brown doesn’t agree with the decision to pull that episode of Community.)
I don’t think I’ve seen any traits associated with them that are also associated by racists to be “like black people” other than the use of the word “black.” I’d also state that they are black in such a way that humans are not. There is no trace of brown in their skin and never has been in any official material I’ve ever seen.
Good and evil for alignment was usually associated with the place the characters come from, at least in every campaign I ever ran or participated in. I had Lawful Good Barbarian who murdered and pillaged villages because that’s what Good was to him. It’s relative. I said it elsewhere, but I ran a campaign with all players playing Drow where all were Lawful Good because they were deemed so by Drow societal laws. It was fun and put everyone in an odd headspace for that game.
Damn bro I just typed out like 1000 words for the other comment! Appreciate you giving me more excuses to procrastinate work ;)
I don’t necessarily think that Drows are racist by default, but again, black skin = evil is iffy. That’s all I’m saying. If people are actually bothered, it should be changed. (Orcs are the ones with the parallels to racist stereotypes, and to me, a significantly larger offender.)
Also, I don’t agree with the removal of the DnD episode. I haven’t seen a single person actually argue for the removal - it was basically pearl clutching from NBC execs, as far as I know. But the fact that blackface was used to represent an “evil” race does more or less make my point for me.
This entire discussion is about surface level characteristics of these fantasy races, (at least from my perspective), and the beauty of DnD is that you can run and change whatever you’d like in a campaign. But I maintain that by default, the lore should attempt to separate itself from harmful stereotypes that are endemic in American culture.
I don’t mean they have the innsmouth look (which is a racist reference actually), i mean they have the same adaptation to darkness that many deep sea fish do (they aren’t all pale or translucent, and I’d like to point out that other evil underdark races are incredibly pale too).
As for orcs, yes I’m referring to stereotypes because that’s what people are accusing them of being. They match the very broad thing that every racist tries to apply to every race, because they were an evil species, but if you pick the brain of a racist you’ll hear things that absolutely don’t match dnd orcs. As for dreads, and I’d like to stress I’m only bringing this up because it was a point often brought up when this nontroversy was popular, they were independently developed across europe and asia.
If anything, the real racism was simply excluding other cultures entirely.