Stereotypes

Regarding my last post on race.  Let me start by saying that I know how unpopular the topic is; that the constant thrust of identity politics is an unwelcome nuance that has made itself unwelcome in every other discourse; and that I don't care to talk about it any more than most readers do.  My feelings are that a subset of humanity that has learned how to monetize group-think into crowd-sourcing, as a way of granting themselves money and power by selling "racism" as a product, purporting to "cure" it where in fact they're only interested in how much cred they can build before the press catches up to reveal what a bunch of hypocrites they are, is as tiresome for me as it is for you.  Therefore, I apologize for discussing the racism in the DMG.

The subject came up because I have been working through the DMG and race was the next heading.  I would have preferred to skip it, but I have this OCD-influenced sense of do-not-skip-a-subject-just-because-you've-written-about-it-before uniformity that produces an echo in my head of some reader saying, "Hey, you skipped that heading!  What, are you afraid of it?"

This causes me to painstakingly address every fucking stupid thing Gygax wrote, even when it brings me no pleasure.

It should come as no surprise to my readers that there is a great deal about D&D, including "original" D&D, that I think is shit garbage.  I have no more love for OD&D than did those people in the 80s who screamed for the do-over that was 2nd edition, that became 3rd, 4th, 5th and whatever will eventually come next, once 5th stops selling in game stores.  The difference between me and those people who rushed to other versions of the game isn't that I hated AD&D less, it was that I didn't wait for others to reinvent the game for me.  I knew what worked with the original systems and I kept those things ... and burned everything else to the fucking ground.  That is why, as I go through the original book, I'm explaining why I've changed it or ditched it.  There is virtually nothing where I can say, "Yeah, exactly as the book says."

Which should indicate that I have thought and thought about every phrase and nuance on every page of this book for a long, long time.  I haven't pieced it together from my "feelings" or my "gut instinct," because I have decades of table fights to draw on for what works in a game and what doesn't.  Those first ten years, with the sort of fiery, passionate, angry young men who related to me as friends, were very educational.  I didn't have friends who weren't well-read; I didn't have friends who didn't go to university and didn't get 3.0 averages or better; I didn't have friends who accepted things "because that's the way it was"; I didn't have friends who had "faith" in things.  I ran with semi-violent misanthropes who lived lives of social leprosy and we held each other accountable like we were Thomas Paine measuring how much blood we were ready to sacrifice for our personal hill.  Any poor soul who entered into that lion's den without those credits or backbone just didn't survive.  These guys — and later, gals of the same stripe — played D&D, they loved D&D, and why they were liberal down to their socks, they weren't forgiving liberals.

So we fought and inconsistencies were addressed, with rules that dictated behaviour being pushed out of the game.  Later, after we got older and all those people went off to live different lives, or died of one thing or another, I just went on.  Forty years rebuilding this game; I feel a long, long way from those original books.  I haven't read much of this content I've been deconstructing this last month in 15 years or more.

For the record, I'm a grognard but I'm not "old school."

Thing is, still talking about the last post on race, a lot of people really like the cliches.  They like having everything simplified; they like that elves are always this way or that.  They like that they know how the dwarves will react.  They like that the entire race fits a stereotype, because the stereotype is predictable.  For a lot of people, who don't detect nuance when they witness it, predictability becomes a question of putting things into plainly marked boxes ... and it upsets them when the thing in the box doesn't act like expected.

See, predictability is one of those things that makes life tolerable.  When you have to go to your job, and you know its going to make you tired or there will be people there you don't like, the one thing that enables you to make it through the day is that you WILL get your coffee from the same place you always get your coffee, the annoying co-worker will be annoying in the SAME WAY, the stupid requests from your boss will be like the other stupid requests that are ALWAYS being made ... and while it sucks, at least it sucks in a bland, numb, I-can-forget-about-this-shit at 5 o'clock sort of way.

Bad days happen when the coffee place is unexpectedly closed, or the water has been turned off, or you woke up late and you're stuck waiting in a line-up that's never there when you usually get your coffee.  It's bad when that co-worker has been invited to a cousin's wedding and now you have to hear about THAT all day.  It's bad when your boss is being visited by a bigger boss, and now the two of them are "assessing" everyone.  Change is bad.  Unexpected is bad.  5 o'clock is suddenly way farther away than usual.

When people don't pay attention to things — which is virtually everyone, all the time — they have a tendency to assume those things haven't changed ... even though it is now thirty/forty years since the 1980s and hey, look around, politics and other things have changed a fuck of a lot.  All those rock-solid bits of infrastructure and institutions that you continue to assume haven't really changed are on the verge of collapse.  Some of you who send your kids to school have noticed that, hm, those don't seem to operate according to the same precepts now.  Some, however, haven't noticed; and don't want to notice.  They want to go on thinking that everything is fundamentally the same, because, well, if they're not, then what?  What are we to think?

9/11 probably wouldn't have happened if America hadn't gotten so cavalier about their foreign policy in the 80s and 90s.  Hurricane Katrina wouldn't have devastated New Orleans if the city had spent the money it should have spent on the dikes, that it did spend for a hundred years before the 1960s changed which party Louisiana started to support.  Texas in February wouldn't have happened if attitudes towards providing service hadn't given way to attitudes about whose pockets need filling.  But we don't pay attention to any of those things; we're just suddenly SURPRISED when a bridge falls down or a dam breaks, or an ally gets unexpectedly invaded by someone we thought was defanged, or a disease rolls along and whacks so many people we have to go 70 years back to find a comparison.  And because we don't want to believe things have changed so hard, we're ready to act stupidly, every day, screaming at the coffeeshop for not having our coffee or for daring to have a line-up, or screaming at a co-worker for daring to look forward to a wedding, or screaming at our boss because we don't want to be assessed today.  All that failing to look at the details makes us forget that coffee places do not exist for us personally, or that the co-worker is also a person, or that we're not at a job for the purpose of dragging ourselves through until 5 o'clock.

People conveniently forget that a book about the game was written in another time, where another set of attitudes and different rules about publishing and editing existed.  They remember too keenly that something happened just ten years ago ... until they suddenly realize that no it didn't, it happened 30 years ago and look at that — "Hm.  I must be getting old."  Only, that's not all that's happened.  There are people who have been born, grown up and become police officers between the time you thought that was 10 years ago and now.  You're not just getting old.  Your belief system is growing irrelevant.

Ouch, eh?  "Jeez man; lay off, will ya?"

The shouting and noise about racism in D&D arises out of the comfort-level that arises with some people that certain things should just be left as they are.  Unfortunately, the predictability-fetish that causes a group of people to hold onto "elves always being such-and-such" tends to reflect poorly when the same conversation turns to how black people should act or how gays, lesbians, bi, trans and questioning people should act.  All this "change" is so darned unpredictable.  "What do they want now?  We gave them this — wasn't that enough?"

Now, OBVIOUSLY ... and please let me repeat that, because I think it needs to be ... OBVIOUSLY, your feelings about elves do not make you a "racist."  Anyone who makes that argument is hunting for a paycheque.  However, since every nook and cranny is being picked through by liberal-minded-profit-mongers for those at whom they can point a finger, the habits of defending a Victorian-style stereotype of one kind raises alarm bells when looking for those willing to defend the Victorial-style stereotype of ANOTHER kind.   And since to those people, if it walks like a duck, and talks like a duck, well ...

In the late 1970s, when I was a young kid between 10 and 14, once in awhile I'd get sick and thus stay at home from school.  Whenever that happened, my mother would leave me in the family room with the television, while I covered myself up in blankets and watch the television I couldn't watch when I was at school.  In those years, at 10 a.m., the show I never missed was Donahue.  Donahue was a morning talk show very unlike those talk shows that came later.  Donahue featured the sort of guests that today we find on something like Bill Maher ... except Donahue wasn't a moronic secret republican toady and the members of congress and the senate, as well as professors and other writers, were EDUCATED ... not like the bonehacks in Congress now.

Some noobs to this blog might disbelieve that a 12-year-old kid could watch a show like that religiously, but I know most gentle readers here are muttering, "Figures."

Donahue had a regular guest on, whose spiel I caught three or four times (I could watch every day in the summer).  I don't know his name.  He was black; he was very large, and tall.  He dwarfed Donahue, who wasn't such a large man anyway.  And he would stand and rail at the audience, who were invited to get up and ask questions, that EVERYONE was racist.  Everyone.  There were no exceptions.  This man was educated, respected ... and though I can't find out his name (someone older might know who he was, but this being before the internet and my being young, I just don't know), his arguments were irrefutable.  He made the same arguments then that some will still make now.

The discourse, he said, was so polluted, that it's impossible to talk about racism without making a judgement that's racist.  It's impossible to be a white person and take any stand, however liberal, however well-meaning, that hasn't been soaked in racist thinking, a racist upbringing and a racist's rhetoric.  The language doesn't exist that will truly enable us to understand truthfully what any of us feels about any other race, regardless of what race we are.  The ship that would let us solve racism by talking about it has already sailed.

I think that's true.  I've seen nothing over the last 40+ years to convince me it isn't true; and when I wrote the last post about racism, I assumed it was true when Gygax & crew set themselves down to reflect Tolkien's conception of what fictional races would be like.  The "embarrassment" of it no doubt comes out of a certainty by Gygax & crew that despite the 1960s and 70s, nothing had "really changed."  To them, the world of the 1970s was close enough to the 1950s that being white dudes writing a book about fantasy and a game didn't feel much like it had anything to do with politics or being white.  The idea that they were inventing cheap stereotypes might have occurred to them ... but they were literary stereotypes, not political ones.

I could go on about the annoyance of literary stereotypes, and have in previous posts.  These are anathema in themselves, and always have been.  Long before black characters in movies were vilified for the racism involved in the writing, they were vilified for being stereotypically boring ... but then, if this is 1939 and you want southerners to see your movie, a fairly large demographic, you have to crowd-please.  It was hard for black people in 1939 to see your forward-thinking black characters in a film, given that movie theatres in a third of the country were "white only."

No, this time around on the subject I chose to talk about political stereotypes rather than literary ones.  I chose to point out that this is 40+ years later than when the old DMG was written.  I was making an allusion to the reality that while the world has changed, and moved on, and politics with it, that modern D&D is STILL perpetrating this stereotype, in an atmosphere largely made up of WHITE MALES, so that there's reason to think that maybe, just maybe, there's a reason behind all this backward thinking beyond the official, "We like our elves this way."  It gives one pause, and reason to think, if you're not moving forward on this, when are you going to move forward on anything?  It certainly doesn't help that the WOTC has been raked over the coals these last 18 months for their non-white hiring practices.

Of course, if the company rushes forth to do it now, it raises that other miserable question, "Are they doing it because they're not racist, or because they have to in spite of their being racist?"

I can answer that one.

We're all racist.  All the time.  And it IS an embarrassment.  The difference, I think is that some of us know we ought to be embarrassed ...

And quite a lot of others haven't caught on yet.

Player Character Racial Tendencies

This heading can be found on the bottom right corner of page 15 of the original DMG.  I sincerely hope this concept dies a mean, permanent death.

Published quotes from 1979:

"Dwarves tend to be dour and taciturn ..."

"Elves are often considered flighty and frivolous ..."

"Gnomes are most lively and full of humour ..."

"Half-orcs are boors." 

 

Stuff we've heard before, and largely based on templates established by Tolkien, who has been worshipped since culture discovered the man's work in the 1960s.  It's still not popular to mention it among hardcore D&D traditionalists (of which I am not one) that there are uncomfortable relationships between Tolkien's "fantasy races" and possible real-world counterparts.  For myself, I tend to take the word of canon that he never intended such relationships ... but that doesn't exempt him from being a product of his time, which others have connected to Victorian values that existed among the scholars that Tolkien worshipped.

In any case, that doesn't excuse the willingness of post-1960s white males to casually codify racism into the game's framework, afterwards adopting stuffy, pouting foot-stamping behaviours whenever it was proposed that dwarves had every right to be happy, elves could be serious and gnomes were allowed to be depressed or have no interest in tool-making ... at least in the context of what emotions we force players to play.

Personally, I considered dwarves-are-this and elves-are-that as a worthless contribution to the game world, along with alignment and anything else that dictates what a player feels or how a player acts at table, whatever their race.  Space wasted in books to tell us who hates who and who gets along with who is just as ill-considered.  It paints a bleak picture of how poorly we've managed racism since the beginning.  There is half a page of this nonsense in the DMG, and part of me can't help seeing Gygax and crew patting themselves on the back at how literary and clever they were being.

The inclusion of this nonsense in the DMG is an embarrassment.  I say this as a 56-year-old white male raised in a region just right of Texas.  And this is something I knew in 1979, when the book came out.

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.