Race in D&D part 2

I’m a historian by training. I spent 11 years in higher education, steeped in the past. I’m also white and middle class, and I haven’t experienced racial discrimination against me or my family. The process of checking my privilege is one of acknowledging my own place in the social fabric and admitting that I have no direct experience of racism impacting me negatively, indeed, as a white person, structural racism has benefited me. 

What this means for me intellectually is that I’m hesitant to speak on this topic, as someone who has not experienced the negative impacts of racism I’m to a degree on the outside of this issue. So when I comment about this I endeavor to “stay in my lane”, which means I will speak about only the things I’m sure about, 11 years of post-secondary historical training make me qualified to speak about parts of the past with some degree of authority.

So let’s start there.

Differences in power have existed in human society since it’s very beginning. When we switched over from being nomadic hunter gatherers to being agriculturalists we used various techniques to increase the yield of our food crops and produced surpluses. Food surpluses brought population increases, and these led to class differentiation. In short, one group controlled and distributed the food surplus, another group did the work to create it. The haves and the have nots, the dominant class and the marginalized. 

No credible historian argues that there are no power differentials in society, that is well established, throughout history there have been groups in power and marginalized groups. Fast forward to the Early Modern period (more or less) and you see the pattern there, one where certain racial groups are part of the marginalized groups in society, and other groups are part of the class in power (the dominant class).

Which brings us to colonialism. Colonialism is a project of resource acquisition that involves the use of military force to seize land and engage in cultural genocide. Certain cultural groups have used their technological and economic might to subjugate other cultures, take their land and control their destiny. Again, none of this is disputed or uncertain. 

The last layer here is language. Part of the colonialist project was a justification of widespread violence and outright theft. How do you justify mass slaughter and subjugation? The primary method for this was a process sometimes called “othering”, in essence, you claim that a group of people are lesser than you, somehow flawed, thus justifying treating them as less than human. You can do whatever you want to the “other” as they aren’t really human, they are corrupt, primitive, animalistic, uncivilized.

This process was all over the place, in personal correspondence, in thoughtful treatises, in popular language and discourse. It was scientifically justified and officially adopted by most Western nations and encoded in religion and popular discussion. Historically, there are thousands of examples of this process in action, and they all boil down to saying that foreigners, specifically darker skinned foreigners, were dangerous, represented a threat to civilization, and thus that any form of atrocity was acceptable in pushing them back.

That’s the historical piece. Now fast forward to today. You can see these ideas shot through the rhetoric of immigration. The fear of the animalistic, uncivilized “other” is everywhere in the dialogue about immigrants. They are characterized as rapists and thugs, we are told they will get into “our” countries and wreak havoc. Calls for violent reprisal and exclusion are common. 

For someone with a historical sensibility this is all quite obvious, it is the same process that lasted for hundreds of years applied to modern day. Outsiders are dehumanized and vilified to justify violence against them.

So when someone says that humanoids in D&D are “coded” as POC, it's shorthand for acknowledging that the same language and concepts applied to POC for hundreds of years are used to describe humanoid races in D&D. 

I don’t think there is any room for disagreement so far, the coding is there, it is based on hundreds of years of precedent, and it’s negative impacts are well understood and significant. 

The question becomes, what is to be done about it? 

There are at least three options I can think of that address this issue

Option one: remove certain races from the game, so take out the orcs, goblins, kobolds, bugbears, hobgoblins, etc, the “Inherently evil” creatures that look like people. D&D can survive just fine without them, there are plenty of monsters, and regular humans can be the opposition as well.

Option two: change the nature of these creatures in your game, so for example don’t make them “inherently evil”, give them cultures, stop having them “pressing up against civilization” and represented as “barbarians”. Make them just another cultural group in the game. They can still be in opposition to humanity, humans oppose each other all the time, but they wouldn’t be portrayed as the uncivilized, animalistic “others”.

Option three: leave the inherently evil races in the game, but make sure your players know that these are fantasy races, they do not “stand in” or represent anything in the real world. They are opposition for the player characters, no deeper than that. They are inherently evil to ensure that fighting your opposition in the game doesn’t create moral conundrums. I read recently that Gygax wanted inherently evil humanoids in the game for this reason, so PCs would not have to question the morality of slaughtering things and could get on with the game. It’s important to remember that even though the coding I have discussed is real, for some people games are just games, and they don’t “signify” or “code” anything. For them, an orc is just a bag of hit points, and is not meant to imply anything about the real world. 

The third option is one that I see in many people’s angry responses to this issue. They point out that for their group these associations are not meaningful, for them, orcs are just orcs, they don’t signify anything in the real world. It’s a game, not a simulation of the real world, not an analogy for any real life situation. That’s a legitimate perspective to take, even if it’s one you aren’t comfortable with. If you are going to go all in with the postmodern deconstruction of ideas that underpins these conceptual analyses you can’t legislate one fixed meaning for ideas. Orcs don’t mean the same thing to everyone, that’s one of the basic assumptions behind the idea that meaning is social and changes over time.

So all three of these responses are meaningful. You can’t change the signification of something for the wider population, you can’t control what something means to others. But you can be clear about what things mean to you and your group. 

Now a few words on motivations.

I live in Toronto, which for those unfamiliar is a fairly multicultural place. So as it happens I run games with POC at the table. That gives me the opportunity to talk to real people about this issue, to see what actual POC think about the idea. Twitter is a fun place, and I certainly value what POC on Twitter have to contribute to this discussion, but for me personally it is always better to speak to actual people about issues like this. I follow the same principle about issues of class, gender and any other issue of marginalization. This is important because in-group marginalization is a thing. Communities of color, queer communities, all communities exclude others to some degree, and minimize dissent. If you are going to stump for empowering marginalized people, you have to listen to what they all have to say.

And I have found that there are two camps on this issue. 

The first camp finds inherently evil humanoid races to be a problem. The coding is too strong and too unpleasant. I realize this is hard for someone who is not a POC to understand, it was hard for me to understand for the longest time as well. But this isn’t people being “snowflakes” or “triggered”, this is a real, visceral dislike for something that reminds them far too much of real world prejudices. And it can be particularly upsetting when it shows up in your fantasy game, some people play D&D to escape the real world for a while, seeing these ideas in their games is a bridge too far.

The second camp is aware of the coding but doesn’t care. For them, it’s just a game, and as long as they can play the hero along with their fellow PCs it’s all good. FWIW, I’ve seen pretty much the same thing here on Twitter, some self-identified POC don’t like the inclusion of inherently evil humanoid races, some don’t care.

Privileged people tend to homogenize others, to treat groups like their members were all of the same mindset. That in itself is a racial generalization, POC don’t all speak with the same voice. If you are going to be respectful of others and work to ensure that POC have a voice at the table you can’t just ignore POC voices that don’t fit the narrative. 

And, perhaps unsurprisingly, the people I’ve seen the most vocal about this issue of coding and orcs are white. When that happens I’m always a bit hesitant to get involved. POC don’t need to be saved by white people.

At the end of the day I decided to remove many of the humanoid races and remove the inherent evil alignment from the few that I kept around because it addressed the issue for the players at MY table. Those who were concerned about the coding felt more welcome, those who didn’t care about the coding didn’t care about the changes. And to be honest after 35+ years of D&D gaming, I was happy to change my game world in this way, it kept things fresh and different. To my mind that’s a win-win.

On a personal note, as a historian, some things you just can’t unsee. When I see inherently evil races in D&D it brings to mind the historical precedents, and I can’t shake that association. But that’s me, I spent more than a decade of my life learning about stuff like this, you can’t shut that off. 

But I don’t vilify people who either don’t see the association or don’t have an issue with it. Everyone is responsible for keeping their own house in order and gaming with the people at their table. My advice, for what it is worth, is to know your table, know your players, and listen to the people who are actually impacted by this sort of thing, see how they feel and what they have to say. Then do what feels right.