I have established in the first part that some authors try far, far too hard and fail. Then there are authors who I don’t think actually try, but who feel a vague obligation to send out messages in a Saturday morning cartoon sort of way. Adventuring parties with a human or two, an elf, a dwarf, and possibly a pet beholder to tag along in the bargain. Elves and dwarves bicker but get along in the end. There’s a point made about how race doesn’t matter, let’s unite against evil, la la la isn’t it nice. Villains may be racists, in that mustache-twirling, obvious fashion we can all dismiss. Black, white, simple. Racism is bad and we should all get along.
RA Salvatore, best known for his D&D tie-in fiction, takes this approach to a batshit conclusion. He dresses his bit antagonists up in Klan costumes.
The band and their missing fellows, then, were indeed members of Casin Cu Calas, the “Triple C,” an organization of vigilantes who took their name from the Elvish saying that meant “honor in battle.”
Given the reputation of Casin Cu Calas, whose favorite tactic was to storm orc homesteads in the dark of night and decapitate any males found inside, Drizzt found the name more than a little ironic, and more than a little distasteful.
“Cowards, one and all,” he whispered as he watched one man hold up a full-length black and red robe. The man flapped it clean of the night’s dirt and reverently folded it, bringing it to his lips to kiss it before he replaced it in the back of one wagon. He reached down and picked up the second tell-tale garment, a black hood. He moved to put that, too, in the wagon but hesitated, then slipped the hood over his head, adjusting it so that he could see through the two eye-holes. That drew the attention of the other four.
The other five, Drizzt noted as the fourth dwarf walked back around a corner of the wagon to regard the hooded man.
“Casin Cu Calas!” the man proclaimed, and held up both his arms, fists clenched, in an exaggerated victory pose. “Suffer no orc to live!”
“Death to the orcs!” the others cried in reply.
I’d like to be articulate about this but oh my god fuck this shit. Yes, this text is reproduced verbatim from RA Salvatore’s The Orc King. I made none of it up.
Some context if you’re unfamiliar with Forgotten Realms or D&D. Throughout the history of the setting, orcs have been one of the monster races: the basic game allows your character to be an elf, human, halfling, dwarf, or a half-elf. Later on, this expands to include half-orc plus a ton of whacky templates like quarter-divine semi-golem werewhales, but only if you fork over more cash and buy extra supplements. Until then, your dungeonmaster may let you play an orc or any of the other “monster races,” but the Player’s Handbook won’t provide much for you to build on. Orcs’ default alignment, in D&D’s broken morality system, is Chaotic Evil. In game terms, orcs are experience point fodder for adventurers. In the lore and published fiction, they rampage across the land, burning, pillaging, and raping as they go (half-orcs are mostly products of, yes, rape). Their origins are murky, but some of the lore has it that they were made by an evil god.
So: RA Salvatore has this Big Wonderful point to make about racism. The genius then leaps to a KKK analogue that persecutes and hunts down orcs. Except orcs in Forgotten Realms, until a fairly recent retconwere all evil monstrous barbarians who liked to rape human/elven women. Still with me? Congrats, we’ve got:
The issue is compounded further. Salvatore is famous for his “goodly” drow character, Drizzt Do’Urden. The drow are negative elves who live underground: they have snow-white hair and black skin, generally portrayed with black-purple complexion but on one curious occasion with African features and skin tone. They, and I’m sure you saw this coming, are a Chaotic Evil race and started off as monsters until the advent of Drizzt popularized them among gamers. Nowadays, a campaign will barely pass by without drow characters who see the evil of their people and abandon them to seek the “goodly” folks of the surface. Drow: all evil except for the few token ones plus this one group of hippies moon-bathing followers of a hunter goddess. Drizzt, moreover, is possessed of a sterling moral compass because he inherited it from his father. No, no, not because his father instructed him in it. It’s inborn.
Where were we? Oh yes, unfortunate implications. Except kind of not implied, since it’s put forward bald and bold in sky writing. Throughout his travels, Drizzt comes across the odd goblin or similar who’s a token “goodly” one as distinct from the rest of his kind. Perhaps he, too, was fortunate enough to have a Chaotic Good father? Goodness is in the genes. Your race defines your morals.
There have always been alienages. They have been around for as long as elves and shems have lived in the same lands. Ours isn’t even the worst: They say that Val Royeaux has ten thousand elves living in a space no bigger than Denerim’s market. Their walls are supposedly so high that daylight doesn’t reach the vhenadahl until midday.
But don’t be so anxious to start tearing down the walls and picking fights with the guards. They keep out more than they keep in. We don’t have to live here, you know. Sometimes a family gets a good break, and they buy a house in the docks, or the outskirts of town. If they’re lucky, they come back to the alienage after the looters have burned their house down. The unlucky ones just go to the paupers’ field.
Here, we’re among family. We look out for each other. Here, we do what we can to remember the old ways. The flat-ears who have gone out there, they’re stuck. They’ll never be human, and they’ve gone and thrown away being elven, too. So where does that leave them? Nowhere.
– Dragon Age Codex, entry “Alienage Culture”
In Dragon Age, city elves live in “alienages,” a word chosen presumably because ghetto is too real and therefore unpalatable. I haven’t the patience to find out what Bioware’s gibberish means so your guess is as good as mine, but the gist of this setting’s elves is that once upon a time they lived in harmony with nature and copypasta from the nearest Tolkien clone, then humans invaded their land and enslaved them. A cross between Jeanne d’Arc and Jesus (white) rose up against the human empire and liberated the elves, and then elves were conquered again. Many of them now live in walled-off ghettos in human cities. Every now and again a gang of human nobles burn down their houses and/or rape their women for shits and giggles. It’s not hard to see where the writers are going, and the lead writer David Gaider asserted that “The medieval Jewish ghettos were the original inspiration behind the alienages, yes […] all of Thedas started as a fictionalized version of European history, so that is indeed where it began.”
These elves look like this:
Looks Semitic to you? Me neither! Their religious beliefs bear no resemblance whatsoever to Judaism. I’m not even sure they have a culture beyond “generic oppressed elves in city.”
It’s not so much that fantasy minorities must correspond precisely to their real-world counterparts. It’s that this is a whole new level of erasure. Minorities aren’t even token characters anymore; they are in absentia, their oppression and plight appropriated by lily-white people with pointy ears, written by a lily-white dudebro from Canada who posits his race of horned non-humans as “sort of like what you’d get if you crossed Islam with the Borg.”1 Thankfully, his dwarves aren’t compared to Japanese victims of concentration camps or something, though I’m sure that could be worked into the sequel.
[1] Whose only representative in the game is a lunatic who murdered some innocent farmers for the crime of helping him. He’s also a Proud Warrior Race Guy to a tee if we haven’t piled on enough race essentialism already.
Cardboard Racism
You’ve seen it. I’ve seen it. You are ranting, justifiably, about sexism in a game or homophobia in a novel or racism in Avatar. Then along comes some twit who chastises you for wasting energy on something so “trivial.” Moff’s Law is invoked; tone argument is trotted out, and anyway don’t you have better things to do than complain about a videogame? Go out and fight for your rights. There are people dying out there.
For this, I blame cardboard bigotry and white-guilt fantasies.
White people generally don’t like to confront their privilege. They want to deny it, or derail the discussion by telling you how they were bullied in school because they were short and a POC got a job promotion over them thanks to affirmative action. Institutional oppression is especially difficult for them to grasp, because in school and through the media they are spoon-fed the most extreme and obvious forms of bigotry, which after a point is nothing more than preaching to the choir—every child knows it’s bad to want to kill somebody because they don’t look like you. What is left out is what they think are “little things.” Racial profiling at job interviews and words like gypped, to them, don’t constitute racism. They don’t recognize it as such, so why should anyone? It’s not racism unless someone’s being lynched to death while Klansmen stand in attendance. It’s not anti-Semitic unless you’re up to your elbows in neo-Nazi.
Popular media, then, reinforces this notion by refusing to engage with insidious forms of prejudice. Rather it wants to throw villains like ridiculous hood-wearing “CCC” orc-hunters at the audience or humans who are out to ravage elven women: simplistic caricatures everyone can safely and happily hate, then pat themselves on the back. They can’t possibly be racist because they aren’t like those villains; they aren’t promoting violence against minorities, so how can they possibly be bigots?2 This mindset absolves them of thinking of POC as “ethnic” and making racist jokes, because sticks and stones will break your bones but words don’t hurt anyone. It excuses them for thinking in terms of stereotypes (all Asians are hard-working children raised by strict parents who speak broken English; Indians, Chinese and Hispanics are out to steal our jobs) because everyone’s a little bit racist. It takes away nuances, and what is left is a reductive, kindergarten logic with which privileged folks employ in discussions of race politics. Like not seeing race. “I don’t see skin color, I see people,” a white person will protest. “I put ‘human’ in ethnicity fields, there is no race, everyone’s equal.” Which is naturally easy to say when one believes that “seeing race” equates to extreme life-and-death persecution.
[2]: this is how James Cameron’s Avatar works. Jake Sully isn’t like those evil humans who are bent on destroying the Na’vi and their habitat. No, he’s a paragon of virtue, the model of tolerance, and all should learn from him. That’s why he is a better Na’vi than any actual Na’vi, why they accept him as one of their own, follow his lead, and fall in love with him. This is also the fantasy of white people who would like to call themselves allies, and have POC accept them as such too. The Na’vi is, of course, an analogue of Native Americans. Only more blue and more magical, because real POC are boring and not sufficiently glamorous.
It’s a game white people can’t lose; when you use Hitler and the KKK as a yardstick, it’s easy to come off smelling like roses in comparison. How progressive it is to disagree with eugenics. How enlightened it is to not want to send Jewish people to concentration camps. Low standards, aren’t they, and nicely black and white? In the meantime, it’s okay to dismiss upset reactions of minorities as irrational, hysterical, and “unhelpful” to discourse. It’s just fine to accuse us of looking to be offended. It’s wonderful to fetishize Asian women and coo over how exotic we look. Those little things just don’t count.
What about when media does engage with checking your privilege? Border House invokes an interesting example from Mass Effect concerning Wrex and Krogan, a warlike species that has been hit with a genetic plague that dooms them to a low birthrate forever. It’s not a bad one, really, and as Alex notes, it hits all the right parallels. Intent is magic. What-about-me derailing. Unfortunately, we are still dealing with racism directed at frog-aliens who look like this:
It’s even further removed from real-world racism. While I can certainly agree that the conversation Border House quoted could provoke useful conversations and nudge people toward unpacking their privilege, I still feel it isn’t as confrontational as the discussion would have been had the dialogue occurred between a white character and Jacob Taylor, a black man, in Mass Effect 2.3 If game discussions I have seen are any judge, the audience is much likelier to make wishy-washy threads about the horrible oppression that elves and dwarves have suffered at human hands, or how nasty Ashley Williams of Mass Effect is for comparing aliens to animals. Rare is the thread that ventures anywhere near the land of “hey, maybe this is kind of like race relations IRL.” If a topic like this miraculously appears, it will quickly be dismissed and shut down, because nobody wants politics and the PC police in their videogames.
[3]: Of course, you can argue that in the game’s setting humans are too busy dealing with interspecies relations to care about distinctions between human ethnicities and cultures anymore. Okay. I doubt it, but okay. But a lazy way out, all the same.
That’s the crux of my argument. You want to address racism? Great, lovely. Go ahead. But don’t sugarcoat it by making it about amphibious aliens and orcs. Don’t even make it about bullshit “blood purity” and magic. You want to do this? Do it properly. Shove it in your audience’s face and be not afraid. Don’t soften the blow, don’t misdirect, don’t beat around the bush. Make those elves black. Have different human nations in your fantasyland, some inhabited by dark-skinned people, some not. No, I’m not asking everyone to be literal-minded and painstakingly imitate life and history, but don’t insult me by pretending that you are making some profound point about tolerance when all you really want is to talk about the suffering of pointy-eared Caucasians.
“Like color blindness. “I don’t see color, I see people,” a white person will protest. “I put ‘human’ in ethnicity fields, there is no race, everyone’s equal.” Which is naturally easy to say when one believes that “seeing color equates” to extreme life-and-death persecution. ”
Um…. can I ask that you possibly not appropriate my disability to describe that? Because it’s getting to the point where the constant talking about how ‘color blindness’ is bad without acknowledging the appropriation means I’m not actually comfortable telling people about my disability for fear that they will think I’m being a racist asshat.
I don’t think anyone’s going to call you a racist asshat for saying you’re literally color-blind. People can understand context and all that.
I apologize for the use, but I’m not the one appropriating the term as such, since white people do insist word for word that they’re “color blind” (hence the quotation marks) in race-related discussions. What’d you prefer me to say? Drop the point entirely? Qualify with “skin color”? I’m not being sarcastic, I genuinely would like not to offend.
No, but I shouldn’t have to have that ‘literally’ there.
And I am aware that you’re not the first person to appropriate it. And hardly the only. For a start, I’d prefer you put it in quotes, which you didn’t do. That would at least make it clear that this isn’t your word, you’re using the word other people use, despite its problems. That would be a start.
The other problem though is that almost any time I see people address the problem with that phrase, what is never acknowledged is that it is appropriating the experience of people with disabilities. (And really the problem with the word is more the ‘blind’ than anything else, adding more qualifiers to it or changing them would just make it appropriation of blind people’s disability, instead of colorblind people’s.) By never addressing the appropriation it can create a situation where it seems like the only problem with the word is the race privilege denying, and that the appropriating disability as metaphor is okay. Which it isn’t.
To be fair, your article isn’t discussing disability, and I certainly don’t want to distract from the point you are making, especially seeing as I’m coming from a place of white privilege and could easily miss my privilege, and that’s something I’d rather not do. But I’d also prefer the appropriation were acknowledged.
(Other ways you could fix it would probably be dropping the term altogether; the point could be made without ever calling it ‘color blindness’)
That’s true, and I’m sorry that I acted as part of the problem here–it’s very shitty that your disability has been assimilated, by white folks and POC alike, into the language of race politics.
I’ve dropped the term, added in a “I don’t see skin color” and removed anything to do with “blindness.” I realize this is a bandaid solution, though, but I promise I’ll do better in the future (though, of course, this isn’t worth much to you).
as I’m coming from a place of white privilege and could easily miss my privilege, and that’s something I’d rather not do.
Basically, I’m not saying you should sit down and take it when people appropriate your disability; I certainly wouldn’t want to shut you down for it. But what made me uncomfortable was that, in your initial post, you acted as if there were plausible situations wherein you talk about your disability and someone rides in to silence you with NO YOU RACIST ASSHAT. “I’m color-blind, stop appropriating this term” is very valid and irrefutable. It’s not going to provoke anyone into calling you racist. So yeah, that point… bugged me.
Well it’s not really a rational fear; I’m kind of feeling like if I’m to list “colorblind” on my list of traits where privilege or lack there of comes into play I’m worried people will read it that way. If it’s in a disability context already then nobody is likely to read it that way, but if I’m, say, putting it on a profile page I’m afraid they will.
Ah, yeah. I see what you mean now. Didn’t think of that.
Moff’s Law, eh? Probably should remember [to spread) that one.
Think I may have a stronger revulsion to these tropes/themes/whatever when its in a gaming format, probably because you interact with the material.
*reminded how much I loathe world of warcraft*
-Ansi8
Please. The discrimination gnomes suffer is a very real and terrible problem. /deadpan
Well, the problem with confronting race in any real way in roleplaying games is that the protagonist is generally assumed to have privilege. Part of it is a matter of expense (dialogue is expensive to record, recording alternate conversations for female protagonists or POC would significantly increase the cost) and part of it is that writers and designers are often just plain unwilling to treat the player-character as a genuine member of an oppressed class.
As a result, even if a player-character is a woman or a POC or queer, they’re treated as a straight white male. Take Dragon Age. Any indication that the player-character comes from an oppressed class is either nonexistent (if your protagonist is queer, a POC or a woman) or limited to single lines in dialogues or barkstrings if you’re an elf or dwarf.
The fact the player-character is privileged reinforces the idea that the game can’t get into these issues because it just makes no sense for the player to magically be immune to privilege. This, along with the reticence that a lot of designers feel to dig into it, and the aversion that most publishers have to dealing with issues like this, ensure that we’ll probably not overcome the issue of depictions of minorities and women in games until there’s a big shift in development culture.
That said, it’s not always that bad. There were queer characters in the last Fallout game that were fairly deftly handled (thanks no doubt to the fact that Tess Treadwell, JE Sawyer, and other Obsidian devs seem to have more than a passing acquaintance with queer theory and gender theory) and games like The Sims where control over the narrative is entirely ceded to the player have room for whatever kinds of depictions the player wants to puzzle together.
You know you’re right. take the Video Game Saints Row (1-3) all of the standard character mode is a white guy. Look at the screenshots.http://www.facebook.com/SaintsRow#!/media/set/?set=a.178422198875629.47455.158667724184410
Is a straight white guy.
I found my way to this article from your more recent post on deconstructing elves, and I have to say both are great reads. That said…
You’re very dismissive of Bioware’s city elves having their inspiration in the Jewish ghettos, despite being pale and gingery and not followers of a Judaic analague religion. In affect you’re accusing them of drawing too vague an inspiration for the racial and cultural oppression to be meaningful.
So it would be better for you if they actually resemble semitic people, perhaps lead by pointy eared rabbi? Really nail a Jewish parallel down in the same way the game does with the Christian church and its messiah and crusades? Would that make the portrayal of racism more effective?
If not that, than what you’re effectively saying is that any kind of inspiration from real world history is off limits, even, or perhaps especially, if it’s a vague one. Which would raise difficulties for well.. almost every work of fiction ever.
I’ll be the first to admit that Dragon Age’s take on racism is pretty damn ham-fisted most of the time, but come on, give them some options here.
Are you Jewish? If so, I’d absolutely welcome what you have to say specifically re: the city elves thing, and if you wish to take me to task for it I would stand corrected. If not, I’m going to have to ask: do you belong to any oppressed ethnicity?
Er, no. The more vague, the better actually, because it’s less pretentious and extremely shitty: Bioware’s take isn’t vague at all. And, yes, I think taking “inspiration” from real oppressive experiences of minorities is offensive. It’s called, I think I’ve already said, appropriation. It’s possible to do with respect and sensitivity, but Bioware lacks neither. It requires a good, mature writer, and Bioware has none. You need research, you need insight, you need intelligence, you need a host of things that Bioware and clueless neckbeard dudebros don’t care to develop.
To appropriate whatever minority experience they would like to? You’re defending some enormously privileged douchebaggery, here. Is that what you really want to do?
Not Jewish I’m afraid, no. Just about as generically white as it comes, to be honest. I appreciate that likely dulls my point considerably, but I’ll have a go at making it anyway.
If you’re saying vague is better, then really these ghetto elves are about as vague as it gets. As you said, they don’t have anything in common with Judaic beliefs and don’t look classically semitic. The only observable connection is that they’re the diaspora of an old nation, now oppressed in ghettos.
Much as Gaider needs to know when to shut up (eg, the Islamist Qunari thing) in this case he’s just saying they stated with the idea of Medieval Jews, and it seems the oppressed diaspora element is what came out of the process.
If they’d appropriated the long and tragic history of the Jews to create as paper-thin an analogue as they did for the Christian church or lazy French and Italian stand-ins, I’d agree completely.
As it is, I think there’s a line between appropriating a culture or people, and drawing inspiration from some elements of it. In the case of the city elves at least, Bioware stays on the ride side of it.
Arses. “Right” side of it at the end there.Tsch.
Not gonna lie, I’m completely unsurprised.
Pretty much everyone cottoned on to the “alienage” thing; Gaider’s quote only confirmed it. Many people were also uncomfortable with “the Tranquil Solution” in DA2 too (i.e. Nazis), but I haven’t played that one.
You’re still defending some shittily-written juvenile hack-job that is incredibly, incredibly privileged and erasing. From a position of incredible, incredible privilege and often erasure.
I’m Jewish and I have to say, I actually took offense at your statement. What, because she doesn’t have a crooked nose and frizzy hair, she can’t be Semitic? I know a couple pale-skinned, redheaded fellow Jews. And I look like any other white person, and that in no way diminishes my Judaism.
She also has prominently pointy ears, but I take your point and apologize.
Not, even so, that the elves’ culture has anything to it beyond “we are oppressed by humans boohoo
.”
I’m very confused. Why do you always try dismiss racism in fiction on the basis of historical precedence? Can we never, ever, have racism in fiction with absolute disregard for real world parallels?
In one case, you’re ranting at the real world parallels between KKK and this “CCC” where orcs are a “monster race” hunted by the “fairer” and “nobler” race but then you’re also dismissing when the oppressed are the “fairer” and “nobler” race for a turn where the initial problem you tell us is that “they don’t look anything like their historical analogue” ie. Semitic people. It’s almost as it there is no way of “winning” with you, so I’m just not getting it, I’m afraid. Maybe I’m a dolt but it seems to me like whatever the case be with racism in fiction, you have rationalised a way of invalidating it on historical grounds somehow.
Could you point me to more meaningful portrayal of racism in fiction?
Uh, the problem with the CCC is that it’s implicitly comparing orcs to black people. Orcs being, you know, objectively monstrous and–previously in the game rules–also objectively evil. Do you, like, not see the problem there?
I’m not sure why you are concerned over “winning” with me, because it sounds rather disingenuous and rather missing the point. Would you like to clarify your position?
As for meaningful portrayals, why, Octavia Butler for one.
Do you think it would be possible for orcs to be rehabilitated? The Elder Scrolls seems to have done a particularly good job of making their orcs part of the game world, when they were previously just complete monsters.
Can we never, ever, have racism in fiction with absolute disregard for real world parallels?
No. These works of fiction are created by people who live in our world, and that bleeds over into everything we make. Whether people care to admit it or not, real-life race finds its way into fictional worlds because we live in a world where race matters. In our world, race determines a great deal about who is important, who is expendable, who has power, and who is allowed none.
It’s almost as it there is no way of “winning” with you, so I’m just not getting it, I’m afraid.
There is a way to go about asking that doesn’t dismiss or derail the OP. Like, “I’m not sure I understand exactly what the problematic elements are. It seems to me that they’re avoiding stereotypes by presenting Fictional Group A that way, but there seems to be more going on with that. What are you seeing that I don’t?”