I'm not very well today; I have a cold or something, with a temperature well below 98.6 F. I've laid down several times today and I've got a humidifier sitting next to me keeping my sinuses open; I'm covered in sweat, which is a good thing. I should be sleeping. Instead, I'm poking at a wiki page I wanted to get finished today; my own take on a master-race of orcs, the haruchai (name stolen from Donaldson's Thomas Covenant series and replacing the Fiend Folio's ogrillon). Not a friendly people.
Historically, they fill in a huge gap in the record, replacing the Mongols and several Mongol-related peoples, going back further in time and, of course, not being human. I sometimes wonder what a living Mongolian or Oirotian person would think of my co-opting their ethnic background this way; they probably wouldn't like it and no doubt that makes me a racist, after a fashion. Personally, being a member of which I consider to have been the worst race on the planet, I don't have much use for white people who think they're better that other people. I could have made a world where orcs and other races replaced the white people in Europe, but then I'd still be called a racist if I tried to represent history by saying the Mongol humans came out of the east and butchered millions of orcs, goblins and bugbears, then occupied their lands and forced those humanoids to pay tribute for two centuries to keep from being further slaughtered.
Facts are, people have not been nice to people. My representing the Mongols honestly, or as haruchai, won't change the barbarism perpetrated in the 13th century either way. Still, I might someday have to answer to someone who steps up to me, angrily, to tell me that he or she was born Mongolian and that I'm a pig. They will almost certainly be absolutely right. I'll have to make amends somehow when the time comes.
Mind you, I'm willing to make amends to those people, but I won't to you, if you're not Mongolian. No matter what race you happen to be, you have a lot of answering to do regarding the practices of your ancestors, just as I have; there isn't a single race on the planet that would be served especially ill by our depicting them as not human, given how we try to define human these days. Anyone and everyone who tries to defend their people's "perfect innocence" based on their skin colour simply isn't going back far enough in time. We all have our hands covered in blood.
That said, yes. For the sins and crimes of my awful people and ancestors, I feel reparations should definitely be paid. And were I elected to the House of Commons in my country, I'd be ready to get on my feet everyday and fight for that. I will sign any petition that calls for a standardized tax that will redistribute wealth.
None of that excuses me, naturally. I'm an entitled white person; always have been, and will always be incapable of being anything else.
But ... I've got to put these haruchai somewhere. And explain how they got there, and what they did with it. If it feels better, the reader should just realize that these peoples slaughtered the humans who were meant to live in Mongolia ten thousand years ago, and later in history co-opted the name of Mongol. I'm not actually saying the Mongols weren't human.
