Entry tags:

race

Christmas thoughts on racism in fantasy... ;)
Visiting relatives for Christmas in a small break from legal studies.

On the list of gifts was the book 'Wicked', something I had avoided for years due to its connection with 'Oz', but that very same connection switched my interest recently.

Oz was written by Frank Baum, whose earlier writings had been a series of newspaper editorials in the years and months before Wounded Knee advocating the complete eradication of the entire race of 'indian savages'. He was of the opinion that 'we', as in the Americans, would never be able to make peace with so savage a people after what had already come to pass, and so it was best to just finish them off 'now' - in the late 1800s.

So I've had a dim view of the man and his works for the past few years after learning this fact about him. 'Wicked' however, takes his story and flips it - it is the tale from the Witch's point of view, and if I gather correctly she is more of a persecuted figure now rather than an evil woman.

So, that feeds into my own racial sense of justice...

To take the work of an avowed genocidal racist and flip it around, exposing a very different tale. It made 'Wicked' something I wanted to look into.


And that, along with watching my brother play World of Warcraft, reminded me of what it is that bothers me so much about games like 'Dungeons and Dragons' (DnD).

In DnD the default assumption is that the darker the skin of a given race, the closer to pure evil it will be. A cursory flip through DnD's imagery throughout the years will show this. In modern times, it has even begun to apply native American, African, and Asian imagry to the evil races... and the language used to describe such races as Orcs is not just similar, but is a near -exact- match to the language once used by writers like Mr. Baum in the 1800s when the called for the genocide of the native Americans.

Dirty, savage, brutal, uncivilizable people who roam the badlands seeking to kill 'us purer people' and 'rape our women' to create a new race of mongrels.

Well, I am one of those mongrels...

In DnD, I am even given the reduced mental and moral capacity that 19th century and 'modern racists' believed half breeds like myself would have...

Something quite far from the truth I should say...

In DnD in the moral axiom, which DnD players defend as 'simpler for easier gameplay', the top of all evil is possessed by the only truly black skinned race in the game - the Drow, the dark elves.


World of Warcraft got me thinking. It flips the usual DnD dynamic. In World of Warcraft the 'dark skinned elves' are not the evil ones. Rather, they are the holders of the traditional culture, close to the forest and nature, and the other elves broke away by committing sacrilege. In the video game, you never see the other break away elves, but you can find out about them if you to the game maker's website and read the world mythos.

They do show up in the table top RPG, WoW's answer to DnD.

In that game, no race is made presumptively evil for the color of its skin, even the light elves are not evil per se.


This 'simplified morality' DnD players like is actually not simple at all - it is an indoctrination into the core presumption of Anglo-European (and by extension American) racism - that only purity in lightness can be good, and both darker skin and mixed blood are paths to moral degradation and a lack of mental ability.

DnD in fact actually couches itself in the very kind of language once used to back violent racial conflicts committed by Europeans in the Americas, Africa, and Asia.

It is hardly innocent and hardly simple...


So... not a light Christmas message...

But, I do have to say that I am glad World of Warcraft is so popular. I can only hope that a new generation of fantasy fans does not have to get a racist-education in order to enjoy fantasy, and that we can finally see the end of this idea that racialism based norms are 'simpler' and better storytelling vehicles.

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EDIT:
There's a notion that in World of Warcraft characters spend a lot of time killing off indigenous races. Is this a racist setup for World of Warcraft? I would say both yes and no. Yes, in that it shows the protagonists come from cultures that are racialized. But no, in that it is not a world statement of racism as in DnD.

In DnD the evil races you kill are killed because they deserve to be victims of genocide. They are evil, morally and mentally lesser. Thus in DnD it is the -world- that is racist, not the people. In World of Warcraft, the people are racist and even the main races have race based conflicts, but the races are not morally, soulfully, or mentally bankcrupt. There are no races that are killed because it is morally pure to kill them. Thus in World of Warcraft it is the cultures that are flawed. World of Warcraft thus can support a notion that racism is wrong.

DnD advocates that racial conflict is right and just. Thus DnD's base, default assumptions are racialized and serve to promote racialism based norms. World of Warcraft's presents a world with flawed cultures, but actually shows that the largest of the race wars in its past was wrong. It is making a statement opposite from DnDs.