Monday 5 December 2022

Moving on from 'Race' in D&D?

You may not have caught the announcement, but it seems that D&D products will no longer use the term 'race' to distinguish between PC, er, races. They'll use the word 'species' instead. 

The first thing to say about this is that it indicates the difficult position in which companies like Wizards of the Coast find themselves. On the one hand, you would have a hard time making a coherent case that the way the word 'race' has been hitherto used in D&D is racist. This is because it has in fact been used in what would, a mere 5 years ago, have been understood to be an anti-racist way (before the meaning of that term changed): there was an orc race, an elf race, a dwarf race, and so on, and a human race

In other words, all human beings, regardless of skin colour, are part of the same family, a 'brotherhood/sisterhood of man/woman' if you will, and distinctions between them should not be materially relevant. This is how people brought up in the 80s and 90s were raised to think about things, especially in the context of the SF/fantasy genres, in which the generally unstated emphasis on such matters was on presenting humans as a single group vis-a-vis aliens, monsters, etc. So while Wizards mights say that '"race" is a problematic term that has had prejudiced links between real world people and the fantasy peoples of D&D worlds' it is being either disingenuous or not thinking about things very hard - there is no 'prejudiced link' at all between real world people and the fantasy peoples of D&D worlds. The truth is almost the exact opposite: 'race' in D&D has always been used to (tacitly) eliminate prejudice between real world people by putting them all in the same basket. (Unless you happen to be an orc or tiefling or something, I suppose.)

Yet on the other hand, there are people who don't like the use of the word and are vocal about it. And once you start setting out an argument against them, as I have just done, you undergo a strange transformation from somebody who really didn't particularly care whether the word 'race' is used or not, to somebody who does, and who therefore becomes tainted by their defence of a thing which others consider to be racist. The accusation immediately becomes, "Why do you care? Why does it mean so much to you that D&D continue to use the word 'race'?" And then suddenly you are treading turbulent waters.

So I get why Wizards of the Coast made the decision they did and why they didn't think it a good idea to defend the history of D&D, even if I personally find it a bit insulting (I know it's a bit unfashionable to say this, but I am not a racist and I resent the implication that because I have been using the word 'race' all these years in D&D games I have been somehow perpetuting prejudice). The truth is it doesn't matter whether the word 'race' is used, all things considered, so it's best to just bite one's lip and go with something else. Species is a uniquely bad choice in my view, because 'species' is a biological, rationalist term that is very out of place in a fantasy setting. But I understand the reasoning.

44 comments:

  1. If I could purchase fewer Hasbro products, I would, but I have already cut my consumption to zero.

    The only appropriate response to this kind of cultural vandalism is to make your own game more “racist.” I intend to add East Asians and North Africans to my medieval European style game, but only in small numbers.

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    1. Yes, it's probably worth pointing out I am totally unaffected by this as I never buy any WotC stuff anyway. Another reason not to really care.

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  2. "being either disingenuous or not thinking about things very hard"
    Why not both??? ;)) They have, after all, already proved to be all this these years...
    Agree about scientific terms like "species" being a poor fit for FRPG. Still, in our post-post-post-modern times it's not SO big a problem for a generic mishmash style of late D&D. In WFRP or some other game with a more specific style, it would be much more of a problem.
    Mike

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  3. "The truth is it doesn't matter whether the word 'race' is used, all things considered, so it's best to just bite one's lip and go with something else. Species is a uniquely bad choice in my view, because 'species' is a biological, rationalist term that is very out of place in a fantasy setting."

    I agree. I regard the word "race" as an innocent casualty, but one that isn't much worth saving.

    It's a bit ironic that "species" isn't just out of place, but also less accurate both from a scientific point of view (at least in its most common definition), since half-elves and the likes (funny that the other half is always implicitly human, by the way) are usually considered fertile, and from an inclusivity point of view, since a different "species" feels even less human than a different "race".

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    1. "Species" is the worst outcome, as you've explained. I would have preferred almost anything else: "peoples", "tribes", "nations", "kinds", whatever. The origins of elves, dwarves, and trolls in Norse mythology posits them as sentient, magical beings created spontaneously from the remains of Ymir along with other natural features of the world like rivers and mountains and stars. Humans, in contrast, are deliberately created by the Aesir using trees as their raw materials. Each, uh, type of being has its own physical realm (elves in the sky and the tree branches, dwarves/gnomes/dark elves under the earth, trolls far off on the glaciers). So "nations" or "tribes" would each work pretty well, with the caveat that these stories long predate the concept of nationalism. In fact, the word with the closest meaning to "nation" in the pre-national era would probably be "race" (the Norman race, the Gallic race, the Celtic race, the Teutonic race, the Slavic race, the Roman race, the Mongol race, the Ethiopian race, the Egyptian race, and of course races like the non-humanoid prodigies of faraway lands described by Herodotus).

      But the heart of the toxic concept these guys are trying to avoid is the idea that the world includes multiple distinct types of sentient humanoid beings, each having significant innate differences from the others, and who can be distinguished from the others by their distinct physical appearances and their distinct cultures. Taking another step in place on the euphemism treadmill does nothing to address this idea, which is hard coded into D&D (and into just about any ancient mythological system you care to name). If orcs are supposed to be an offensive caricature of "savage" cultures (I think this gets it just about backward, but that's the claim), then excising the word "race" does absolutely nothing to address this objection.

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    2. You could be right about what lies at the heart of the matter but then again I wonder if it's just something more primeval - a feeling that the word 'race' just somehow sounds bad.

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  4. Agreed that it's just not a hill worth dying on, but it'll be interesting to see if the change takes.

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    1. I suppose it has to, now - they've been pretty decisive about it.

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    2. Probably, but I don't think "species" will stick. It's awkward and hardly evocative of high fantasy. The ideas you and others have listed here, like "kind" and "origin" are better. Tin foil hat time, but maybe the mindflayers at WotC deliberately chose a dumb word?

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  5. Someone else has pointed out in another blog about how the angry noises from from the "woke" crowd about aspects of D&D has the same tone as the "angry mothers from heck" did back in the 1980s. They are angry about different things - the angry mothers from heck were worried about demons, paganism and witchcraft, which provoked a tonal change between 1st and 2nd editions (dropping demons & devils from the Monstrous Compendium, dropping assassins and half-orcs from the PHB). The "woke crowd" are angry about gender issues, race issues and cultural appropriation (Mystara and Kara-Tur are seen as mocking real world cultures). But I get the feeling that both are vocal minorities and that what they are complaining about does not bother most RPGers. We simply have to weather this particular storm which might take a year or more to calm down, but it will eventually.

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    1. I think it will burn out as younger people coming up start to reject it. The more "wokeism" becomes the consensus, especially among teachers, politicians, parents, etc., the less cool it will seem and the less appealing it will be to the youth of the day.

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    2. Interesting. I think you're onto something. But in fairness, the angry mothers from the day weren't usually upset about 'Satanism!'. They were upset that D&D would kill their kids. Because the 'Satanic Panic' was what got blamed in later years, but it was a media driven hysteria, of which religious outlets were merely one branch of the assault, that cried havoc and let slip the dogs of war against the hobby. It was the press trotting out doctors, scientists, mental health experts, child behavior experts and others who assured the viewer that D&D was for hacks, outcasts, the mentally disturbed, and could easily lead to bad behavior, suicide or even murder. Even Hollywood jumped in on the act. Why are we seeing books banned, rewritten, erased, the destruction of art or memorials or statues or movies or the general heritage of the West? Because the same press that whipped parents into a frenzy over D&D in the 1980s is at it again. The target is just a little broader.

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  6. I understand and would probably want to jettison that word too, simply because of the connotations. A young American today hears the word 'race' and they know trouble's coming. Best let it go. But if I had been at that meeting, I would've advocated for the word 'kind' instead.

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    1. I think 'origin' would work. 'My character is of elven origin'.

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  7. Never pay the Danegeld. This time it's a trifle like swapping "race" for "species," but what concession will the wokescolds demand next?

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    1. Yes. Thank you. These are neo-bolsheviks. Never back down, never explain, never apologize.

      With our shields, or on them.

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  8. "'race' in D&D has always been used to (tacitly) eliminate prejudice between real world people by putting them all in the same basket."

    Yeah, sure, because fictional species are never used as stand-ins for real ethnicities while "humans" are coded as white Europeans. That *never* happens repeatedly and constantly.

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    1. I've often heard that said, though I'm not at all convinced. But even if I grant you that's true for the sake of argument, how does changing the word from 'race' to 'species' help?

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    2. How does keeping the word race 'race' help? WotC has only ever had their own interests in mind, that much is clear. Otherwise, they wouldn't have turned their game and editions into a streamlined expression of relentless mediocrity. However, the word species is strictly more accurate in almost every sense and does away with the fuzzy delineations drawn by the word 'race' and hopefully any misconceptions that may come with it. Although I too would've preferred something like 'origin' or 'folk', the truth is that this hardly matters to any of us writing here, since it is quite clear that the rules and principles governing our tables are not to be found in an official D&D supplement.

      Having said that, and conceptually speaking, the barriers and demarcations erected by the word 'species' are much more sharp and distinct than the blurry, often socially constructed and still highly debates lines suggested by the concept of 'race', making it harder and less intuitive to draw any naturalistic parallels between the "species" that populate the implied setting of D&D and the various peoples of the world.

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    3. @DeCometis - I think there's some weight to this argument, except, what about the huge explosion in human diversity in D&D representations (not just players) in the last 10+ years? If PCs and players of color are fighting irredeemable orcs (or whatever) doesn't that slightly change things from when all PCs were drawn and written as lily-white? What's wrong with having some imaginary enemy for all humanity to unite against?

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    4. @patternsofdestruction I would dispute that 'species' is more accurate. I think it's a category error. I take your general point, though. However, I'm not sure that there is indeed a hard core of racialists who enjoy acting out their essentialist, white supremacist fantasies in the context of RPGs (I mean, if there are such people they must number in the hundreds at most) and they are so far outside of the mainstream that their activities are basically meaningless. I mean, just to riff on Jason & Jay's point above, D&D hasn't been solely about white Western European men vanquishing orcs and dragons for, what, at least 30 years? And it has become progressively more, well, progressive since the late 80s.

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    5. @Jason & Jay. I basically agree. Even if it was once true that "fictional species are used as stand-ins for real ethnicities while 'humans' are coded as white Europeans" it certainly wasn't true even as early as 2nd edition, which did have quite a few depictions of non-white humans adventuring - I mean, I have the 2nd edition DMG on my shelf right now.

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    6. @noisms Even if you deem the term to be less accurate, it is certainly less loaded. I don't think this was ever about suppressing supremacist urges or denying hardcore racists their race based fantasies. There is literally nothing to be done about that, since you can make D&D to be about whatever thing you want it to be. Neither is this about ending racism or some such. No single act, no matter how big or seemingly all-encompassing could ever accomplish that task. However, the words we use in our made up fantasy worlds do resonate in different ways with the reality they are based on, and race does resonate in a way that other words such as the suggested above do not. Again, none of this is of any real significance to any of us doing our own thing and playing our own games (in my setting, for example, there are only humans, and I believe that to be more than enough).

      It worries me a wee bit, though, that some people are trying to equate this to McArthysm "but from the other side" or reacting to this change as if it heralded the collapse of western civilization or something like that. Particularly because WotC has 0 power to tell anyone how to play their games and what words to use, since all of our games and all of our words are always our own.

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    7. As you say @patternsofdestruction, I think the issue of "resonant" language is central to this issue. Until very recently, resonance of the kind you describe was understood to be subjective. I may be offended or upset by a word; you may not be. So it goes. But today, the negative resonance of many words is held to be objectively true. The word "race" is now objectively problematic, regardless of context, and therefore must be changed. If any word (or historical person, gesture etc) could have a subjectively problematic context, it is treated as though it, objectively, always does. This mania will pass, but like Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and others, I wonder what potentially-great art will have been lost in the meantime.

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  9. My son observed some time ago that we are seeing what McCarthyism would have looked like if the institutions that opposed McCarthy back in the day would have been on his side instead. I would say my only quibble with his observation is that I don't know if McCarthy would have gone where we now excuse going on a regular basis.

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  10. I do not mind people becoming more considerate of others and more sensitive to others’ feelings.

    I DO object to people becoming lazier and stupider.

    That WotC would find it easier to simply cut a term deemed by some ignorant folks to be “racist” is the latter. That we, as a society/culture, deem this to be “okay” is a mystery to me. Even when it doesn’t directly affect us, it is NOT “okay;” rather, it is fucked up. Take the harder road, Powers That Be: educate the ignorant.

    Sign of the times.

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  11. I like species precisely because it sounds scientific. Give me more science in my fantasy. I have no use for the kind of purism that says all fantasy, or even just medieval fantasy, must feel prescientific.

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    1. I don't mind a bit of "science" in my fantasy setting. I love a good alchemist-style wizard, or a Cadfael-type natural philosopher cleric. But I think the ruleset should aim to be purer/more neutral fantasy. Having such an Enlightenment word as "species" baked into the rules feels like a choice that belongs on the setting side of the ruleset/setting divide.

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  12. This thesis seeks to demonstrate how “race” as a concept is utilized in the genre of high fantasy.

    http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=bgsu1648836976448254

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    1. Read the abstract. It takes the same imaginative leap which online commentary takes: high fantasy has an essentialist conception of race which stipulates that "race is determinative of individual morality, psyche, and aptitude", and this is somehow saying something about real world humans when it is actually doing something completely different (saying something about fictional world archetypes which are definitionally not human).

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  13. I doubt I'll be purchasing D&D One, or One D&D, or whatever. So I don't have a horse in the race on this (non)issue. But I will say that in my opinion, while calling whether you're human, elf, or dwarf "race" seems non-problematic to me, I understand why others might see it as such. Calling them "species" seems more sci-fi, but "bloodline" or "heritage" as I think some of the recent Pathfinder and WotC D&D books have done seems *more* racist to me than calling them "race." I get the opposite feeling to the way you describe the term "race" lumping all humans into one category so being non-racist.

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    1. I think "bloodline" is bad for a different reason which is that it really refers to family background rather than one's 'species'.

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  14. Will the blackmailers stop blackmailing once people give in to their blackmail? Too early to tell, I suppose; it is not like we have a hundred cases where something similar has happened. After all, if you give them an inch, they will probably be content with that inch, and stop berating you.

    Or you can stop playing their game, and walk your own path. You don't have to obey the scolds, and you don't even have to serve them by becoming their easily defeated foil.

    Which way, Western man?

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    1. We must secure the future.

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    2. My friend if you are wondering what purpose this change serves. Look at this guy. I've dealt with this my entire life. He doesn't say much unless asked, but he's deeply serious about his beliefs. Your wife eyed innocence makes sense, because usually he would assume as your steward he wouldn't let on and hold court about something so self-evident that it's not worth discussing, but in order to give him no quarter we are forced to change things so as to keep him from ruining them over and over.

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    3. Same question as that to Eric Walker below. How does changing the word from "race" to "species" stop anybody ruining anything? Sorry to sound Zakish with my questions but I really don't think the reason for changing the word in this instance was somehow to stop the hard right corrupting D&D. That isn't plausible to me.

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  15. Your essay says: what's the point of this? And just like that a bunch of people come on the comments and quote Julius Evola and Oswald Spengler. This. This is why they're called species. I wish the word wasn't species, but just listen to these monsters. You have to starve them of oxygen or they'll strangle anything good in the world.

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    1. OK, so, for the sake of argument - why does switching the word from "race" to "species" starve anybody of oxygen? I have difficulty following the reasoning.

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    2. For those of us who aren't familiar with explicitly-fascist thought, which are the Evola & Spengler quotes? Skimming wikipedia isn't making it obvious.

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    3. I'm not sure either, having read nothing written by either. Julius Evola from what I gather was a bona fide nasty piece of work, but Oswald Spengler was I think more of a crank in the same sense Karl Marx was a crank - somebody who thought they had a theory of history that could also explain the future. I certainly don't think he was any more odious than Heidegger or Carl Schmitt, theorists who people on the left are often quite happy to read and cite.

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    4. @Eric Walker:

      Ah, yes. "Any denial of the charges is itself evidence of the charges." What are we to do with accusations such as this? I am not paid to listen to this drivel.

      -TS

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  16. Seems like a pretty good change to me. The meaning and import of words and ideas change with time. It's a lot more loaded word these days, especially in the US for my comrades from across the pond, and as replies in this thread have shown it's obviously a lot more politically divisive than anyone selling light entertainment really wants to be involved with.

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  17. I am happy with the change, as long as they do something with it. Elf as a species: inherently have dark vision and can use a longbow, a little bit of magic. Raised by human blacksmiths, so your background gives you some skills with metalworking, you’re stronger than you otherwise would be, that kind of thing. The change to avoid a problem or to preempt other people making it a problem is fine but lazy, do something with this change. Make it mean something more, and then everyone can be happy with it.

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  18. I've never seen so many people playing tabletop RPGs in my lifetime and a lot of that is due directly to 5E. Creating something inclusive, welcoming, and enjoyable is what pulls them in to start. Removing barriers whether someone perceives them as real or not to grow the hobby is not a bad thing. Hasbro and wotc have done well with the game, it's got more life now than the dessicated corpse tsr was gnawing on when they collapsed. There's no need to fear change.

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