We like to talk diversity and inclusion. But if someone was to come out with a vastly different religious, political, or world view to our own would we still be in favour? In my experience these are the things that knit people together and create 'groupings' of sorts. Its all food for thought. Hopefully we can all (myself included) take the time to consider the individual rather than the group.
Only speaking for myself, but as long as that view wasn't one which encouraged exclusivity and discriminatory practices I would be just as welcoming and inclusive with them as someone who shared my own world view.
As an example, my best friend has vastly different political and religious views to myself, as well as a completely different upbringing and background. She is still welcoming to people of all races, religions, sexualies, genders, etc. But she comes at life from a very different angle to myself. We often spend time discussing these differences and how they apply to various situations, although we both gave up on trying to "convert" each other a long time ago.
That said, I think that part of the reason people "focus on the more surface-level attributes than delving much deeper", as you put it, is that these are the things which should not be affecting how included or welcomed people are made to feel. There is so much more going on with the person, but they are excluded from things because they happen to be a different gender, sexuality or race. These things should not matter as much as they do, but they matter because they have been historically made to matter. There are historic behaviours still present in society which have been used to discriminate against people with these "surface-level attributes", and which still cause them pain due to that history even if they are no longer being used to discriminate.
So, yes, we focus on "surface-level attributes", specifically because they are the ones which should not matter but do.
"For the purposes of Diversity & Inclusion, please tell us your gender, race and sexuality!"
The whole point of "Inclusion" is that these factors shouldn't matter, at all.
Yes and no. You can't fully practice inclusiveness without acknowledging that certain people are currently disadvantaged, simply because of who they are. In a perfect world, none of that would matter, but we are not in a perfect world and pretending that none of that matters blinds us to reality and hinders us from making real change. This is why it is useful to collect that kind of data, because the data can show trends that are not necessarily obvious at first glance.
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Canto alla vita alla sua bellezza ad ogni sua ferita ogni sua carezza!
I sing to life and to its tragic beauty To pain and to strife, but all that dances through me The rise and the fall, I've lived through it all!
Currently, my group is me and my husband, two married cishet men whose wives do not play, another cishet fellow who is unmarried, and one fellow whose preferences I’m unsure of though I’m pretty certain he’s cis if not also het. We all happen to be white but none of this is by design. I’m actually amazed that anyone has enough people knocking on the door that they can be choosy about their group members. In coming on 40 years of playing, I have always found it difficult to find new players; difficult enough that I joke about marrying the DM to ensure I always have a game (I mean, it is one of the reasons but not the only one). As such, I have literally welcomed any person who has responded to an advert for new players.
One other couple has come out but mostly it’s either single men or men whose partner does not play, ranging from teenage to my age (Gen X). A few POC have come out but mostly it’s whites. A few queers have come out but mostly it’s cishets. Again, none of this is by design—all are welcome. If I were to start getting selective about my players, it would not be due to sexuality or gender preference. For me, who you rub up against when you’re not gaming is inconsequential compared to your politics and how god-bothered you are.
Yes and no. You can't fully practice inclusiveness without acknowledging that certain people are currently disadvantaged, simply because of who they are. In a perfect world, none of that would matter, but we are not in a perfect world and pretending that none of that matters blinds us to reality and hinders us from making real change. This is why it is useful to collect that kind of data, because the data can show trends that are not necessarily obvious at first glance.
I think this is something I have only recently learned (as in, over the last decade or so).
When I was growing up, I was taught never to let someone's ethnicity, gender etc influence my behaviour towards them. I was taught that we should be "colourblind", as it were. So, I treated everybody as individuals, not consciously discriminating towards or against any group. As Ophidimancer says above, this is how things would be in a perfect world, but we don't live in a perfect world.
This is often where there end up being clashes over discrimination and bias. Where negative biases exist, they are very difficult to remove. Therefore, efforts to equalise things often include adding in positive biases to try to cancel this out. However, many outside looking in don't see the negative bias, or see more of the the positive than the negative, and become upset that others are being given a helping hand up when they are not.
In an ideal world, everyone would be treated on merit. Gender, race, sexuality and all these other things would not have any discriminative effect. Unfortunately we don't live in in that world, yet, though I think we are moving closer towards it.
In an ideal world, everyone would be treated on merit. Gender, race, sexuality and all these other things would not have any discriminative effect. Unfortunately we don't live in in that world, yet, though I think we are moving closer towards it.
I don't buy the argument that since we'll never be able to create a perfect world, we should settle for a flawed answer. You're right -- we don't live in an ideal world. But the ideal solution does exist. You treat people as people. As individuals. Things a person can't control shouldn't be used for judgment. People are as good or bad as they behave or at least strive for.
What you can control is you own behavior. You, as an individual, can choose to treat other people as unique. You can choose not to value or devalue someone based on stuff that's not their choice or is not under their control. If you live that, you forge actual steps toward that ideal world. We'll never get there, but we should never stop trying to get closer.
The argument isn't that we'll never be able to create a perfect world (although it's true, we won't. Perfect is an illusion and, as the expression goes, the enemy of good) that we should thus settle for flawed answers.
The argument is that we currently live in an imperfect world and thus should adopt philosophies that reflect the truth of the world we live in and work to improve them. As the world changes, we change our philosophies, until we reach that close-to-perfect world.
It's about accepting the world as it is and working to make it how it should be, but not confusing the two.
Look at it this way; you have two groups, one of which has been disenfranchised from the hobby due to unequal treatment. If you pivot to treating them equally, you're not actually going to undo the imbalance caused by the unequal treatment and disenfranchisement, you're going to actually preserve it. Only by acknowledging the differences in experience and treating those of each groups as individuals including their own individual experiences with being disenfranchised or not can you work to undo past damage.
Treating people equally does not mean treating people identicitically. Doing so doesn't result in equality and equity, it just preserves any imbalance that already exists.
To me (and this is only my opinion), a large benefit to threads like this is to help people to think about diversity and inclusivity.
There is nothing wrong with a bunch of cishet white guys playing D&D together. If that's the group you have found to play with and you are all enjoying yourselves, then that's great. However, reading a thread like this can help people to consider whether there is an underlying reason. Is it just because that's who turned up, or who your friends were who wanted to play? Or is there some factor you missed which has made your game less welcoming to people who are not cishet white guys? If a woman, a black person, a homosexual or a trans person turned up at your table tomorrow, would they feel welcome and comfortable there? Is there anything you are doing which would be found off putting, are you aware of it, and would you be willing to adjust if the makeup of the table changed?
These are all important things to ask. I don't think it is necessary (or even particularly healthy) to force diversity, nor is a diverse table necessarily better, more welcoming or more inclusive than a homogeneous one. I also don't think it is necessary to stop all practices which could be considered off putting to a potential new member to the table. However, I think it's very important to think about these issues, be aware of where your game may have issues for others, and be prepared to discuss and change if the makeup of the table changes.
I don't think I know anyone that's not straight and cisgendered. There's a friend of a friend that's a homosexual male, but he doesn't play D&D.
So in general I'd love to play with people of different orientations etc, as long as they're down to earth and chill like I am, then we'd get along great. The only thing I do enforce in my D&D is a gender mixed table. I wouldn't be comfortable playing at a table with only dudes for instance.
In an ideal world, everyone would be treated on merit. Gender, race, sexuality and all these other things would not have any discriminative effect. Unfortunately we don't live in in that world, yet, though I think we are moving closer towards it.
I don't buy the argument that since we'll never be able to create a perfect world, we should settle for a flawed answer. You're right -- we don't live in an ideal world. But the ideal solution does exist. You treat people as people. As individuals. Things a person can't control shouldn't be used for judgment. People are as good or bad as they behave or at least strive for.
What you can control is you own behavior. You, as an individual, can choose to treat other people as unique. You can choose not to value or devalue someone based on stuff that's not their choice or is not under their control. If you live that, you forge actual steps toward that ideal world. We'll never get there, but we should never stop trying to get closer.
I agree that we should always strive to get closer, and that we should treat people as individuals.
However, that doesn't mean we shouldn't help those who are currently suffering through not being treated as individuals, whether individually or as a group.
For instance, if a town is subject to flooding, you build flood defences for that town. You don't say "hey, we need to treat everyone the same, so we will build flood defences for every town, including those which don't need it". Nor do you say "we need to treat everyone as individuals, so we are going to ask everyone to prove that they need flood defences, spend time investigating each individually, and protect one house at a time". You know the whole town needs flood defences, so you build them for the whole town (and hopefully for any other town that needs them).
An easy way to think of it: ignoring differences can be almost as harmful as active discrimination, and is no substitute for awareness and acceptance.
Saying "Okay, you're a black man. I'm going to ignore that fact and treat you exactly the same way I'd treat any white man" is not only ignoring part of that person's character/identity, but also ignoring what being black has meant for that person and how it's affected him. It also doesn't really work at all with gender identity issues, wherein the major problem many people face is explicitly the fact that their chosen expression/identity is being ignored in favor of the expression/identity normally assigned to someone of their physical appearance. The "I'm going to treat you exactly the same way I'd treat any other white guy" bit provokes the response "but I'm not a white guy..."
Davyd hit the nail pretty firmly on the head: uniformity is not equality. Acknowledging the differences in people's experience and accommodating those differences is the essence of inclusiveness. Trying to apply the exact same standard of treatment and behavior to every single person one interacts with regardless of that person's character or identity is simply discrimination of a different flavor.
You're right -- we don't live in an ideal world. But the ideal solution does exist. You treat people as people. As individuals. Things a person can't control shouldn't be used for judgment. People are as good or bad as they behave or at least strive for.
Idealistic, but somewhat incomplete. So like yes, I agree, but you have to go a little bit further. People you encounter in life aren't blank slates, they come to you with various experiences from the world and society we live in. You have to be sensitive to that because it is very easy to inadvertently poke sore spots or inflame old traumas. So it's always worth self reflection on how one treat people. You can't assume that one size fits all, because no one is all knowing.
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Canto alla vita alla sua bellezza ad ogni sua ferita ogni sua carezza!
I sing to life and to its tragic beauty To pain and to strife, but all that dances through me The rise and the fall, I've lived through it all!
Treating people identically is the precise way to create a balance. All measured by the same rules.
Speaking as a lefty, I have experienced environments created by identical rules that have nevertheless imposed an unequal burden upon me. Most things in the US are designed for right handed people and us lefties suffer from it. Speaking as a gay man I have literally had a financial burden exacted upon me from "identical" rules that nevertheless disadvantaged me. Forms that say "Husband and Wife" were touted as equal because they were the same forms given to everyone, but it cost me significantly in both money and heartache, especially when I didn't know if my husband would be deported or not because our marriage wasn't recognized for immigration purposes.
From lived experience I can tell you that identical does not mean equal.
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Canto alla vita alla sua bellezza ad ogni sua ferita ogni sua carezza!
I sing to life and to its tragic beauty To pain and to strife, but all that dances through me The rise and the fall, I've lived through it all!
Look at it this way; you have two groups, one of which has been disenfranchised from the hobby due to unequal treatment. If you pivot to treating them equally, you're not actually going to undo the imbalance caused by the unequal treatment and disenfranchisement, you're going to actually preserve it. Only by acknowledging the differences in experience and treating those of each groups as individuals including their own individual experiences with being disenfranchised or not can you work to undo past damage.
Treating people equally does not mean treating people identicitically. Doing so doesn't result in equality and equity, it just preserves any imbalance that already exists.
So you are actively promoting the unequal treatment of a group that you believe has ruled unfairly over D&D, so some balance can be restored. You are wrong. Treating all people the same way does not maintain any imbalance. It creates a balance.
Given this entire thread has stepped way outside the realm of "just D&D thanks very much", I am comfortable to say that based on your logic it is perfectly reasonable to exclude white straight males from D&D tables, or job interviews, because "a balance must be created", and only by treating straight white males as lesser beings can the pendulum swing back to the middle. Treating people identically is the precise way to create a balance. All measured by the same rules. I would prefer my doctor to be one that graduated on merit, not the colour of their skin, or who they like to have sex with.
I was endeavouring to keep this within the remit of diversity at the D&D table as this is what the thread is about.
Based on my logic, it would not be reasonable to exclude anyone in pursuit of some concept of balance. I, nor anyone else in this thread, made any mention of excluding people. Quite the opposite, the goal is to be inclusive and ensure you are acting in a way to remove as many barriers as possible that may exist for people wanting to participate.
Once again, this is not a box-ticking exercise. This is about cognisance, about awareness and introspection. It's about acknowledging how the world is, how you want the world to be, and how you're going to make the two meet.
How the world is is that currently a lot of people still don't feel comfortable sitting down at a D&D table because the legacy of the game not being for them looms large over the experience. How I, and many others, believe the world should be is that anyone who wants to play D&D should feel safe and comfortable doing so. They should feel the rules and lore can represent themselves as much as they represent people like me. We look to the diversity of the games around us, of the depictions of peoples in the lore, and those who make content to see where we are, and we practice inclusivity to improve the spaces we make for our games.
Treating people identically does not create equality or equity (not balance), because people are not identical. Everyone is different with their own history and baggage and dreams and fears. There is a great quote by John Green from the book Paper Towns which goes "imagine people complexly"; everyone is a whirling ball of complex experiences and thoughts. You cannot, and should not, treat people identically. What you should do is treat people as complex individuals and be ready and willing to factor in the complexities of their life experiences, and the factors that shaped their lives, into how you treat them. This is as true at the D&D table as it is anywhere else.
A form that is equal and fair would say "spouse". And that form would also be "identical" for all.
Right, and those changes have been made in some places, but just because those changes have been made doesn't mean that everything is all great. Pretending that, because I now live in a country that legally recognizes my marriage, everything is now equal for me completely ignores the toll that history has taken on me and my family. In literal money that I have spent as well as the emotional burden. It's not like I want some sort of compensation for that, but the least people can do is be aware and compassionate.
But what many here are suggesting is reversing the bigotry, where the form says "if you have a non cis spouse, check this box, and we will expedite your application."
Making a process easier for some people because they are disadvantaged is not bigotry. It may sometimes be ham handed, but it is an attempt to redress systematic wrongs. People will never get to an equal footing if they keep getting hamstrung by a legacy of wrongs that still affect them.
The stakes of these issues at the gaming table are admittedly lower than the stakes in things like housing, employment, and health, but can nevertheless be the difference between a table that is welcoming and a table that says it is welcoming but exposes people to traumas simply because of ignorance of those traumas.
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Canto alla vita alla sua bellezza ad ogni sua ferita ogni sua carezza!
I sing to life and to its tragic beauty To pain and to strife, but all that dances through me The rise and the fall, I've lived through it all!
Identical treatments is only equality of everyone is identical (from the point of view of that treatment).
If a shop has stairs up to it and they help nobody, they are treating everyone identically but they are not treating those with mobility issues equally. It is significantly more difficult, if not impossible, for a person on a wheel chair to gain entry to their shop.
Sometimes, people have a disadvantage, and to treat them equally you must put in place measures to help them overcome that disadvantage. This is not special treatment, this is making the world so that it is possible for people to be treated equally, as individuals.
Identical treatments is only equality of everyone is identical (from the point of view of that treatment).
If a shop has stairs up to it and they help nobody, they are treating everyone identically but they are not treating those with mobility issues equally. It is significantly more difficult, if not impossible, for a person on a wheel chair to gain entry to their shop.
Sometimes, people have a disadvantage, and to treat them equally you must put in place measures to help them overcome that disadvantage. This is not special treatment, this is making the world so that it is possible for people to be treated equally, as individuals.
An easy way to think of it: ignoring differences can be almost as harmful as active discrimination, and is no substitute for awareness and acceptance.
Saying "Okay, you're a black man. I'm going to ignore that fact and treat you exactly the same way I'd treat any white man" is not only ignoring part of that person's character/identity, but also ignoring what being black has meant for that person and how it's affected him. It also doesn't really work at all with gender identity issues, wherein the major problem many people face is explicitly the fact that their chosen expression/identity is being ignored in favor of the expression/identity normally assigned to someone of their physical appearance. The "I'm going to treat you exactly the same way I'd treat any other white guy" bit provokes the response "but I'm not a white guy..."
Davyd hit the nail pretty firmly on the head: uniformity is not equality. Acknowledging the differences in people's experience and accommodating those differences is the essence of inclusiveness. Trying to apply the exact same standard of treatment and behavior to every single person one interacts with regardless of that person's character or identity is simply discrimination of a different flavor.
Honestly, I don't agree. I owe it to other people to not treat them differently based on the color of their skin, so here we are in disagreement. I think it's a disservice to people to treat them based on a stereotype. I treat other people as I'd like to be treated.
An easy way to think of it: ignoring differences can be almost as harmful as active discrimination, and is no substitute for awareness and acceptance.
Saying "Okay, you're a black man. I'm going to ignore that fact and treat you exactly the same way I'd treat any white man" is not only ignoring part of that person's character/identity, but also ignoring what being black has meant for that person and how it's affected him. It also doesn't really work at all with gender identity issues, wherein the major problem many people face is explicitly the fact that their chosen expression/identity is being ignored in favor of the expression/identity normally assigned to someone of their physical appearance. The "I'm going to treat you exactly the same way I'd treat any other white guy" bit provokes the response "but I'm not a white guy..."
Davyd hit the nail pretty firmly on the head: uniformity is not equality. Acknowledging the differences in people's experience and accommodating those differences is the essence of inclusiveness. Trying to apply the exact same standard of treatment and behavior to every single person one interacts with regardless of that person's character or identity is simply discrimination of a different flavor.
Honestly, I don't agree. I owe it to other people to not treat them differently based on the color of their skin, so here we are in disagreement. I think it's a disservice to people to treat them based on a stereotype. I treat other people as I'd like to be treated.
It's a luxury that you can disagree about this as a hypothetical. I don't know your background, but I can tell you that, at least in the US, this kind of attitude can get people killed. Calling the cops on a black person, even if you think it's for the same reason as you would call the cops on any other person, has a statistically higher chance of getting that black person killed. If you're not considerate of this factor in how you treat people then I would beg you to start.
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Canto alla vita alla sua bellezza ad ogni sua ferita ogni sua carezza!
I sing to life and to its tragic beauty To pain and to strife, but all that dances through me The rise and the fall, I've lived through it all!
An easy way to think of it: ignoring differences can be almost as harmful as active discrimination, and is no substitute for awareness and acceptance.
Saying "Okay, you're a black man. I'm going to ignore that fact and treat you exactly the same way I'd treat any white man" is not only ignoring part of that person's character/identity, but also ignoring what being black has meant for that person and how it's affected him. It also doesn't really work at all with gender identity issues, wherein the major problem many people face is explicitly the fact that their chosen expression/identity is being ignored in favor of the expression/identity normally assigned to someone of their physical appearance. The "I'm going to treat you exactly the same way I'd treat any other white guy" bit provokes the response "but I'm not a white guy..."
Davyd hit the nail pretty firmly on the head: uniformity is not equality. Acknowledging the differences in people's experience and accommodating those differences is the essence of inclusiveness. Trying to apply the exact same standard of treatment and behavior to every single person one interacts with regardless of that person's character or identity is simply discrimination of a different flavor.
Honestly, I don't agree. I owe it to other people to not treat them differently based on the color of their skin, so here we are in disagreement. I think it's a disservice to people to treat them based on a stereotype. I treat other people as I'd like to be treated.
It's a luxury that you can disagree about this as a hypothetical. I don't know your background, but I can tell you that, at least in the US, this kind of attitude can get people killed. Calling the cops on a black person, even if you think it's for the same reason as you would call the cops on any other person, has a statistically higher chance of getting that black person killed. If you're not considerate of this factor in how you treat people then I would beg you to start.
I'm not from the US. The problems you have we don't really have. You seem to have managed to perpetuate a racism-divide in the US from both side. As I see it.
I don't see how my ideal to treat all equally as I'd treat myself is grounds to put people in danger. I am however aware of the danger the cops pose towards people of color in the US and would take that into consideration.
Personally from what I've learned you should in general avoid the police in the US.
You just admitted the circumstance under which you know that treating people identically to yourself would put people in danger. Clearly you understand the point.
On a less U.S.-centric example: your stance is what people are following when I get called "sir" several dozen times during my workday. Every time I hear that word, it sends a little sliver of depression into my heart. It's not a huge deal, not anything that's going to drive me to self-harm, but it doesn't feel good. Every time it happens I frown a little harder. I said it in the post of mine you quoted: you treating me "exactly as you'd like to be treated" doesn't work because you're not me. You're (presumably) not stuck in a body you hate with no known way of getting free of it and reminded a hundred times a day of how lowkey terrible your meat shell is, and so you'd just treat me like a regular one-of-the-guys Dude Brohampton.
I can handle someone relegating me to Dude Brohampton status. People've been doing it my whole life, I'm well used to it. But I like the people who acknowledge me as Rei more than I like the people who insist I be Mr. Brohampton, and the tables where I'm free to be me and be treated as me, instead of as you-by-proxy, are tables I like better.
Or, TL;DR: Don't treat me the way you'd treat yourself. Treat me the way you'd treat me. Just like you'd want me to treat you the way I'd treat you, and not myself. Different people with different experiences and different lives merit different treatment. There's no one-size-fits-all solution, there's being aware and willing to extend the courtesy of adjusting your treatment of someone to fit their own situation.
Well, how would I know how to treat you before I get to know you? Once I know you, I'd treat you the way you'd like to be treated, but up until that point I'd treat you at a baseline how I'd treat myself.
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Only speaking for myself, but as long as that view wasn't one which encouraged exclusivity and discriminatory practices I would be just as welcoming and inclusive with them as someone who shared my own world view.
As an example, my best friend has vastly different political and religious views to myself, as well as a completely different upbringing and background. She is still welcoming to people of all races, religions, sexualies, genders, etc. But she comes at life from a very different angle to myself. We often spend time discussing these differences and how they apply to various situations, although we both gave up on trying to "convert" each other a long time ago.
That said, I think that part of the reason people "focus on the more surface-level attributes than delving much deeper", as you put it, is that these are the things which should not be affecting how included or welcomed people are made to feel. There is so much more going on with the person, but they are excluded from things because they happen to be a different gender, sexuality or race. These things should not matter as much as they do, but they matter because they have been historically made to matter. There are historic behaviours still present in society which have been used to discriminate against people with these "surface-level attributes", and which still cause them pain due to that history even if they are no longer being used to discriminate.
So, yes, we focus on "surface-level attributes", specifically because they are the ones which should not matter but do.
Yes and no. You can't fully practice inclusiveness without acknowledging that certain people are currently disadvantaged, simply because of who they are. In a perfect world, none of that would matter, but we are not in a perfect world and pretending that none of that matters blinds us to reality and hinders us from making real change. This is why it is useful to collect that kind of data, because the data can show trends that are not necessarily obvious at first glance.
Canto alla vita
alla sua bellezza
ad ogni sua ferita
ogni sua carezza!
I sing to life and to its tragic beauty
To pain and to strife, but all that dances through me
The rise and the fall, I've lived through it all!
Currently, my group is me and my husband, two married cishet men whose wives do not play, another cishet fellow who is unmarried, and one fellow whose preferences I’m unsure of though I’m pretty certain he’s cis if not also het. We all happen to be white but none of this is by design. I’m actually amazed that anyone has enough people knocking on the door that they can be choosy about their group members. In coming on 40 years of playing, I have always found it difficult to find new players; difficult enough that I joke about marrying the DM to ensure I always have a game (I mean, it is one of the reasons but not the only one). As such, I have literally welcomed any person who has responded to an advert for new players.
One other couple has come out but mostly it’s either single men or men whose partner does not play, ranging from teenage to my age (Gen X). A few POC have come out but mostly it’s whites. A few queers have come out but mostly it’s cishets. Again, none of this is by design—all are welcome. If I were to start getting selective about my players, it would not be due to sexuality or gender preference. For me, who you rub up against when you’re not gaming is inconsequential compared to your politics and how god-bothered you are.
I think this is something I have only recently learned (as in, over the last decade or so).
When I was growing up, I was taught never to let someone's ethnicity, gender etc influence my behaviour towards them. I was taught that we should be "colourblind", as it were. So, I treated everybody as individuals, not consciously discriminating towards or against any group. As Ophidimancer says above, this is how things would be in a perfect world, but we don't live in a perfect world.
This is often where there end up being clashes over discrimination and bias. Where negative biases exist, they are very difficult to remove. Therefore, efforts to equalise things often include adding in positive biases to try to cancel this out. However, many outside looking in don't see the negative bias, or see more of the the positive than the negative, and become upset that others are being given a helping hand up when they are not.
In an ideal world, everyone would be treated on merit. Gender, race, sexuality and all these other things would not have any discriminative effect. Unfortunately we don't live in in that world, yet, though I think we are moving closer towards it.
I don't buy the argument that since we'll never be able to create a perfect world, we should settle for a flawed answer. You're right -- we don't live in an ideal world. But the ideal solution does exist. You treat people as people. As individuals. Things a person can't control shouldn't be used for judgment. People are as good or bad as they behave or at least strive for.
What you can control is you own behavior. You, as an individual, can choose to treat other people as unique. You can choose not to value or devalue someone based on stuff that's not their choice or is not under their control. If you live that, you forge actual steps toward that ideal world. We'll never get there, but we should never stop trying to get closer.
The argument isn't that we'll never be able to create a perfect world (although it's true, we won't. Perfect is an illusion and, as the expression goes, the enemy of good) that we should thus settle for flawed answers.
The argument is that we currently live in an imperfect world and thus should adopt philosophies that reflect the truth of the world we live in and work to improve them. As the world changes, we change our philosophies, until we reach that close-to-perfect world.
It's about accepting the world as it is and working to make it how it should be, but not confusing the two.
Look at it this way; you have two groups, one of which has been disenfranchised from the hobby due to unequal treatment. If you pivot to treating them equally, you're not actually going to undo the imbalance caused by the unequal treatment and disenfranchisement, you're going to actually preserve it. Only by acknowledging the differences in experience and treating those of each groups as individuals including their own individual experiences with being disenfranchised or not can you work to undo past damage.
Treating people equally does not mean treating people identicitically. Doing so doesn't result in equality and equity, it just preserves any imbalance that already exists.
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I don't think I know anyone that's not straight and cisgendered. There's a friend of a friend that's a homosexual male, but he doesn't play D&D.
So in general I'd love to play with people of different orientations etc, as long as they're down to earth and chill like I am, then we'd get along great. The only thing I do enforce in my D&D is a gender mixed table. I wouldn't be comfortable playing at a table with only dudes for instance.
Altrazin Aghanes - Wizard/Fighter
Varpulis Windhowl - Fighter
Skolson Demjon - Cleric/Fighter
I agree that we should always strive to get closer, and that we should treat people as individuals.
However, that doesn't mean we shouldn't help those who are currently suffering through not being treated as individuals, whether individually or as a group.
For instance, if a town is subject to flooding, you build flood defences for that town. You don't say "hey, we need to treat everyone the same, so we will build flood defences for every town, including those which don't need it". Nor do you say "we need to treat everyone as individuals, so we are going to ask everyone to prove that they need flood defences, spend time investigating each individually, and protect one house at a time". You know the whole town needs flood defences, so you build them for the whole town (and hopefully for any other town that needs them).
An easy way to think of it: ignoring differences can be almost as harmful as active discrimination, and is no substitute for awareness and acceptance.
Saying "Okay, you're a black man. I'm going to ignore that fact and treat you exactly the same way I'd treat any white man" is not only ignoring part of that person's character/identity, but also ignoring what being black has meant for that person and how it's affected him. It also doesn't really work at all with gender identity issues, wherein the major problem many people face is explicitly the fact that their chosen expression/identity is being ignored in favor of the expression/identity normally assigned to someone of their physical appearance. The "I'm going to treat you exactly the same way I'd treat any other white guy" bit provokes the response "but I'm not a white guy..."
Davyd hit the nail pretty firmly on the head: uniformity is not equality. Acknowledging the differences in people's experience and accommodating those differences is the essence of inclusiveness. Trying to apply the exact same standard of treatment and behavior to every single person one interacts with regardless of that person's character or identity is simply discrimination of a different flavor.
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No one is saying that we should?
Idealistic, but somewhat incomplete. So like yes, I agree, but you have to go a little bit further. People you encounter in life aren't blank slates, they come to you with various experiences from the world and society we live in. You have to be sensitive to that because it is very easy to inadvertently poke sore spots or inflame old traumas. So it's always worth self reflection on how one treat people. You can't assume that one size fits all, because no one is all knowing.
Canto alla vita
alla sua bellezza
ad ogni sua ferita
ogni sua carezza!
I sing to life and to its tragic beauty
To pain and to strife, but all that dances through me
The rise and the fall, I've lived through it all!
Speaking as a lefty, I have experienced environments created by identical rules that have nevertheless imposed an unequal burden upon me. Most things in the US are designed for right handed people and us lefties suffer from it. Speaking as a gay man I have literally had a financial burden exacted upon me from "identical" rules that nevertheless disadvantaged me. Forms that say "Husband and Wife" were touted as equal because they were the same forms given to everyone, but it cost me significantly in both money and heartache, especially when I didn't know if my husband would be deported or not because our marriage wasn't recognized for immigration purposes.
From lived experience I can tell you that identical does not mean equal.
Canto alla vita
alla sua bellezza
ad ogni sua ferita
ogni sua carezza!
I sing to life and to its tragic beauty
To pain and to strife, but all that dances through me
The rise and the fall, I've lived through it all!
I was endeavouring to keep this within the remit of diversity at the D&D table as this is what the thread is about.
Based on my logic, it would not be reasonable to exclude anyone in pursuit of some concept of balance. I, nor anyone else in this thread, made any mention of excluding people. Quite the opposite, the goal is to be inclusive and ensure you are acting in a way to remove as many barriers as possible that may exist for people wanting to participate.
Once again, this is not a box-ticking exercise. This is about cognisance, about awareness and introspection. It's about acknowledging how the world is, how you want the world to be, and how you're going to make the two meet.
How the world is is that currently a lot of people still don't feel comfortable sitting down at a D&D table because the legacy of the game not being for them looms large over the experience. How I, and many others, believe the world should be is that anyone who wants to play D&D should feel safe and comfortable doing so. They should feel the rules and lore can represent themselves as much as they represent people like me. We look to the diversity of the games around us, of the depictions of peoples in the lore, and those who make content to see where we are, and we practice inclusivity to improve the spaces we make for our games.
Treating people identically does not create equality or equity (not balance), because people are not identical. Everyone is different with their own history and baggage and dreams and fears. There is a great quote by John Green from the book Paper Towns which goes "imagine people complexly"; everyone is a whirling ball of complex experiences and thoughts. You cannot, and should not, treat people identically. What you should do is treat people as complex individuals and be ready and willing to factor in the complexities of their life experiences, and the factors that shaped their lives, into how you treat them. This is as true at the D&D table as it is anywhere else.
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Right, and those changes have been made in some places, but just because those changes have been made doesn't mean that everything is all great. Pretending that, because I now live in a country that legally recognizes my marriage, everything is now equal for me completely ignores the toll that history has taken on me and my family. In literal money that I have spent as well as the emotional burden. It's not like I want some sort of compensation for that, but the least people can do is be aware and compassionate.
Making a process easier for some people because they are disadvantaged is not bigotry. It may sometimes be ham handed, but it is an attempt to redress systematic wrongs. People will never get to an equal footing if they keep getting hamstrung by a legacy of wrongs that still affect them.
The stakes of these issues at the gaming table are admittedly lower than the stakes in things like housing, employment, and health, but can nevertheless be the difference between a table that is welcoming and a table that says it is welcoming but exposes people to traumas simply because of ignorance of those traumas.
Canto alla vita
alla sua bellezza
ad ogni sua ferita
ogni sua carezza!
I sing to life and to its tragic beauty
To pain and to strife, but all that dances through me
The rise and the fall, I've lived through it all!
Identical treatments is only equality of everyone is identical (from the point of view of that treatment).
If a shop has stairs up to it and they help nobody, they are treating everyone identically but they are not treating those with mobility issues equally. It is significantly more difficult, if not impossible, for a person on a wheel chair to gain entry to their shop.
Sometimes, people have a disadvantage, and to treat them equally you must put in place measures to help them overcome that disadvantage. This is not special treatment, this is making the world so that it is possible for people to be treated equally, as individuals.
Exactly. Equity instead of equality.
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Spells, Monsters, Subclasses, Races, Arcknight Class, Occultist Class, World, Enigmatic Esoterica forms
Honestly, I don't agree. I owe it to other people to not treat them differently based on the color of their skin, so here we are in disagreement. I think it's a disservice to people to treat them based on a stereotype. I treat other people as I'd like to be treated.
Altrazin Aghanes - Wizard/Fighter
Varpulis Windhowl - Fighter
Skolson Demjon - Cleric/Fighter
It's a luxury that you can disagree about this as a hypothetical. I don't know your background, but I can tell you that, at least in the US, this kind of attitude can get people killed. Calling the cops on a black person, even if you think it's for the same reason as you would call the cops on any other person, has a statistically higher chance of getting that black person killed. If you're not considerate of this factor in how you treat people then I would beg you to start.
Canto alla vita
alla sua bellezza
ad ogni sua ferita
ogni sua carezza!
I sing to life and to its tragic beauty
To pain and to strife, but all that dances through me
The rise and the fall, I've lived through it all!
I'm not from the US. The problems you have we don't really have. You seem to have managed to perpetuate a racism-divide in the US from both side. As I see it.
I don't see how my ideal to treat all equally as I'd treat myself is grounds to put people in danger. I am however aware of the danger the cops pose towards people of color in the US and would take that into consideration.
Personally from what I've learned you should in general avoid the police in the US.
Altrazin Aghanes - Wizard/Fighter
Varpulis Windhowl - Fighter
Skolson Demjon - Cleric/Fighter
You just admitted the circumstance under which you know that treating people identically to yourself would put people in danger. Clearly you understand the point.
On a less U.S.-centric example: your stance is what people are following when I get called "sir" several dozen times during my workday. Every time I hear that word, it sends a little sliver of depression into my heart. It's not a huge deal, not anything that's going to drive me to self-harm, but it doesn't feel good. Every time it happens I frown a little harder. I said it in the post of mine you quoted: you treating me "exactly as you'd like to be treated" doesn't work because you're not me. You're (presumably) not stuck in a body you hate with no known way of getting free of it and reminded a hundred times a day of how lowkey terrible your meat shell is, and so you'd just treat me like a regular one-of-the-guys Dude Brohampton.
I can handle someone relegating me to Dude Brohampton status. People've been doing it my whole life, I'm well used to it. But I like the people who acknowledge me as Rei more than I like the people who insist I be Mr. Brohampton, and the tables where I'm free to be me and be treated as me, instead of as you-by-proxy, are tables I like better.
Or, TL;DR: Don't treat me the way you'd treat yourself. Treat me the way you'd treat me. Just like you'd want me to treat you the way I'd treat you, and not myself. Different people with different experiences and different lives merit different treatment. There's no one-size-fits-all solution, there's being aware and willing to extend the courtesy of adjusting your treatment of someone to fit their own situation.
Please do not contact or message me.
Well, how would I know how to treat you before I get to know you? Once I know you, I'd treat you the way you'd like to be treated, but up until that point I'd treat you at a baseline how I'd treat myself.
Altrazin Aghanes - Wizard/Fighter
Varpulis Windhowl - Fighter
Skolson Demjon - Cleric/Fighter