Boils Down to One Argument

[You can read today's post on The Higher Path here]


I can't imagine a worse subject to write about in this time and place than the relationship between race and D&D.  Therefore, obviously, let's do this thing.

I've spent too much time lately on Twitter, mostly because the news and the feel for the American landscape there is far stronger and more vital that what can be found on the news.  While individuals are screaming about a need to end the present regime, the News still thinks the upset is about George Floyd and not the literally hundreds of civil rights abuses going on in as many cities.  If George Floyd was raised from the dead today, and For Whatever Reason chose to claim that the cop had committed manslaughter and not murder, there would still be reason to scream blue bloody murder.  But ... that's not what I want to talk about.

On Twitter, I follow POCGamer, or Graeme Barber, who always has a lot to say about the convergence between race and D&D, regardless of whether or not the race is a real one.  All race relations are, from Barber's perspective, stand-ins for the pervasive entitlement that exists among the majority white players of the game.  The fictional races are cardboard, two-dimensional reflections of the way that whites look at non-whites, and he is quite clear about this:

"... They ascribe half Orcs the negative stereotyped features of POC; they’re brutish, incapable of having or enjoying high culture, and violent by nature. Half Elves are the exotic, sexualized Mulattos of the game, there to be sexually desired and act as diplomats because of their inherent charisma. Both are denied “normal” lives, both are rejected by both sides of their families. Neither reflects what would, in a world with many such hybrids and a long history of it, be a normalized and routine part of any culture where people from different groups mix and mingle. Why? Because D&D worlds are segregated ones."

There's really no way for a white person to walk this argument back from this position ~ and that is the power of the racial argument.  If I dispute the right of the speaker to employ the argument above, then I'm a racist.  If I dispute the premise, then I'm an apologist.  If I ignore the argument, then I'm entitled.  My only option as a "good person" is to agree unreservedly with the argument, whereupon I become "entitled, but woke."

In no way and at no time do I come through this clean.

The argument is ridiculous.  The stereotypical nature of fictional races is due to their not being real, and therefore can never be written about at length by armies of anthropologists.  The "violence by nature" is a narrative trope, intended to satisfy the needs of the game to produce experience; it does not represent a political statement.  All sexual desire stems from these things because a creation of humans, their images as well, and humans naturally have sexual desire for humans and the products of humans, regardless of the political fundamentals of those products.  No one here is denied a life because no life exists.  The reflection is arbitrary and speaks more for the describer of the reflection that for anything in the content.  And no part of human culture from the beginning of its existence has been mixed and mingled to any extent closer than they are today.  This does not argue that we are mixed and mingled, but that we have Never been, and in general, in the past, it has been Way worse.  But "bad" is relative, no one can experience the pain of history, so we write the pain of the present in the largest letters possible because this is the pain that is happening to US.

All of this defines me, in absolutist terms according to Twitter, Facebook and Popular Culture, as an alt-right, fascist, elitist and probably ignorant Nazi stooge.  All because I will not repeat the words of another person, regardless of color, merely because they think I should, and they have the names to call me what they will when I do not obey.

I am not a fascist because I do not act like a fascist.  This is plain to anyone who has seen me function day to day, in person, around other people.  I am not afraid of being called a fascist, because sooner or later, everyone, everywhere, will be called a fascist because this is The insult that cuts most people deep.  Most people do not like to be called a fascist.  It hurts.  People avoid things that hurt.

But.

For all of Barber's anger (as it seems to be) and sense of righteousness (written right there on the page), and likely pain (though I can't know for sure if he is a black man or no), he does not speak for me.  And his opinion of me, and my motivations for running a game world with non-humans in it, or what I feel politically about the world, is of no more importance to me than is the opinion of a man who IS alt-right, a fascist and a Nazi stooge.  I don't listen to anyone who builds a straw man out of me to cut it down ... and I don't care on which side of the political spectrum they stand, or how noble is their cause.  If they choose to create a man of straw in order to find justice in attacking my belief system, then they're wrong.

By definition.

I, a white man, run a racist world.  I do this because the world I know is racist.  Racism is wrong.  So why is my world racist, if that's wrong?  Since I am the supreme deity of my setting, why have I made my setting this way?

The Higher Path of D&D, the one beyond merely killing things and taking away their treasure, is the human experience of pitting Self against that which we do not think should be.  Not my self.  The Player's Self.  The players are entitled to fight for those causes they want to fight for.  I won't tell them how to do that; I won't shame them into fighting for causes I think are right and noble; I won't clear the road for them.  I won't judge them for their choices.  I won't encourage them to believe what I believe and I won't punish them when they don't.

I have no idea what a non-racist world looks like.  I have never lived in one.  Likewise, I've no idea what a non-sexist world looks like, or a world where no one starves, or where people are educated, or where every person acts like someone I'd want to know.  I have fantasies about this fictional, non-existent world ... but my fantasies are not the fantasies of other people.

And if I were to impose my fantasies on those of other people, for the sake of creating an "appropriate, positive political setting," then I would be committing the exact same sin that Barber and thousands of others commit when every political argument runs thusly:

Person A: Do you believe [statement]?

Person B: No.

Person A: Then You're a [label].

This describes at least three quarters of Twitter.  The rest is nice things people say to each other.

It is impossible for humans not to do this to each other.  Because we're human.  And trust is hard for us.  And we're much better at labelling people than we are at understanding them or counting them as complex.

But it's wrong.