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Here's an interesting essay on the presence--or lack of presence-of non-white folks in D&D throughout history. It's a funny thing to be a black kid into fantasy. Most of this stuff is ripped from Tolkien, and as much as I love LOTR, there is, indeed, something disquieting about the total whiteness of the movies. I don't blame that on Jackson or Tolkien. If someone was doing a fantasy epic based on Xhosa creation myths, I wouldn't expect to see any white people.
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» Race and DnD, how problematic? from Greg Sanders Comments (144)
You would see plenty of white people if they were making a movie out of it. On that note, did you ever read 300? Then watch the movie? I think most claims of whitening the source material are blown a little out of proportion but damn, they turned a group of olive-to-dark skinned guys with dreds into King Arthur's court and for spice made the Persian king into a giant black glitter queen. The political hackwork in the script (the Spartans were free and deomcratic? really?) was nothing by comparison 
Very interesting. As a matter of fact, I just saw Role Models this weekend and didn't notice any black people in Laire. I'm gonna have to go back and look into that. They even hit up the Asian community with the king. Maybe I just can't remember. But they did throw in Ronnie at the end, only for him to be "killed" and died nobly. Love your blog and read it every day!
I played D&D but the color of my character's skin never really entered into the equation. There was no visual representation of him - just numbers on a piece of paper. And since I had a thief/assassin I always thought more about cloaks and weapons than I will say that Blizzard has done a better job with characters, though they are far from perfect. You can choose the hue of your characters and Humans can be made brown (for lack of a more concise term) - orcs can be made light or dark green, etc. It does seem, though, that every human NPC is white. I can't recall seeing any in the game that wasn't so. However, I would never play a human - the Alliance are terribad. Undead > everyone else. I will also say that the Warcraft lore is far from clear when talking about bad guys vs. good guys. A simple expectation might be that the humans and elves are good guys and that the undead and orcs are bad. Light = good and dark = bad. However, in warcraft that's not necessarily the case. And I would argue that the humans are probably more evil than anyone else. The main hero is certainly Thrall, a dark skinned orc. The most peaceful leader is Cairne - the brown tauren (bull/human hybrid for those not in the know). And certainly the main villain (or anti-hero depending on your perspective) is Arthas, a human ex-paladin. Maybe I'm over-analyzing it. Clearly D&D made no attempts at inclusion but new games are making progess. WoW clearly aims for ambiguity when assessing who is right and wrong and who represents good and evil (at least when dealing with playable races). One thing we can all agree on though is that blood elves suck.
I was (and still am, although not as maniacally) into SF and fantasy and as young black girl, I admit at times I was troubled by the whiteness of the fantasy world. On the one hand, I just plowed ahead - it was what I liked, and so I went with it. But as I got older, I started to feel bad about it and sometimes even angered by it. I took a break from SF for a bit, but in the intervening years I have noticed a change; a touch more diversity. And, as I've gotten older, I also really don't give a damn what other people think quite so much.
Sorry, I do not have time to read the entire linked article, and I know the author was going to talk about this. But I do have to say, the Drow are/were, hands down, the coolest race in the entire AD&D universe. And Drizzt Do'Urden was the best character in the entire "Forgotten Realms" series of books.
Not a D&D guy, but a huge fan of LotR; the racial subtexts in those books goes far beyond lily whiteness. Consider the descriptions of the Southrons, together with their description as the only race of men to join up with Sauron, for example.
What is your opinion of the controversy over Star Wars when the first film came out in 1977? Lucas was criticized for having an all-white cast (though the lead villain was, of course, voiced by a then-uncredited black actor). Lucas put Billy Dee Williams in the second film but never formally apologized for his casting of the first; he claimed it was basically a coincidence, and made note of the Japanese influence on the story, which in its early drafts was supposed to have Japanese actors. Roger Ebert has commented that ever since Billy Dee's appearance in "Empire," there has come a tradition of casting African Americans in science fiction movies. You have to admit, that has its downside. Maybe it's a blessing in disguise that fantasy movies like LOTR (which are only rarely good) aren't known for having black actors in them. Sci-fi and fantasy may appeal to the geeks, but they're not the stepping stone for ambitious thespians.
The fantasy genre is pretty much built on European myth and legend. LOTR is a direct attempt to write the original English mythology Tolkien thought was lost after the various waves of conquerors. It's pretty hard to write people of color into that milieu without them feeling like the token black guy. Which is probably why most authors don't even try.
One thing we can all agree on though is that blood elves suck.True. I don't even know what a blood elf is, but this seems self-evident.
New games may be getting better in general, but that article reminded me of how creeped out I was when the original Fable rewards you for making your character a good guy by turning him paler and blonder, while evil characters grow progressively swarthier. Coupled with the whole "be anyone you want to be, as long as he's a dude" thing, it just seemed shockingly regressive. Especially for a game where I spent the entire time running up my homosexual encounter meter.
I'm surprised to be the first to bring up Ursula LeGuin, who with full intent gave the civilized folks in her Earthsea books coppery-brown to black skins; the barbarian invaders are blond. Of course, when they made an Earthsea movie for the Sci-Fi Channel, Ged was payed by some Santa Monica beach boy (with Danny Glover as Magic Negro). LeGuin had several kinds of fit, which are probably preserved on her website.
Somewhat-related question: Is someone like Octavia Butler known broadly in the sci-fi community? (Sci-fi and fantasy aren't necessarily the same thing, but there's some overlap, right?) Having only read Kindred, I didn’t know until hearing an interview with her (I think I heard it the same year she died) that after writing that book she went into the science fiction realm? She talked about taking heat from the Black community for not being a “race woman”. Just curious to know how she was received. Was/is she considered mainstream?
Most of the D&D games are based in fantasy settings ripped off of medieval Europe. Of course everyone's white, the games take place in whitey whiteland. But vanilla D&D is boring anyway. There are too many moral absolutes in most settings. There's too much determinism. The generic D&D world is tired and old. What surprises me is that people still play in Forgotten Realms or one of the myriad other Tolkien-based worlds. But D&D is just one out of a bunch, and in my opinion one of the worst tabletop gaming systems out there. Shadowrun, for instance, has a much more interesting take on social issues. As a GM, I threw away my PHB a long time ago, and I like to design my settings in-house. One of my more recent campaigns, for instance, was set in a plutocratic colonial empire, in which non-humans were second class citizens. The underclass was filled by anime-style cat people, who were kept as domestic servants and laborers. They could have children with humans, but of course, miscegenation was illegal. (Some beat the odds and were successful entrepreneurs. Hats off to racial progress.) On the other hand, democracy existed---but only in the more progressive goblin cities. The wars fought between humans and goblins had more to do with Machiavellian aims than with one or the other's moral superiority. Why you would ever kill an orc on sight, I have no idea.
I was going to mention the Ursula K. LeGuin thing too, but roac beat me to it. I will mention that Steven Erikson, in his Malazan Book of the Fallen series, goes out of his way to introduce ethnic and racial variety into his casts. Indeed, I'd say the most awesome characters in the book are invariably dark and swarthy, and of the "fey" races, the coolest two are the black-skinned Tiste Andii and the gray-skinned Tiste Edur. The white-skinned Tiste Liosan are a bunch of self-righteous motherfuckers. Erikson's books are, hands-down, the fantasy novels to beat for any aspiring writer. And I actually think they set the bar high for any genre in the terms of what's possible, philosophically and narrative-wise, in a book. Aside from Cormac McCarthy, Eriskon is the only writer to make me cry.
Of course, SF/Fantasy is also a good place to look for good, old-fashioned racial paternalism, too. Edgar Rice Burroughs' Martian Tales, anyone? It'll be interesting to see if that movie ever actually gets made, given that angle. Of course, the slated director is the putz who gave us Sky Captain, so we know it's going to suck.
True. I don't even know what a blood elf is, but this seems self-evident. I am going to answer this for you even though it's way more information than you will have ever wanted. Though I do think this is tangentially related to the article. I'll explain. In World of Warcraft the the factions were originally made up of four races each. The Horde had the Undead, Trolls, Orcs, and Tauren. The Alliance had Humans, Night Elves, Gnomes, and Dwarves. And even though I said earlier that there are no clear good or bad races, there are a number of people who see the Alliance as good and Horde as bad despite the lore. This is probably based on preconceived ideas - many which originate from LOTR and D&D - humans and elves are good and orcs and trolls are bad. Humans and Night Elves were often considered the "best looking" or coolest races. What you would see on different realms, then, was often a great faction imbalance where many kids wanted to be the good looking and heroic alliance fighting the evil and ugly horde. Maybe this doesn't seem like a big deal, but some realms had 3:1 faction imbalance and when players can kill people of the opposite faction on site it created a lot of problems. What happened then is that the alliance got the reputation for being a bunch of younger and immature kids who were not very good at the game but wanted to be heroes or look at night elf boobies all day. (Seriously, ask someone who plays the game about night elf females dancing on mailboxes.) The Horde then got the reputation of being older players who wanted to escape the alliance kiddies. Well, Blizzard - the makers of WoW - wanted to rectify the faction imbalance. And even though they never admitted it publicly, it was understood that the prettier races of the alliance were causing the imbalance. The Horde, therefore, needed a pretty race that the kids would want to play. Thus, Blood Elves were introduced to the game in a later expansion and we saw a lot of kids make blood elf characters on the Horde side because they were awesome or whatever. Horde players to this day still have a general distaste for Blood Elves because it caused an infusion of hyperactive adhd kiddies who all wanted to name their hunter Legolas. Now why did I write all of this when you clearly didn't ask? Well, because I think it reinforces TNC's earlier point. In WoW, we saw players gravitating towards races they thought looked better and believed to be heroes even though the lore showed that both sides were good and bad. To even it out they had to introduce a good looking race to get people to join the Horde. And, if you want to take it a step further, they had to introduce a "white" race to get people playing the Horde alongside with Taurens (brown), Orcs (green), Trolls (blue-ish green), and Undead (corpse/skeletons). That's just the way the cookie crumbles, though. I play an undead warlock. So I get my joy from setting humans and night elves on fire.
Keith: I know I play it in spite of the setting. I'd really prefer steampunk, modern, or sci fi. I mean when I GM I can deconstruct and critique the default setting some but often feels that I'm working against the system when I do it. I like the Eberron setting a better, they mix up the "typically evil" stuff a bit, although with pulp inspiration I wouldn't be surprised if it was problematic in other ways.
Can't speak to comics much (I read Archie comics), but I do recall Octavia Butler's earlier series always had white women on the covers, even though internal clues made it clear the heroines were black. In later novels they did use black cover models--changing times, changing artist stature? In fantasy it doesn't bother me too much if, as you say, they're picturing an early anglic culture. And a lot of attempts to have diverse races come across rather hamhanded and token. I think more is put on futuristic sci fi--if it's 500 years in the future, we don't expect everyone to be white. Or if they are all one race, there should be a logic to the planet's colonization, for example, e.g. Brazilian separatists. Speaking of sci fi, Wonkette argues that Lando has been tapped for AG, and they have a convincing photo.
TNC, I'll do you one better: I am the only black comic book & gaming store owner that I, and many other people (so I've been repeatedly told), am aware of (atleast for the moment, the current economic climate is forcing me into an unfortunate direction). From what I've seen, and this is without having read the article or doing any legitimate research, one of the major issues contributing to our lack of representation in Fantasy, and to a lesser extent Sci Fi, is the dependence upon videogames for entertainment. And not so much particular kinds of videogames (my friends growing up were all madden, all shooting, nothing else), but more so videogames as a replacement for any kind of imaginative exercise. My grandmother was an english teacher and taught me how to read by making me read the article for every sunday newspaper toy add I brought to her. When I was a kid my aunt would come from California every summer, and bring with her Final Fantasy I, Talisman and her DnD books, and her latest sketches and water color paintings of Gandalf and Frodo. This is just unheard of in our community these days, and it is a sad thing.
James F. Elliot: Seconded! Great to hear from another Erikson lover. I constantly evangelize that series. I've had at least one success but given the size of the books it's hard work. One other thing of note for Erikson is that probably one of the most pleasant places to be and cultural capitals is called Darujistan.
The Drow have always bothered me. As badass as they are, they seem so damn socially regressive. Plus, anyone with half a brain knows that subterranean creatures are much more likely to be albino than dark. The Drow should totally have been badass albinos.
Does anyone besides me remember "Metamorphosis Alpha"?
Heh, I too play an undead warlock. We will destroy them all and then eat their corpses! From my earliest days of D&D, I always thought it was strange that all members of the monster races had the same alignment. It made no sense to me. How could all the dragons of a particular color have the exact same outlook on the world? It made no sense at all. So when I started DMing I would throw curveballs at the players by changing alignments of monsters occasionally on them. They have added cultures to the games in the past from different backgrounds. They made a very concerted effort to add Asian influences and characters to the games through various resource books. I don't recall as much effort regarding other cultures though. I am amused at how Warcraft has flipped the script. Last night my undead warlock was flying around on a red dragon in order to save the world. And the humans are indeed dirtbags. I was shocked at how petty they are when I started exploring their starter area when the game was new. There's a very interesting sociological elements to Blizzard's creation of the Horde races that may or may not have been intentional. The cultural elements used to signify them come from tribal/minority cultures (African, Caribbean, and Aboriginal American) and you have to wonder if that subconsciously affected players' choices. The addition of the blood elves adds a weird sort of mix to the group. Somehow they seem to be popular despite the fact that the more immature players think they're all "gay." In fact, they're extremely popular in my LBGT-friendly guild (along with the Feral druids for the bear crowd).
Patagonia, there are definitely non-white human NPCs in WoW. Off the top of my head, I think some of the priests in Stormwind are black (or at least brown). Also I think it's worth noting that Night Elves, one of the Alliance races, are dark skinned -- purple or blue usually. Not only that, but their features, particularly in the males, seem closer to African than European in inspiration. The male Night Elves even do the moonwalk if you type /dance in the game. Michael Jackson is at least sort of not white, right? Anyway, I couldn't get very far in the linked article. It just kept making assertions that didn't seem all that plausible and then acting like they'd been proven when they hadn't. Also, in the part where the author lists how many non-white adventures he found in the various source books, he claims to have found 2 in the entire canon: a black male and a black female. But his definition of non-white seems pretty narrow -- what about Mialee, the example elf wizard found throughout the 3rd edition source books? Here's an official illustration: Mialee. She's not a human, but the argument was about adventurers period, and she looks to me like she could easily be Asian or Latino.
@Greg Sanders: Hell yes! I tell everyone to read them. I'm going to cry like a little schoolboy who just got his Transformers lunch box stolen when I close book ten. I'm also incredibly pissed that the Ian C. Esslemont Malazan books aren't available in the U.S. Erikson is a truly gifted storyteller, but I don't think his books would be half as good without his twenty years as an archaeologist/anthropologist behind them.
The racial undertones of Tolkien have often been noted -- Southrons and Easterlings were dark-skinned and pretty much evil. The only things that can be said in his defense are he was a product of his time, he was careful to note that these people were unfortunates who fell under Sauron's sway, and in the only scene in the books which focuses on men fighting men (Faramir and the men of Gondor ambush a Southron patrol), Tolkien points out how uncomfortable and sad it makes Sam.
The Drow have always bothered me. As badass as they are, they seem so damn socially regressive. Plus, anyone with half a brain knows that subterranean creatures are much more likely to be albino than dark. The Drow should totally have been badass albinos. Well we know that when subterranean creatures are formed through evolution, they're likely to be blind albinos, but I don't think the same can be said of subterranean creatures that were created by a malevolent spider goddess.
James F. Elliot: Quite agree with sorrow once it ends, although really the books are so crowded with detail that I think there's no way I couldn't find more on repeated re-reading. I'm lucky that I have a friend in Montreal (the one I've convinced to read the series) that gets me the ones not available in the U.S.
Huge sci-fi fan, ate it for breakfast, lunch and dinner growing up as a kid in Kenya. I guess I wasn't really attuned to the lack of black characters in sci-fi until I hit my teens. I remember reading "Babel 17" by Samuel R Delany as a teen and being absolutely psyched when I came across one of the characters speaking swahili, later found out the author was African American. It's funny, I go back and read some of the books I loved and I can't stand them. The Lensman series by E.E Doc Smith now reads like something a Nazi eugenist would have dreamed of (sorry, not trying to invoke the Godwin law, thats just the way it reads). There seems to be a thread of racial hierarchy running through most S.F books from that time. There are notable exceptions, but even with the exceptions (and great writers) blacks and characters of color are woefully missing. I remember being pleasantly shocked by Arthur C Clarke's inclusion of race in one of the Rama books. I'm also a fan of Tolkien and also keep in mind that the books are a reflection of the times they were written. The bad guys/trolls in "The Hobbit" have clearly lower class/Irish accents. But yeah, in the Silmarillion and the LOTR the most depraved characters are of darker skin. And I do fault Peter Jackson a bit, especially when he states that in the siege scene in the 2nd movie he was going for the effect of the Boer's being surrounded/attacked by the Zulu (it's in the interviews on the extended collection, he saw the scene in an old movie). It doesn't take a lot of imagination to figure out who the boers and Zulus correspond to. I mean, Peter Jackson is an amazing director, but there are parts of the LOTR trilogy where I was rooting for the good guys while being uncomfortably aware that the bad guys looked much more like me. It's enough to give one schizophrenia. I have begun seeing more black characters in sci-fi books written by non African American authors. In some cases the depictions are great (Ancient Shores by Jack McDevitt and Wheelers by Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen) others are just horrendous (Footfall by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, where the sole character of color who is close to being of any importance is a nigerian doctor whose name you never learn and of course dies mid-way through the book). Of course they are books by AA authors, i.e Octavia Butler's amazing books and those get it right, but by and large, the future seems very white. It's like somewhere between our modern era and the future something happened to wipe out most blacks. It's not like the writers go out of their way to eliminate blacks, its like they are much more comfortable imagining a world where we do not exist in any meaningful measure. Movies/TV series are somewhat less problematic. For all its faults, I loved the original Star Trek due to the presence of Uhura (and lets not forget, the first interracial kiss on American TV), Star Trek TNG seemed to me a step backwards in diversity. Movies, loved 'Serenity', 'The Matrix', 'Deep Impact' (I mean, cmon, Morgan Freeman as the president kicked ass!), 'Event Horizon' etc. I still have an ongoing love affair with sci-fi, though I do find myself reading it with a more critical eye.
Consider the descriptions of the Southrons, together with their description as the only race of men to join up with Sauron, for example. True, and Tolkien is answerable for it. Though I think the real ghetto children of the book are the dwarves. No, actually, they are the Appalachians, now that I think of it.
In the movie, Faramir has a speech using most of that language, to the same effect. To me, that's Tolkien's first-hand experience of WWI coming into play. Personally, one of my most cherished characters is a female half-orc who I imagine as very dark, very large, and very strong. As a model, I use Queen Latifah and Venus/Serena Williams. Yeah, a gender-and-race-bender. Oddly, it's not as much of a stretch as I thought.
roac, Thanks for the info. I loved 'Left Hand of Darkness' but never read the Earthsea series, now they are next on my list. I did some googling and found Ursula LeGuin's angry but measured missive about the tv series. I think it is really disturbing that they decided to cast (once again) the good guys as white when in the book they are black/brown. Even more disturbing are the responses to her calling her a 'knee jerk liberal' and 'pc police' when clearly in the books she cast the good guys as brown/black and the invaders as white. It seems that race is just one of the elements in the story they totally F'ed up but when did asking that movies adhere to the spirit of the story and true to the writers vision (especially the race reversal, something I'm sure LeGuin did very consciously considering these books were written in the 1980s) make one a knee jerk liberal? This kind of reminds me of Angelina Jolie playing Pearl's wife in "A mighty Heart". That also bothered me. Pearl'w wife was bi-racial and Jolie had to have her skin darkened to play her. What, there were no talented bi-racial actors to play her (Halle Berry and Thandie Newton come to mind).
Heh, I too play an undead warlock. We will destroy them all and then eat their corpses! I love to hug someone I killed then cannibalize their corpse. I like to show the alliance how much I appreciate the meal. I am amused at how Warcraft has flipped the script. Last night my undead warlock was flying around on a red dragon in order to save the world. And the humans are indeed dirtbags. I was shocked at how petty they are when I started exploring their starter area when the game was new. Humans are the worst. There's all sorts of religious zealotry and absolutely assuredness about the righteousness of their cause. You don't get the sense that they're at all reflective but rather war-mongering racists who take to arms at the first sign of an affront. Gee, I wonder why anyone would think humans are like that... There's a very interesting sociological elements to Blizzard's creation of the Horde races that may or may not have been intentional. The cultural elements used to signify them come from tribal/minority cultures (African, Caribbean, and Aboriginal American) and you have to wonder if that subconsciously affected players' choices. The good thing about those attributes is that are definitely not perjorative. Taurens are clearly modeled after Native Americans and they are the race that I would say most alliance respect (lore wise). Trolls are carribean but it's done more for flavor than anything else. The addition of the blood elves adds a weird sort of mix to the group. Somehow they seem to be popular despite the fact that the more immature players think they're all "gay." In fact, they're extremely popular in my LBGT-friendly guild (along with the Feral druids for the bear crowd). One does often hear the term "gay" as a description of blood elves. There was once a thread on the general WoW forums inquiring "where are all the male blood elves?" - hinting that the men were so feminine you couldn't distinguish between the men and women. However, they were definitely added to get more people playing Horde and it does seem to have succeeded. My realm is ridiculously imbalanced but I actually like it that way. Patagonia, there are definitely non-white human NPCs in WoW. Off the top of my head, I think some of the priests in Stormwind are black (or at least brown). True there are a few here and there. Not many. But I think Blizzard does a lot more to be inclusive than those NPCs here and there. Also I think it's worth noting that Night Elves, one of the Alliance races, are dark skinned -- purple or blue usually. Not only that, but their features, particularly in the males, seem closer to African than European in inspiration. The male Night Elves even do the moonwalk if you type /dance in the game. Michael Jackson is at least sort of not white, right? Eh, I would still say Night Elves are more white than anything. Even though they are blue and purple they are a very light blue and a very light purple. And while the males might do the Michael Jackson dance, the female dance is modeled after Alizee and so that probably offsets any gain due to moonwalking.
Not to belabor the point. Ursula K Le Guin's article in the slate The relevant passage. Most of the characters in my fantasy and far-future science fiction books are not white. They're mixed; they're rainbow. In my first big science fiction novel, The Left Hand of Darkness, the only person from Earth is a black man, and everybody else in the book is Inuit (or Tibetan) brown. In the two fantasy novels the miniseries is "based on," everybody is brown or copper-red or black, except the Kargish people in the East and their descendants in the Archipelago, who are white, with fair or dark hair. The central character Tenar, a Karg, is a white brunette. Ged, an Archipelagan, is red-brown. His friend, Vetch, is black. In the miniseries, Tenar is played by Smallville's Kristin Kreuk, the only person in the miniseries who looks at all Asian. Ged and Vetch are white. My color scheme was conscious and deliberate from the start. I didn't see why everybody in science fiction had to be a honky named Bob or Joe or Bill. I didn't see why everybody in heroic fantasy had to be white (and why all the leading women had "violet eyes"). It didn't even make sense. Whites are a minority on Earth now—why wouldn't they still be either a minority, or just swallowed up in the larger colored gene pool, in the future?
Peter Jackson does not deserve the benefit of the doubt on this one. Take a gander at some of his earlier movies. The beginning of Dead Alive, for example: there's no ambiguity, and it's not subtle; he depicts black folks as stupid savages. They look and act a lot like the hordes of Uruk-hai in the first LOTR movie. I really don't think Jackon's a fire-breathing racist or anything - it's more likely unexamined, internalized stereotypes coming out in his film-making. Racism is pretty mainstream in New Zealand, with the Maori being still being widely regarded as savage and stupid. Growing up there, I'm sure it's hard to avoid internalizing those sorts of nasty archetypes. Interesting thing about being an artist, though, is that Jackson throws this stuff on the screen for all to see. Still, I'd really like to see Jackson get called out more about it, because it's not acceptable.
I forgot to mention: My beloved female, dark-skinned, half-orc was quite specifically NOT the product of rape. Nor was her half-angel half-brother.
Also, re: races in WoW, for those who haven't already seen it: election 2008 poll of WoW players. The partisan breakdown by race was astonishing to me, anyway.
Eh, I would still say Night Elves are more white than anything. Even though they are blue and purple they are a very light blue and a very light purple. And while the males might do the Michael Jackson dance, the female dance is modeled after Alizee and so that probably offsets any gain due to moonwalking. Yeah the females don't seem very black, but then again the male Night Elves are the only race that can get a Mr. T haircut. And you can get a pretty purple skin tone. (I mostly play orcs though, as a side note.)
"Not a D&D guy, but a huge fan of LotR; the racial subtexts in those books goes far beyond lily whiteness. Consider the descriptions of the Southrons, together with their description as the only race of men to join up with Sauron, for example." "The racial undertones of Tolkien have often been noted -- Southrons and Easterlings were dark-skinned and pretty much evil. The only things that can be said in his defense are he was a product of his time, ....' Well, yes he was, which is why the skin color of his races matters so much less that the obvious equation of Mordor and Germany and the Orcs and the Germans. LOTR follows British anti-Prussian/German propaganda pretty closely, hopefully inadvertently, and it was so glaring that he inserted a German-looking race on the Good Guys side to kill that parallel. In his day the fashionable meme was of a Celtic high civilization that had gone down under a tide of Saxon barbarism. Some of that obviously crept in too.
Jeepers, Ebert, did you not notice Lt. Uhura? Also, has nobody but me read Day of the Drones? It's the post-apocalypse, and the only civilization left is African, and they blame whitey for the apocalypse, so lightskinned guys roast themselves in the sun to try and get darker, etc., and suffer from discrimination, and then one day a scientist finds a tribe of white people who pattern their society on that of the bee. And the protagonist is a smart, foxy, dark-skinned young woman. This book was written in the early 70s, and somebody really really needs to make a movie out of it. It is all kinds of fabulous.
Follow-up on race in DnD's Eberron setting. The wiki entry verifies most of what I remembered, namely that they have their own civilization a la Warcraft and Drow are similarly not evil worshiping. That said, I haven't played Eberron that much, so I'm not saying it doesn't have problematic aspects, but definitely seems like an improvement. No Eberron for DnD 4th edition for at least a year I think though. Although one notable change versus some of the things mentioned in the article is that races no longer have stat penalties. They've still got varying stat bonuses, but they don't have inherent weaknesses. So doesn't get beyond racial essentialism, but a step up I'd say.
@ Professor Kum'n'go - No need to even go back to Jackson's older work. I was extremely uncomfortable watching King Kong, which had the most appalling representation of "natives" in any movie since, oh, the original Kong. Truly frightening.
I suspect that many of the humans in fantasy are "white" not because the source material is anglo-saxon per se, but because the creators of it are mostly white, and therefore turn to the lore that is closest at hand. Kung Fu movies are fantasy, too; fantasy created mostly by asians, with asian characters. It's been my observation that the sci-fi/ fanasy world is skewed whiter and maler than the surrounding population. I have a theory about that... but I think the content is probably skewed because the creators and consumers are skewed.
Well, yes he was, which is why the skin color of his races matters so much less that the obvious equation of Mordor and Germany and the Orcs and the Germans. LOTR follows British anti-Prussian/German propaganda pretty closely, hopefully inadvertently, and it was so glaring that he inserted a German-looking race on the Good Guys side to kill that parallel. It is my mission and self-imposed duty to address the issue of Tolkien's racial attitudes whenever they arise. This is never satisfactory because the subject is too complicated for a readable blog post. I mean, Tolkien was both a philosophical anarchist AND a serious believer in the divine right of kings. So it is much easier just to say that the quote above is as wrong as it can possibly be. Tolkien's chief scholarly interest was in the lost prehistory of the Germanic peoples, of which the (It was the French he didn't like.)
Have you read Oscar Wao, TNC?
Yeah Tolkein got super pissed anytime it was suggested that LoTR was a WWII allegory.
Re: The racial undertones of Tolkien have often been noted -- Southrons and Easterlings were dark-skinned and pretty much evil Um, the Haradrim aren't meant to look like Africans, they're meant to look like South Asians or Arabs (hence the elephants). I'm South Asian and it doesn't bother me, so I'm not sure why it bothers Mr. Coates.
@ Hector - I always thought of the Haradrim as North African, a la the Carthaginians, who were famous for using elephants in war. @ Miles - While the Drow might be protected by their evil spider goddess, I seem to remember their skin color being the result of a curse by the Elven gods for their betrayal, which seems remarkably like the old mark of Cain/curse of Ham story used to justify slavery. My Drowish history may be wrong, though - been quite a while.
Yeah, I thought Lolth had something to do with that but you may be right. The point stand though!
Erikson's "Malazan Book of the Fallen" is in my opinion the best fantasy I've ever come across hands down. George RR Martin's "Song of Ice and Fire" comes in second. "Malazan" is great from a huge number of reasons one of which is the great diversity (racial, ethnic, etc.). It even has blue humans (Napans). And power and badassedness is not just reserved for a few euro-looking characters. That was always a problem for me as a kid. A small one, but still. Same thing with comics. "Ice and Fire" seems to be way more traditional in terms of racial demographic, but my memory may be fuzzy given the huge gaps of time that pass between the release of the next book. Also, in fantasy isn't race sometimes a synonym (sp) for species? Does it matter? Lastly, any sci-fi/fantasy geek looking for a great book needs to read the Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss.
AMT: Another Erikson lover? Awesome. I'll check out Rothfuss based on your good taste.
@James F. Elliott: I get the Esselmont Malazan from Amazon UK. The currency exchange hurts but its worth it. I'm finishing up the second one now. Also, having Malazan as the saga to beat is scary. I've toyed with the idea of writing and Erkison makes me wonder if I could even come close.
Great article, TNC, as in a great representation of how sociologically impoverished our discourse in humanities has become in academia. I have a story. In college, I once created a campaign myself. I based it off of Eastern history and set it in a world that obviously resembled earth. I began the world in Hangzhou, capital of the Nan Sung dynasty. I even wrote my own Eastern mythology for it. Thirty pages long. Well, the 'Three Dreams' didn't go over so well with my players. I just fired off an email to them with this article in the link:
For a good primer on SF (or speculative fiction) by people of color, check out "Dark Matter", edited in 2000 by Sheree R. Thomas.
Americans tend to put their extreme sensitivity onto everything and everyone. Hence the genuine rage a lot of Americans feel when they see a German Halloween costume catalog or something. It's unforgivable, unforgivable I tell you, that Tolkien dared to make people from outside of fantasy Europe non-white & anything less than angels! He should have pretended everyone was white, or at least put an african-middle earthican in there somewhere. Dismount that high horse sirrah, or I shall smite thee!
Especially compared to the truly blatant and undeniable racism in so much contemporaneous fiction, Tolkien isn't answerable for anything and frankly was probably setting a good example.
An interesting article, and his points about racial essentialism and especially the lack of non-white humans are well taken. One thing he consistently fails to take into account, however, is D&D's nature as an actual game. While at the high end D&D can be sophisticated interactive storytelling, it still has to have certain game mechanics and rules built in to make it playable. Sometimes things like stat bonuses or different levels of hit dice are just attempts to translate physical realities into numbers. And while the author seems to scoff at the notion, Gygax's protectionist attitudes towards the human race were undoubtedly necessary. Based on my own middle school and high school D&D playing experiences, almost no one would have played a human if there weren't a whole bunch of cool classes that more or less required. Part of the point of a game like D&D is to immerse yourself as much as possible in the fantasy ... when you're allowed to pick what (fantastic) race you want to be, why choose the race you already are?
At risk of going seriously off-topic, I have to ask the folks that have finished the Malazan books - does it become clearer to the reader who is who and what is going on as the series progresses? I've just finished Deadhouse Gates, and found myself terribly confused about who people where, where they came from, what they where doing, why they were doing it, etc. I would chalk this up to my own deficiencies, but I did not have this problem at all when reading the Wheel of TIme and other similarly complex books. Do things get better in this regard as the series progresses? p.s. I second the recommendation of The Name of The Wind. It's not as racially progressive as the Malazan books, but is so fantastic a story that it really doesn't matter.
The further you got from the vanilla settings in D&D -- especially 2nd ed, which had a broader diversity of settings -- the more people of color you got. Were there even any white people in Dark Sun? Planescape had a lot of non-whites, though they were admittedly just as likely to be blue or orange as brown.
I just finished Toll the Hounds recently (Malazan, Book 8) and I have to say that it was kind of confusing at times, but still entertaining. I never made it through the Wheel of Time, but even though they're undoubtedly the best, the Malazan books can be hard to follow if you're not paying attention or even if you are. He starts with a core of characters and spread them across the world and then introduced new characters and new plotlines that sometimes seem unrelated. They always tied together. You just have to wait. It's probably easier to deal with if you can read them all back to back so you remember who everybody is. I think that's the biggest problem, the sheer volume of characters. Memories of Ice is awesome. Another great sci/fi novel to deal with race/prejudice was written by Richard Morgan. It was called Black Man in the UK and Thirteen here in the states. Its probably in paperback by now. I love this book.
"LOTR is a direct attempt to write the original English mythology Tolkien thought was lost after the various waves of conquerors." It's interesting to think what shape fantasy would have taken without Tolkien. What he pointed out about Anglo-Saxon literature is that the reason it was dismissed was because we come to it with Classical expectations. So Anglo-Saxon epic isn't linear, it's cyclical. There are numerous fore-shadowings and flash-forwards in Beowulf. Indeed at the very opening the poet says he'll recite the story of the burning of Heorot - so you know there's not necessarily a happy ending. They're obsessed with decline. There's lots of sun-sets in Old English but also a sense that the world isn't as good as it once was and it's getting worse, a feeling that every age is less heroic than the one that preceded it. At the end of Beowulf there isn't a cheer that he defeated the dragon or a celebration of his heroic life. The final image is of his body on a monumental pyre (something since banned by Christianity) surrounded by his people, the women singing dirges. And it's made clear that without Beowulf all of the surrounding Kingdoms will invade and his people will be enslaved and his lands taken. They also don't have a single protagonist as the simple hero. While Beowulf is the main character what's emphasised is his loyalty to his Lord and the Hall. When, in the second book, Beowulf dies in the fight against the dragon it's not because he isn't as strong as he used to be but because his thanes (with the exception of Wulfram) abandoned him. In all of Anglo-Saxon literature the heroic virtues are primarily to do with doing what you said you would do. They're obsessed with promises made in the 'mead-hall' which is why the heroes aren't, perhaps, as interesting as, say, Achilles, Ulysses or Satan. I think all of thsoe things exist in Lord of the Rings - far more than Classical ideas of heroism and the epic - but without Tolkien I think fantasy would have a very different feel to it. All of that would be removed, you wouldn't have the cylcical narrative, the sense of decline, the 'fellowship'. It would produce a totally different story and a radically different aesthetic. And I think it would be interesting to see that sort of thing, people as steeped in a different set of myths as Tolkien was in Anglo-Saxon and Norse mythology to produce a fantasy. For example what would an Indian fantasy novel look like? I mean a writer whose cultural reference is the Ramayana or the Mahabarata could write something very different to what we expect and something very interesting. Shaun
Zeke: It stays about the same. And it isn't just you, I'm a fan but I lose track as well. I sort of treat them as history books. I track the characters I'm interested and accept that I'm not going to necessarily be able to perfectly follow everything else. As AMT says they do tie together which helps and it's less of a problem when read in quicker succession. But yeah, if you want to be able to track everything you need to use the lists, take notes, or be smarter than me as I'm sure not capable of it. :P I would say the plot lines get easier as time goes by. There can be some large tangents, particularly in prologues, but at this point I think I have a pretty good idea of where most of the plot lines are headed, if not any solid predictions of what happens when they they all get together. My current favorite is Midnight Tides, my only caveat is that uh, some of the females were not the best written characters I've encountered. Fortunately there were also a good number of better written women both in that book and in others, so it isn't a huge deal.
For what its worth I would recommend Tad Williams' Otherland series for an interesting take on race in the future. I loved it, but I know some who hated it, so take this as a qualified recommendation. Not only are the main heroes African, one is a Kalahari Bushman, and the "villains" are not your usual array of maniacal rich white men, but a realistic projection of who the rich people will be in 100 years. Americans and Europeans to be sure, but also Arabs, Chinese and an African or two. The most evil character is Maori, so they don't come off great, but there you go. Speaking of Lando. Remember the first Burton Batman? Billy Deee Williams played Harvey Dent pre-scarring. When they turned Dent into Two-face they tapped Tommy Lee Jones. Maybe they didn't think Williams had the chops or the name recognition, or maybe they were scared of the bad press from turning the only black character into villain. Anyway, considering what that might have done for his career, I always thought it was a shame Williams couldn't continue the part.
Interesting Article. A whole comment thread on SF and D&D and no one mentioned Robert Jordan. (May he rest in Peace). Sometimes a story is just a story.
I've seen a couple of mentions of Chip Delany here. (Random factoid: he appears to be a Dalton school alum; somebody tell Matt Yglesias.) I heard an interview with Delany some time ago in which he said that he didn't like LOTR very much. "The world of lord of the rings is a world in which racism is true; elves are good and orcs are bad, because they are elves and orcs...." (quote reconstructed from memory, of course). As I recall, he chose his words carefully so that his point was not just about skin color, but about the moral content of a character being determined by their tribe.
Greg: I'm not a big fan of D&D's leveling system. I prefer other systems because they're nonlinear and more realistically reflect a character's progress. So far World of Darkness is my favorite system, and I tend to branch off from it. I like the World of Darkness philosophy better anyway---in the phrase "role-playing game," D&D tends to emphasize the "game", whereas WoD tends to emphasize the "role-playing". Balance isn't really an issue for me, because combat is not the most important part of a campaign---and if there is an egregious power differential between players, then I have zero problems with tweaking the rules to improve the experience. But I have a very idiosyncratic gaming group, and we tend to have to explain our strange ways even to veteran gamers.
Thought some of you might enjoy this: http://www.mcsweeneys.net/2003/04/22fellowship.html It sort of ribs a lot of the points we've been making, but it's funny regardless.
That said, I haven't played Eberron that much, so I'm not saying it doesn't have problematic aspects, but definitely seems like an improvement. The Drow in Eberron are basically the cannibal Africans from 20's pulp adventure (Alain Quatermain, Tarzan) so I'm not sure what an improvement on race that setting is. I don't play D&D with any black people, but I don't think I could run drow pc's or npc's if I did. Too much white self-consciousness about racism, on my part, to even consider trying to role-play the racism drow (are supposed to) experience. But then a guy in my group right now is a white man married to a Kenyan woman, and we play at his house, and I guess I have no problem setting up scenarios of in-game racism, or even running drow as villains. So, I don't know. Side thought - I listen to the Wizards D&D podcast, and even though it's basically an hour-long commercial the 8-part Penny Arcade/PVP Online 4th edition session, where they simply recorded Scott Kurtz and Gabe and Tycho playing 4th edition with Chris Perkins as GM, was totally awesome. I've often tried to think who they could get for "Celebrity D&D, pt. 2". Wouldn't it be awesome to get together a party of Will Wheaton, Vin Diesel, Stephen Colbert, and Ta-Nehisi Coates and just turn the microphones on?
Another shout out to LeGuin - the Lathe of Heaven adressed race issues head on. And the PBS made-for-TV movie version made a huge impression on me when I saw it in the early 80s - that was the first time I'd ever seen an interracial sexual relationship treated as something completely normal in mainstream media (as compared to say Tom and Helen on "The Jefferson" whom I always felt we were supposed to congratulate on their oh-so fantastic liberal sensibilities, and of course you never really believed Helen had any sexual interest in Tom).
I first got into D&D when I moved from Catholic school to the gifted program in public school in 4th grade; our regular group consisted of three white guys (including me and two Jews), two Japanese-Americans, and a black guy who was a grade higher (but we had the same teacher because of some combined classes). It's true, a lot of the D&D stuff is chock-full of white people. There's no getting around that. TNC's original post says, "non-white" people, though, and there is some room for Asians. Remember the Monk character class? Also the Oriental Adventures milieu, which came out when I was in junior high. What was interesting was that the black guy was a Jehovah's Witness, so as long as we were over at his house we couldn't play D&D, but we could play things like Star Frontiers or Boot Hill. I lost contact with him in high school, and sadly learned that he died in a car accident in college.
AMT said: For the most part that how I understand it too. However this view does become rather complicated by the existence of half-orcs, half-elves and the like. Since these races can breed, it seems rather likely that they do not constitute separate species. I suppose it could be a horse+donkey=mule situation where it is a genetic dead end, but it seems to me that most depictions choose not to go this route. For instance: http://www.wowwiki.com/Half-elf Of course all this comes with a caveat that this is fantasy we are talking about so scientific terms like species might not have meaning. Whether or not they qualify as species though, the existence of the "half-" races brings up another wrinkle. Most worlds, in my experience, depict half-'s as rare and portray "pure bloods" as the norm. However most usually depict at the least humans and elves as living peacefully together. This by necessity sets up a world where interracial relationship are possible but are discouraged, either actively or by default as the result of living in what amounts to self-segregating communities. (Elves live in forests and humans live in cities for instance, which brings us back to essentialism.) However having said all that there is something to be said for having the races in fantasy be fundamentally different. If for example the elves live in the cities with the humans and behave in the same way that humans do, doesn't that just make them basically humans with pointy ears? Of course that's kind of the point. But it does seem a little boring. |
You posted about he aging of cartoons a while back which inspired me to rewatch the D&D cartoons, which age very well, by the way. I'm not sure if our acrobat friend would reinforce the premise of the article you cite, or refute it (consider Bobby as a counter point to the obvious critique).
Posted by pete | November 18, 2008 4:14 PM