In any case, I'm not here to defend anything racist or make any such remark. The original point hat I made and continue to stand by is that by removing or not writing lore for a race you make it both a blank canvas, and completely bland and unimpressive. Why play a race with no background or history when you could play one that does?
Considering this content could be omitted at any time by a DM, it would make more sense to leave any potentially inflammatory material in the book and provide content warnings on all their material. Like you said, it will be impossible to know what could trigger people, but making the game blander and more uninteresting to cater to those people specifically is not the answer because literally millions of people play the game and no two people will be triggered by the same number of things. This game has ben around for years, and there are bound to be things that make a few people uncomfortable. I have a friend who is arachnophobic, and D&D has had Giant Spiders since Oe. Should they be cut from content because it might trigger a phobia?
It is hard to take you seriously when you say "I'm not here to defend anything racist" when your prior post is, quite literally, defending keeping racist material in the book. This is not a fringe case where "it will be impossible to know what could trigger people"--this is a case with something so obviously offensive that any reasonable person could tell the paragraphs in question are triggering for a half dozen different reasons.
This is not a situation where some folks would merely be "uncomfortable"; as would be apparent if you read the thread before posting, the lore literally uses the exact same justifications used by slaveholders to justify the enslavement of an entire people, the exact same justifications used to try and exile that people back to their homeland when slavery ended, and contains a weirdly specific stereotype that, to this very day, is responsible for statistically measurable worse health outcomes for the same race. Roll that all up in a monkey race--a word which is used as a racial pejorative for the same group--and you have something that is not merely discomfort, it is actively offensive.
Let me fix your post into something that is not abjectly terrible--what you should have said from the start, rather than double down on defending racism:
I am shocked and appalled that Wizards could let something so clearly problematic through their design process, and am glad Wizards took steps to remove something so clearly offensive from their lore. However, while I agree the old, racist lore has no place in D&D, I am not overly fond of Wizards' decision to simply excise the lore from the game without a replacement. Rather than simply removing the lore from publication, it would have been great for Wizards to reach out to one of their creators of colour--like anyone involved in the wonderful Radiant Citadel book--and give them the opportunity to write up replacement lore which could be added to the digital version and future reprints.
An announcement acknowledging and removing racist content from the work is well and good, but think how much better this statement would be: "We acknowledge this material is problematic, and profusely apologize to any we might have offended. Effective immediately, we are removing this language from digital circulation and will not be publishing new books with the language included. We are currently working on a replacement lore which will show up in the physical and digital copies moving forward, created by [artist] from the popular [section] of Radiant Citadel. We apologize again to any of our players we have harmed and are committed to redoubling our efforts toward making a more inclusive game for everybody. We are excited to see the perspective [artist] will bring to this project and hope to provide you an update as swiftly as possible."
... Why play a race with no background or history when you could play one that does?
Why miss an opportunity to create where you find lack?
Because people typically don't. Why not just make a homebrew race then? Or rather, why should we need to homebrew official content?
Also in um no, people in fact typically do camp. Your claim for a need is like saying kids need instructions on how to use building blocks. Kids are able to take the forms, and make them their own. Just like many a D&D table can take a species and make it part of their game world. I'd go so far as to speculate that WotC probably knows "lore definitions" of a race is probably the most commonly abandoned aspect of the game (so a streamlined 5e would then ask "why bother writing it?").
Why not homebrew it? I think you got your objections backwards. Most players like taking the elements from a book and play with them, building a game where the element becomes the players own. Homebrewing is introducing unavailable elements. It's much easier to run with the elements given to you in the book that have been playtested for functional mechanics, are often accompanied with professional art for races and monsters, etc. than to homebrew. 5e practices and even the OneD&D proposals are largely derived from what WotC has learned players actually do with the game. Hence the deprioritization of lore constrictions in favor of player options that can be aligned with a (marketed as) multiverse of options. Extracting lore that was debatably "canonically" part of a new to 5e race (I haven't seen the 5e narrative of the Hadozee in 2e spelljammer, though I haven't looked deep, the "deck ape" stuff comes from 3.5 for a non spelljammer setting, so there's not treasured traditions being put under erasure here, it was I think weak research into prior editions and conflation of two ideas in a bad way) is very much in line with this way of doing 5e.
Subjugate whoever you want in your games, or pick whatever people you want to have a history of subjugation that they've overcome, you can pick any race from the core books or MMM and do that if there need be a slave narrative in your game. That's your license. Everybody's got that license (though some practice it with more care than others). But to pretend something's been taken from you, or "the hobby" and assign some sort of equivalency to that false injury in line with folks who feel the description of the Hadozee was harmful?
And your canard trying to draw an equivalency between the cultural problems of the enduring legacies of racism and slavery with phobias? If you're drawing that analogy, you are seriously not intellectually equipped to contribute to this conversation. Common phobias and trauma legacies are very different things, and trying to use your knowledge of one to justify your take on another is a callous treatment of both.
The three paragraphs that remain in both books do not inform any player or DM on the races history, worldbuilding aspects or lore of any real kind beyond the incredibly vague. The same is true of the Owlin, and doubly so for the Thri-kreen, who's world isn't even mentioned. So yes, it's like there isn't any lore on them because their isn't. There is nothing about their rise to civilization or even how civilizations work on Yazir; or how they view magic or religion or technology. There is no lore about their culture or cultures. No heroic figures or important points in their history. There is nothing about how they figured out how to enter the astral sea or pilot spelljammers; and next to nothing about their relationships with other races that can.
Dude. This is Spelljammer. You can visit practically any world and setting in Spelljammer and any race can have any culture conceivable in the entire D&D Multiverse.
"Next to nothing about their relationships with other races", yeah, because that's a bad idea in the first place. When they did have that, it was also racist-looking drivel about them being happy servants of the Elven Armada and seen as a lesser race. Also, none of the other races in Spelljammer have that info and the Hadozee didn't have it before . . . so why are you complaining about this in the thread about Hadozee having offensive lore. That's a really, really bad look for you, on top of you defending the presence of said offensive lore in earlier posts.
If you want to complain about races not getting much lore in newer books, feel free to do so. However, this is not the place to do so, and you doing so is making you look bad.
This was not a "leap to defend anything racist" as nothing was racist to begin with. They didn't get rid of anything "racist", they got rid of a background which included Slavery (which is not racist), and Eugenics. Distasteful as these thing are, the content warning on the books should have metered one's expectations of what they might find inside. If you purchased them then you gave consent to being exposed to that content. Moreover, if this is what people have become accustomed to being traumatized by, may I remind you of the Chitine, who have a near perfect copy of the Hadozee's previous lore, and it's somehow not racist. How racist it must be to deem the entire history of a sapient race who fought and achieved their own freedom so unimportant or potentially "traumatizing" to others that it is relegated to a single paragraph footnote that tells nothing of their past.
I don't give an eff about the Chitine and they are not relevant to this conversation.
A race previously being enslaved is not a problem. If it was, people would be complaining about Githyanki/Githzerai, Kuo-Toa, Duergar, Grimlocks, and every other race in D&D (which is about half of them) that have been previously enslaved by the Mind Flayers. Get that into your head, please. Slavery being in the background of a race is not racist and no one is saying that it is.
However, when you have a race of previously-mindless monkeys that were elevated to sentience and given society when they were enslaved by a "higher species" and work on boats and were freed by the good members of that "higher species" because they were too dumb/weak to do it on their own . . . that's a bad look. That looks really, really bad because of how it echoes real world racist propaganda dating back to the Transatlantic Slave Trade.
No one cares if slavery is mentioned in a book so long as it's approached well and respectfully. This was not that. This was nowhere near "respectful". You defending that lore looks really, really bad for you, and you coming in here and complaining about a general complaint that is in no way only pertinent to the Hadozee makes you look even worse and shows that you're trying to distract from the conversation with strawmen and other red herrings.
In any case, I'm not here to defend anything racist or make any such remark. The original point hat I made and continue to stand by is that by removing or not writing lore for a race you make it both a blank canvas, and completely bland and unimpressive. Why play a race with no background or history when you could play one that does?
But it's not a blank canvas. And even if it was, there's probably millions of 5e players that make up their own lore for the races/reskin them as they like. The DMG even recommends doing that (saying that Halflings could be Micefolk in a homebrew setting). One of the most popular settings in D&D history, Eberron, does the exact same thing, telling you that every race and monster can fit in the world if you reskin it and attach it to one of the common lore hooks in the world (Mordain the Fleshweaver, the "kalpas", the Mournland, Xen'drik, experiments during the Last War, etc).
People like reskinning races and adding their own lore. If I end up using Hadozee, I'll certainly do that. This game is about imagination. Use it and stop complaining that lore a bunch of people thought was racist was removed from the game.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Please check out my homebrew, I would appreciate feedback:
In any case, I'm not here to defend anything racist or make any such remark. The original point hat I made and continue to stand by is that by removing or not writing lore for a race you make it both a blank canvas, and completely bland and unimpressive. Why play a race with no background or history when you could play one that does?
Considering this content could be omitted at any time by a DM, it would make more sense to leave any potentially inflammatory material in the book and provide content warnings on all their material. Like you said, it will be impossible to know what could trigger people, but making the game blander and more uninteresting to cater to those people specifically is not the answer because literally millions of people play the game and no two people will be triggered by the same number of things. This game has ben around for years, and there are bound to be things that make a few people uncomfortable. I have a friend who is arachnophobic, and D&D has had Giant Spiders since Oe. Should they be cut from content because it might trigger a phobia?
It is hard to take you seriously when you say "I'm not here to defend anything racist" when your prior post is, quite literally, defending keeping racist material in the book. This is not a fringe case where "it will be impossible to know what could trigger people"--this is a case with something so obviously offensive that any reasonable person could tell the paragraphs in question are triggering for a half dozen different reasons.
This is not a situation where some folks would merely be "uncomfortable"; as would be apparent if you read the thread before posting, the lore literally uses the exact same justifications used by slaveholders to justify the enslavement of an entire people, the exact same justifications used to try and exile that people back to their homeland when slavery ended, and contains a weirdly specific stereotype that, to this very day, is responsible for statistically measurable worse health outcomes for the same race. Roll that all up in a monkey race--a word which is used as a racial pejorative for the same group--and you have something that is not merely discomfort, it is actively offensive.
Let me fix your post into something that is not abjectly terrible--what you should have said from the start, rather than double down on defending racism:
I am shocked and appalled that Wizards could let something so clearly problematic through their design process, and am glad Wizards took steps to remove something so clearly offensive from their lore. However, while I agree the old, racist lore has no place in D&D, I am not overly fond of Wizards' decision to simply excise the lore from the game without a replacement. Rather than simply removing the lore from publication, it would have been great for Wizards to reach out to one of their creators of colour--like anyone involved in the wonderful Radiant Citadel book--and give them the opportunity to write up replacement lore which could be added to the digital version and future reprints.
An announcement acknowledging and removing racist content from the work is well and good, but think how much better this statement would be: "We acknowledge this material is problematic, and profusely apologize to any we might have offended. Effective immediately, we are removing this language from digital circulation and will not be publishing new books with the language included. We are currently working on a replacement lore which will show up in the physical and digital copies moving forward, created by [artist] from the popular [section] of Radiant Citadel. We apologize again to any of our players we have harmed and are committed to redoubling our efforts toward making a more inclusive game for everybody. We are excited to see the perspective [artist] will bring to this project and hope to provide you an update as swiftly as possible."
I would like once more to clarify that slavery is not racist. It is an uncomfortable topic, sure, but it is not racist. The very idea that the Hadozee were slaves is not, by definition in and of itself, racist towards any group of people. Nor has it been justifiably proven as fact that the inclusion of the Hadozee race as it was was previously was done with racist intent. I have not now, nor have I ever defended racism. But I want to stress that slavery as an idea is not racist. It still stands out to me that the Hadozee were slaves previously but are considered racist based on flimsy arguments, but the chitines still are eugenic slaves, and they are not. The end result is that some people were offended by the lore of the Hadozee and it was scrubbed, which is bad, but no one is offended by the lore of the Chitines, which has been out much longer and remains unchanged. It's a double standard and I'm not happy about that. Especially when Spelljammer did have content warnings attached to it. It's the equivalent of taking a child to a rated-R movie and then being upset that they saw something you felt was inappropriate. That is what a content warning is for.
I would like once more to clarify that slavery is not racist. It is an uncomfortable topic, sure, but it is not racist. The very idea that the Hadozee were slaves is not, by definition in and of itself, racist towards any group of people. Nor has it been justifiably proven as fact that the inclusion of the Hadozee race as it was was previously was done with racist intent. I have not now, nor have I ever defended racism. But I want to stress that slavery as an idea is not racist. It still stands out to me that the Hadozee were slaves previously but are considered racist based on flimsy arguments, but the chitines still are eugenic slaves, and they are not. The end result is that some people were offended by the lore of the Hadozee and it was scrubbed, which is bad, but no one is offended by the lore of the Chitines, which has been out much longer and remains unchanged. It's a double standard and I'm not happy about that. Especially when Spelljammer did have content warnings attached to it. It's the equivalent of taking a child to a rated-R movie and then being upset that they saw something you felt was inappropriate. That is what a content warning is for.
What is it about the removed text that you covet so much? That has motivated you so strongly to misunderstand the arguments of your opponents. Which lines do you need to see to finally be at peace?
In any case, I'm not here to defend anything racist or make any such remark. The original point hat I made and continue to stand by is that by removing or not writing lore for a race you make it both a blank canvas, and completely bland and unimpressive. Why play a race with no background or history when you could play one that does?
Considering this content could be omitted at any time by a DM, it would make more sense to leave any potentially inflammatory material in the book and provide content warnings on all their material. Like you said, it will be impossible to know what could trigger people, but making the game blander and more uninteresting to cater to those people specifically is not the answer because literally millions of people play the game and no two people will be triggered by the same number of things. This game has ben around for years, and there are bound to be things that make a few people uncomfortable. I have a friend who is arachnophobic, and D&D has had Giant Spiders since Oe. Should they be cut from content because it might trigger a phobia?
It is hard to take you seriously when you say "I'm not here to defend anything racist" when your prior post is, quite literally, defending keeping racist material in the book. This is not a fringe case where "it will be impossible to know what could trigger people"--this is a case with something so obviously offensive that any reasonable person could tell the paragraphs in question are triggering for a half dozen different reasons.
This is not a situation where some folks would merely be "uncomfortable"; as would be apparent if you read the thread before posting, the lore literally uses the exact same justifications used by slaveholders to justify the enslavement of an entire people, the exact same justifications used to try and exile that people back to their homeland when slavery ended, and contains a weirdly specific stereotype that, to this very day, is responsible for statistically measurable worse health outcomes for the same race. Roll that all up in a monkey race--a word which is used as a racial pejorative for the same group--and you have something that is not merely discomfort, it is actively offensive.
Let me fix your post into something that is not abjectly terrible--what you should have said from the start, rather than double down on defending racism:
I am shocked and appalled that Wizards could let something so clearly problematic through their design process, and am glad Wizards took steps to remove something so clearly offensive from their lore. However, while I agree the old, racist lore has no place in D&D, I am not overly fond of Wizards' decision to simply excise the lore from the game without a replacement. Rather than simply removing the lore from publication, it would have been great for Wizards to reach out to one of their creators of colour--like anyone involved in the wonderful Radiant Citadel book--and give them the opportunity to write up replacement lore which could be added to the digital version and future reprints.
An announcement acknowledging and removing racist content from the work is well and good, but think how much better this statement would be: "We acknowledge this material is problematic, and profusely apologize to any we might have offended. Effective immediately, we are removing this language from digital circulation and will not be publishing new books with the language included. We are currently working on a replacement lore which will show up in the physical and digital copies moving forward, created by [artist] from the popular [section] of Radiant Citadel. We apologize again to any of our players we have harmed and are committed to redoubling our efforts toward making a more inclusive game for everybody. We are excited to see the perspective [artist] will bring to this project and hope to provide you an update as swiftly as possible."
I would like once more to clarify that slavery is not racist. It is an uncomfortable topic, sure, but it is not racist. The very idea that the Hadozee were slaves is not, by definition in and of itself, racist towards any group of people. Nor has it been justifiably proven as fact that the inclusion of the Hadozee race as it was was previously was done with racist intent. I have not now, nor have I ever defended racism. But I want to stress that slavery as an idea is not racist. It still stands out to me that the Hadozee were slaves previously but are considered racist based on flimsy arguments, but the chitines still are eugenic slaves, and they are not. The end result is that some people were offended by the lore of the Hadozee and it was scrubbed, which is bad, but no one is offended by the lore of the Chitines, which has been out much longer and remains unchanged. It's a double standard and I'm not happy about that. Especially when Spelljammer did have content warnings attached to it. It's the equivalent of taking a child to a rated-R movie and then being upset that they saw something you felt was inappropriate. That is what a content warning is for.
Stressing a point literally no one is making is not a defense of your post--all it shows is an unwillingness on your part to actually read the thread, or even the post, you are responding to. The "but slavery is not racist" argument is a straw man which has already been disposed of multiple times on this thread--and not even Wizards has said that slavery is, on its face, racist. The problem is not that the Hadozee are a slave race--the problem is that (and, let me be lazy here and just copy and paste what I already wrote in the very post you quoted but evidently did not read): the lore literally uses the exact same justifications used by slaveholders to justify the enslavement of an entire people, the exact same justifications used to try and exile that people back to their homeland when slavery ended, and contains a weirdly specific stereotype that, to this very day, is responsible for statistically measurable worse health outcomes for the same race. Roll that all up in a monkey race--a word which is used as a racial pejorative for the same group--and you have something that is not merely discomfort, it is actively offensive.
Furthermore, it does not matter that Wizards might not have had racist intent in their lore--it is so overwhelmingly offensive to anyone with a basic understanding of history and empathy that Wizards was, at best, completely negligent in allowing the obviously problematic content to reach publication. While there might not have been a racist intent, the fact that Wizards allowed something like this to fly under the radar is, in fact, a type of racism--it is a clear indication of systemic flaws within Wizards where they do not have employees with the experiences or training necessary to catch something that should have been obvious to someone.
You content warning argument is, likewise, nonsensical. You are forgetting--and it is such an obvious point that I expect you are willfully being obtuse--that D&D is a game for all ages. A better analogy would be taking a child to a G-rated movie and getting the abject racism of Song of the South.
... Why play a race with no background or history when you could play one that does?
Why miss an opportunity to create where you find lack?
Because people typically don't. Why not just make a homebrew race then? Or rather, why should we need to homebrew official content?
Also in um no, people in fact typically do camp. Your claim for a need is like saying kids need instructions on how to use building blocks. Kids are able to take the forms, and make them their own. Just like many a D&D table can take a species and make it part of their game world. I'd go so far as to speculate that WotC probably knows "lore definitions" of a race is probably the most commonly abandoned aspect of the game (so a streamlined 5e would then ask "why bother writing it?").
Why not homebrew it? I think you got your objections backwards. Most players like taking the elements from a book and play with them, building a game where the element becomes the players own. Homebrewing is introducing unavailable elements. It's much easier to run with the elements given to you in the book that have been playtested for functional mechanics, are often accompanied with professional art for races and monsters, etc. than to homebrew. 5e practices and even the OneD&D proposals are largely derived from what WotC has learned players actually do with the game. Hence the deprioritization of lore constrictions in favor of player options that can be aligned with a (marketed as) multiverse of options. Extracting lore that was debatably "canonically" part of a new to 5e race (I haven't seen the 5e narrative of the Hadozee in 2e spelljammer, though I haven't looked deep, the "deck ape" stuff comes from 3.5 for a non spelljammer setting, so there's not treasured traditions being put under erasure here, it was I think weak research into prior editions and conflation of two ideas in a bad way) is very much in line with this way of doing 5e.
Subjugate whoever you want in your games, or pick whatever people you want to have a history of subjugation that they've overcome, you can pick any race from the core books or MMM and do that if there need be a slave narrative in your game. That's your license. Everybody's got that license (though some practice it with more care than others). But to pretend something's been taken from you, or "the hobby" and assign some sort of equivalency to that false injury in line with folks who feel the description of the Hadozee was harmful?
And your canard trying to draw an equivalency between the cultural problems of the enduring legacies of racism and slavery with phobias? If you're drawing that analogy, you are seriously not intellectually equipped to contribute to this conversation. Common phobias and trauma legacies are very different things, and trying to use your knowledge of one to justify your take on another is a callous treatment of both.
1: Most of the time lore is omitted in home game tables and homebrew setting, but not as often in established official settings where they stand as a framework to the world as a whole, for both players and DM's. If lore meant nothing there would be no point in printing books of any kind, especially Setting books like Forgotten Realms or Eberron. There is no "subjugation", it's no different than reading the lore about any race in any official campaign setting book. That is how the race functions on average in that world, though a PC may vary slightly.
2: the Hadozee lore as published in 5e is wholly a 5e concept, it's 2e lore was very sparse and effectively as non-existent as it is now. I'm not defneding it as a treasure legacy. I'm arguing that the new lore was scrubbed because the idea of "slavery" is wrongfully seen as "racist" when it isn't, even when other topics involving slavery are still present in the game. Identifying a fictional race with a real world human is a great stretch unless you suddenly assume it was done deliberately with racist intentions, which then begs the question of why?
3: And you insulting my intelligence by assuming I don't know the difference between "legacy trauma" and "phobia" is absurd. Both are abjectly learned behaviors though both are deeply rooted in the psyche, albeit one can manifest in a far more serious degree, that being an actual phobia. I don't know if you've ever actually seen someone have a true panic attack before due to a phobia but it is more than just "emotionally triggering", and disregarding the mental anguish some individuals go through because of various phobias is also insulting to them. "Legacy trauma" is likewise mostly a learned behavior and is carried down generations because it is kept that way often by a family or community. No one in America lives today who was ever aa American slave, nor were there any known living slaves left in America when this game was first published in 75'. Though institutionalized "slavery" still does exist in some nations to this day, though it goes under different names and structures it is not the "slavery" people are equating to "racism".
In any case, I'm not here to defend anything racist or make any such remark. The original point hat I made and continue to stand by is that by removing or not writing lore for a race you make it both a blank canvas, and completely bland and unimpressive. Why play a race with no background or history when you could play one that does?
Considering this content could be omitted at any time by a DM, it would make more sense to leave any potentially inflammatory material in the book and provide content warnings on all their material. Like you said, it will be impossible to know what could trigger people, but making the game blander and more uninteresting to cater to those people specifically is not the answer because literally millions of people play the game and no two people will be triggered by the same number of things. This game has ben around for years, and there are bound to be things that make a few people uncomfortable. I have a friend who is arachnophobic, and D&D has had Giant Spiders since Oe. Should they be cut from content because it might trigger a phobia?
It is hard to take you seriously when you say "I'm not here to defend anything racist" when your prior post is, quite literally, defending keeping racist material in the book. This is not a fringe case where "it will be impossible to know what could trigger people"--this is a case with something so obviously offensive that any reasonable person could tell the paragraphs in question are triggering for a half dozen different reasons.
This is not a situation where some folks would merely be "uncomfortable"; as would be apparent if you read the thread before posting, the lore literally uses the exact same justifications used by slaveholders to justify the enslavement of an entire people, the exact same justifications used to try and exile that people back to their homeland when slavery ended, and contains a weirdly specific stereotype that, to this very day, is responsible for statistically measurable worse health outcomes for the same race. Roll that all up in a monkey race--a word which is used as a racial pejorative for the same group--and you have something that is not merely discomfort, it is actively offensive.
Let me fix your post into something that is not abjectly terrible--what you should have said from the start, rather than double down on defending racism:
I am shocked and appalled that Wizards could let something so clearly problematic through their design process, and am glad Wizards took steps to remove something so clearly offensive from their lore. However, while I agree the old, racist lore has no place in D&D, I am not overly fond of Wizards' decision to simply excise the lore from the game without a replacement. Rather than simply removing the lore from publication, it would have been great for Wizards to reach out to one of their creators of colour--like anyone involved in the wonderful Radiant Citadel book--and give them the opportunity to write up replacement lore which could be added to the digital version and future reprints.
An announcement acknowledging and removing racist content from the work is well and good, but think how much better this statement would be: "We acknowledge this material is problematic, and profusely apologize to any we might have offended. Effective immediately, we are removing this language from digital circulation and will not be publishing new books with the language included. We are currently working on a replacement lore which will show up in the physical and digital copies moving forward, created by [artist] from the popular [section] of Radiant Citadel. We apologize again to any of our players we have harmed and are committed to redoubling our efforts toward making a more inclusive game for everybody. We are excited to see the perspective [artist] will bring to this project and hope to provide you an update as swiftly as possible."
I would like once more to clarify that slavery is not racist. It is an uncomfortable topic, sure, but it is not racist. The very idea that the Hadozee were slaves is not, by definition in and of itself, racist towards any group of people. Nor has it been justifiably proven as fact that the inclusion of the Hadozee race as it was was previously was done with racist intent. I have not now, nor have I ever defended racism. But I want to stress that slavery as an idea is not racist. It still stands out to me that the Hadozee were slaves previously but are considered racist based on flimsy arguments, but the chitines still are eugenic slaves, and they are not. The end result is that some people were offended by the lore of the Hadozee and it was scrubbed, which is bad, but no one is offended by the lore of the Chitines, which has been out much longer and remains unchanged. It's a double standard and I'm not happy about that. Especially when Spelljammer did have content warnings attached to it. It's the equivalent of taking a child to a rated-R movie and then being upset that they saw something you felt was inappropriate. That is what a content warning is for.
Stressing a point literally no one is making is not a defense of your post--all it shows is an unwillingness on your part to actually read the thread, or even the post, you are responding to. The "but slavery is not racist" argument is a straw man which has already been disposed of multiple times on this thread--and not even Wizards has said that slavery is, on its face, racist. The problem is not that the Hadozee are a slave race--the problem is that (and, let me be lazy here and just copy and paste what I already wrote in the very post you quoted but evidently did not read): the lore literally uses the exact same justifications used by slaveholders to justify the enslavement of an entire people, the exact same justifications used to try and exile that people back to their homeland when slavery ended, and contains a weirdly specific stereotype that, to this very day, is responsible for statistically measurable worse health outcomes for the same race. Roll that all up in a monkey race--a word which is used as a racial pejorative for the same group--and you have something that is not merely discomfort, it is actively offensive.
Furthermore, it does not matter that Wizards might not have had racist intent in their lore--it is so overwhelmingly offensive to anyone with a basic understanding of history and empathy that Wizards was, at best, completely negligent in allowing the obviously problematic content to reach publication. While there might not have been a racist intent, the fact that Wizards allowed something like this to fly under the radar is, in fact, a type of racism--it is a clear indication of systemic flaws within Wizards where they do not have employees with the experiences or training necessary to catch something that should have been obvious to someone.
You content warning argument is, likewise, nonsensical. You are forgetting--and it is such an obvious point that I expect you are willfully being obtuse--that D&D is a game for all ages. A better analogy would be taking a child to a G-rated movie and getting the abject racism of Song of the South.
I don't disagree this made up lore for the race, which is entirely a 5e construction by my understanding and NOT found in any earlier rendition of the race as a whole, is directly negligent. But I would not consider it remotely racist WITHOUT racist intent. If this game is intended for all ages then no child, nor adult for that matter, in their right mind without prior knowledge of the issues you tout will lead them to equate the Hadozee with any human at all, past or present. Their ignorance of the perceived stereotype does not make them racist either. No different than showing a child the movie Dumbo nowadays. Without EXPRESSLY telling someone the crows are a racial stereotype they simply aren't. At risk of sounding crass, in order to find it racist, you'd need to specifically looking to find it racist. In a vacuum it simply isn't.
What is it about the removed text that you covet so much? That has motivated you so strongly to misunderstand the arguments of your opponents. Which lines do you need to see to finally be at peace?
Why are the Chitine's not considered offensively racist in need of immediate company apology and retcon but the Hadozee are? What about one situation is acceptable when the other is not? I don't covet removed text I want this explained to me. Why is one bad and the other acceptable.
In any case, I'm not here to defend anything racist or make any such remark. The original point hat I made and continue to stand by is that by removing or not writing lore for a race you make it both a blank canvas, and completely bland and unimpressive. Why play a race with no background or history when you could play one that does?
Considering this content could be omitted at any time by a DM, it would make more sense to leave any potentially inflammatory material in the book and provide content warnings on all their material. Like you said, it will be impossible to know what could trigger people, but making the game blander and more uninteresting to cater to those people specifically is not the answer because literally millions of people play the game and no two people will be triggered by the same number of things. This game has ben around for years, and there are bound to be things that make a few people uncomfortable. I have a friend who is arachnophobic, and D&D has had Giant Spiders since Oe. Should they be cut from content because it might trigger a phobia?
It is hard to take you seriously when you say "I'm not here to defend anything racist" when your prior post is, quite literally, defending keeping racist material in the book. This is not a fringe case where "it will be impossible to know what could trigger people"--this is a case with something so obviously offensive that any reasonable person could tell the paragraphs in question are triggering for a half dozen different reasons.
This is not a situation where some folks would merely be "uncomfortable"; as would be apparent if you read the thread before posting, the lore literally uses the exact same justifications used by slaveholders to justify the enslavement of an entire people, the exact same justifications used to try and exile that people back to their homeland when slavery ended, and contains a weirdly specific stereotype that, to this very day, is responsible for statistically measurable worse health outcomes for the same race. Roll that all up in a monkey race--a word which is used as a racial pejorative for the same group--and you have something that is not merely discomfort, it is actively offensive.
Let me fix your post into something that is not abjectly terrible--what you should have said from the start, rather than double down on defending racism:
I am shocked and appalled that Wizards could let something so clearly problematic through their design process, and am glad Wizards took steps to remove something so clearly offensive from their lore. However, while I agree the old, racist lore has no place in D&D, I am not overly fond of Wizards' decision to simply excise the lore from the game without a replacement. Rather than simply removing the lore from publication, it would have been great for Wizards to reach out to one of their creators of colour--like anyone involved in the wonderful Radiant Citadel book--and give them the opportunity to write up replacement lore which could be added to the digital version and future reprints.
An announcement acknowledging and removing racist content from the work is well and good, but think how much better this statement would be: "We acknowledge this material is problematic, and profusely apologize to any we might have offended. Effective immediately, we are removing this language from digital circulation and will not be publishing new books with the language included. We are currently working on a replacement lore which will show up in the physical and digital copies moving forward, created by [artist] from the popular [section] of Radiant Citadel. We apologize again to any of our players we have harmed and are committed to redoubling our efforts toward making a more inclusive game for everybody. We are excited to see the perspective [artist] will bring to this project and hope to provide you an update as swiftly as possible."
I would like once more to clarify that slavery is not racist. It is an uncomfortable topic, sure, but it is not racist. The very idea that the Hadozee were slaves is not, by definition in and of itself, racist towards any group of people. Nor has it been justifiably proven as fact that the inclusion of the Hadozee race as it was was previously was done with racist intent. I have not now, nor have I ever defended racism. But I want to stress that slavery as an idea is not racist. It still stands out to me that the Hadozee were slaves previously but are considered racist based on flimsy arguments, but the chitines still are eugenic slaves, and they are not. The end result is that some people were offended by the lore of the Hadozee and it was scrubbed, which is bad, but no one is offended by the lore of the Chitines, which has been out much longer and remains unchanged. It's a double standard and I'm not happy about that. Especially when Spelljammer did have content warnings attached to it. It's the equivalent of taking a child to a rated-R movie and then being upset that they saw something you felt was inappropriate. That is what a content warning is for.
Stressing a point literally no one is making is not a defense of your post--all it shows is an unwillingness on your part to actually read the thread, or even the post, you are responding to. The "but slavery is not racist" argument is a straw man which has already been disposed of multiple times on this thread--and not even Wizards has said that slavery is, on its face, racist. The problem is not that the Hadozee are a slave race--the problem is that (and, let me be lazy here and just copy and paste what I already wrote in the very post you quoted but evidently did not read): the lore literally uses the exact same justifications used by slaveholders to justify the enslavement of an entire people, the exact same justifications used to try and exile that people back to their homeland when slavery ended, and contains a weirdly specific stereotype that, to this very day, is responsible for statistically measurable worse health outcomes for the same race. Roll that all up in a monkey race--a word which is used as a racial pejorative for the same group--and you have something that is not merely discomfort, it is actively offensive.
Furthermore, it does not matter that Wizards might not have had racist intent in their lore--it is so overwhelmingly offensive to anyone with a basic understanding of history and empathy that Wizards was, at best, completely negligent in allowing the obviously problematic content to reach publication. While there might not have been a racist intent, the fact that Wizards allowed something like this to fly under the radar is, in fact, a type of racism--it is a clear indication of systemic flaws within Wizards where they do not have employees with the experiences or training necessary to catch something that should have been obvious to someone.
You content warning argument is, likewise, nonsensical. You are forgetting--and it is such an obvious point that I expect you are willfully being obtuse--that D&D is a game for all ages. A better analogy would be taking a child to a G-rated movie and getting the abject racism of Song of the South.
I don't disagree this made up lore for the race, which is entirely a 5e construction by my understanding and NOT found in any earlier rendition of the race as a whole, is directly negligent. But I would not consider it remotely racist WITHOUT racist intent. If this game is intended for all ages then no child, nor adult for that matter, in their right mind without prior knowledge of the issues you tout will lead them to equate the Hadozee with any human at all, past or present. Their ignorance of the perceived stereotype does not make them racist either. No different than showing a child the movie Dumbo nowadays. Without EXPRESSLY telling someone the crows are a racial stereotype they simply aren't. At risk of sounding crass, in order to find it racist, you'd need to specifically looking to find it racist. In a vacuum it simply isn't.
Multiple people on this thread have said “I do not see how this is racist.” Each one has been told “this is a situation where Wizards used the exact same language used to justify a unique and very dark chapter in history - it is the use of congruent language that is the problem.” Each and every other person on this thread who was initially blind to the racism subsequently responded by saying “wow, that is much worse than I thought - I can’t see why this was a particularly horrific oversight and should be excused from the game.”
You are the ONLY person doubling down on defending the negligent inclusion of hate in D&D.
Might I suggest some self introspection as to your motives? Because, from where I am sitting, looking at a lone person defending something everyone else can see cuts far too close to actual hate to be anything other than offensive… it is hard to accept the notion that lone defender of inadvertent bigotry is motivated by something innocent.
No, no, I agree it was negligent, but then I use Occam's Razor and I think to myself "It would be horribly racist if it was meant this way and would never have made it past the sensitivity review boards the company is supposed to have for this kind of thing. So either it was deliberately written this way (as there is no prior lore like this) and made it past all the checks and balances somehow to coincide with a "racist" depiction of a bard all completely intentionally, or it wasn't meant that way in any shape or form and is completely coincidental which then make this whole argument entirely a perception thing which is being blown remarkably out of proportion. And knowing how quick people on the internet are to knee-jerk react about things, logic tells me this was not meant to be racist and is being seen as racist".
I stand by what I said, in a vacuum this is not racist. It only becomes racist if you attribute racism to it. I understand your argument entirely and I always have, but I have not been looking at this issue solely from the perspective the the American whites, or American blacks. I have been looking at this solely from a perspective devoid of American history and socio-politics. Does that make me or my argument racist?
No, no, I agree it was negligent, but then I use Occam's Razor and I think to myself "It would be horribly racist if it was meant this way and would never have made it past the sensitivity review boards the company is supposed to have for this kind of thing. So either it was deliberately written this way (as there is no prior lore like this) and made it past all the checks and balances somehow to coincide with a "racist" depiction of a bard all completely intentionally, or it wasn't meant that way in any shape or form and is completely coincidental which then make this whole argument entirely a perception thing which is being blown remarkably out of proportion. And knowing how quick people on the internet are to knee-jerk react about things, logic tells me this was not meant to be racist and is being seen as racist".
I stand by what I said, in a vacuum this is not racist. It only becomes racist if you attribute racism to it. I understand your argument entirely and I always have, but I have not been looking at this issue solely from the perspective the the American whites, or American blacks. I have been looking at this solely from a perspective devoid of American history and socio-politics. Does that make me or my argument racist?
The reality is we do not live in a vacuum. As aforestated, the parallels are so incredibly close - “this is in the uncivilised monkeys’ best interest to be made slaves and civilised”; “these monkeys cannot save themselves”; “these monkeys are great at shrugging off injuries”; “now they’re freed, let’s send them back to take our civilisation to their savage lands”; etc. - to the word for word real world statements made against African Slaves (including the monkey imagery to really drive the point home) that it IS offensive to anyone who isn’t so ignorant as to pretend the real world does not exist.
Now, while maybe it was not intentional (and both fantasy and D&D have current and historical issues with racism in design, so big maybe there)… the fact that they missed something so obvious is, in fact, a form of racism. As you even admit, it was “negligent” for them to publish things - negligent, by definition, ascribes a degree of culpability and blame. Negligent racism is a lesser degree of racism, but it is racism nonetheless—it betrays that your company does not properly vet its publications, does not have marginalise people in their review process, does not have people trained to recognise insensitively… everything about this negligent oversight indicates an institutionalised degree of racism within Wizards’ design process, likely a holdover from the fact the game was literally invented by an outspoken racist.
Not only are you trying to advocate in favour of institutionalised racism within Wizards, you are also advocating that, once informed that their content was offensive, they should continue to publish something that reeks of racism. Choosing to continue to publish problematic, hateful content takes an inadvertent, negligent decision, and suddenly turns it to a wilful decision to promulgate hatred. That suddenly raises the level from negligent publication of hate to the higher culpability of wilful publication of hate.
Your entire conclusion is to support the continued publication of harmful and offensive content. You admit that the lore looks really bad, can easily be seen as hateful, and was negligent to publish, then you demand that, instead of fix their negligence and remove something that should never have been published…. They wilfully continue to disseminate content that hurts people. At best, your post lacks empathy (“I can see why this is problematic, but other people should just have thicker skins and ignore that”)… at worst, your posts are actively racist, seeking the continued publication of something you know hurts others. That your posts make the same exact arguments perpetrated by racists to defend their own racist tirades certainly does not help your position either.
"Whoa, whoa, whoa….buddy. Calm down. Let me explain. You have to stop looking at this solely from the perspective that I’m your best friend and she’s your wife. See, I’ve been looking at this from a perspective devoid of any history between any of the three of us. In a vacuum devoid of any of that we don’t even KNOW each other, so labels like wife and best friend...they don’t even exist. No one could have possibly known that those labels existed unless they were expressly told. So she couldn’t have been your wife when I slept with her because I was thinking about us in a vacuum, man. In a vacuum."
Yeah, it's some real delicate footwork trying to dance around the issue in this way, and it just doesn't come together right in the end. We're willing to say that it was negligent...but don't you dare call it racist....oh and also negligence isn't a good enough reason to remove it even if we don't consider it racist (despite all of its obvious racist parallels)?
If you believe that I am, then simply tell me that I'm a racist and be done with it. I submit that placing this book, lore unedited in most any other region of the world without direct connection to say, the internet or knowledge of american history or politics, would not attract as vitriolic a response as it currently has. Likely because without such knowledge the lore does not come off as racist in the same manner or even at all. We may not live in a vacuum, but America and it's politics and history are also not the whole of the world nor the only lens through which we should view it. What I meant by negligent is that Wizards (being a company and therefore focused on making money and little more) would allow anything like this to willfully harm their profit margin by "alienating" their public. It was negligent of them to make anything that could in any way be misconstrued as offensive, which is a pretty hard tightrope to walk.
So once again, if you want to call me a racist for viewing this as fiction and nothing more, not a racist commentary or parallel to american sin and history, but simply fiction, then please do so and let's be done with this.
No one has called you racist. Some have started suspecting it I assume, because you're oddly defensive of very obvious and unnecessary parallels to a VERY LARGE portion of history that, by it's very nature btw, did not just affect American history or politics as you imply. You are right though, America is not the whole world, and is not the only lens through which things should be viewed. It is one of the very large lenses that should be used though; and a period of history that covered 4 centuries and much more of the world than just the Americas is a second very large lens that should be used.
Again though, no one has called you racist. You're the one who has seemingly jumped to some odd conclusion that people are calling YOU racist personally, just by calling THE MATERIAL racist or very problematic. Seemingly because you're able to ignore the parallels or not care about them? I'm confused why honestly, but no one implied that being ignorant of the issue, or being able to happily ignore it, means you are racist. I'm honestly not sure how you've started turning this into a personal attack and not the attack on the logic of your defenses for the material that it has been from everyone.
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I've started assuming that others see me as racist because I have been insinuated to be one for defending neutral ground. I can see parallels as well as anyone but correlation does not imply causation. Two things may look similar but may not be related at all. My arguments are based on looking at this like it is unconnected with American history, not as if it were a parallel of it. I see it as complete fiction that may have unintentionally appeared in a manner which could be misconstrued as racism, even if it wasn't. It makes more sense to me from a business standpoint, and from a logical standpoint, that all of this was the result of a series of unfortunate coincidental mistakes and misunderstandings and the internets inherent ability to overreact to things rather than an inherently racist idea from the get go. This has likely cost WotC a significant sum of money and probably a few potential customers and the already tumultuous peace of those they had. Considering the societal climate of the recent years and the main stream prominence of the company as a whole it doesn't make sense that this would just "slip under a radar". It's entirely possible that people are seeing racism through the parallels because of a perseverance and willingness to do so.
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Nonsense. Maybe in your experience they do not, but that is a reflection of the people you play with rather than commentary on players as a whole.
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It is hard to take you seriously when you say "I'm not here to defend anything racist" when your prior post is, quite literally, defending keeping racist material in the book. This is not a fringe case where "it will be impossible to know what could trigger people"--this is a case with something so obviously offensive that any reasonable person could tell the paragraphs in question are triggering for a half dozen different reasons.
This is not a situation where some folks would merely be "uncomfortable"; as would be apparent if you read the thread before posting, the lore literally uses the exact same justifications used by slaveholders to justify the enslavement of an entire people, the exact same justifications used to try and exile that people back to their homeland when slavery ended, and contains a weirdly specific stereotype that, to this very day, is responsible for statistically measurable worse health outcomes for the same race. Roll that all up in a monkey race--a word which is used as a racial pejorative for the same group--and you have something that is not merely discomfort, it is actively offensive.
Let me fix your post into something that is not abjectly terrible--what you should have said from the start, rather than double down on defending racism:
I am shocked and appalled that Wizards could let something so clearly problematic through their design process, and am glad Wizards took steps to remove something so clearly offensive from their lore. However, while I agree the old, racist lore has no place in D&D, I am not overly fond of Wizards' decision to simply excise the lore from the game without a replacement. Rather than simply removing the lore from publication, it would have been great for Wizards to reach out to one of their creators of colour--like anyone involved in the wonderful Radiant Citadel book--and give them the opportunity to write up replacement lore which could be added to the digital version and future reprints.
An announcement acknowledging and removing racist content from the work is well and good, but think how much better this statement would be: "We acknowledge this material is problematic, and profusely apologize to any we might have offended. Effective immediately, we are removing this language from digital circulation and will not be publishing new books with the language included. We are currently working on a replacement lore which will show up in the physical and digital copies moving forward, created by [artist] from the popular [section] of Radiant Citadel. We apologize again to any of our players we have harmed and are committed to redoubling our efforts toward making a more inclusive game for everybody. We are excited to see the perspective [artist] will bring to this project and hope to provide you an update as swiftly as possible."
Also in um no, people in fact typically do camp. Your claim for a need is like saying kids need instructions on how to use building blocks. Kids are able to take the forms, and make them their own. Just like many a D&D table can take a species and make it part of their game world. I'd go so far as to speculate that WotC probably knows "lore definitions" of a race is probably the most commonly abandoned aspect of the game (so a streamlined 5e would then ask "why bother writing it?").
Why not homebrew it? I think you got your objections backwards. Most players like taking the elements from a book and play with them, building a game where the element becomes the players own. Homebrewing is introducing unavailable elements. It's much easier to run with the elements given to you in the book that have been playtested for functional mechanics, are often accompanied with professional art for races and monsters, etc. than to homebrew. 5e practices and even the OneD&D proposals are largely derived from what WotC has learned players actually do with the game. Hence the deprioritization of lore constrictions in favor of player options that can be aligned with a (marketed as) multiverse of options. Extracting lore that was debatably "canonically" part of a new to 5e race (I haven't seen the 5e narrative of the Hadozee in 2e spelljammer, though I haven't looked deep, the "deck ape" stuff comes from 3.5 for a non spelljammer setting, so there's not treasured traditions being put under erasure here, it was I think weak research into prior editions and conflation of two ideas in a bad way) is very much in line with this way of doing 5e.
Subjugate whoever you want in your games, or pick whatever people you want to have a history of subjugation that they've overcome, you can pick any race from the core books or MMM and do that if there need be a slave narrative in your game. That's your license. Everybody's got that license (though some practice it with more care than others). But to pretend something's been taken from you, or "the hobby" and assign some sort of equivalency to that false injury in line with folks who feel the description of the Hadozee was harmful?
And your canard trying to draw an equivalency between the cultural problems of the enduring legacies of racism and slavery with phobias? If you're drawing that analogy, you are seriously not intellectually equipped to contribute to this conversation. Common phobias and trauma legacies are very different things, and trying to use your knowledge of one to justify your take on another is a callous treatment of both.
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Dude. This is Spelljammer. You can visit practically any world and setting in Spelljammer and any race can have any culture conceivable in the entire D&D Multiverse.
"Next to nothing about their relationships with other races", yeah, because that's a bad idea in the first place. When they did have that, it was also racist-looking drivel about them being happy servants of the Elven Armada and seen as a lesser race. Also, none of the other races in Spelljammer have that info and the Hadozee didn't have it before . . . so why are you complaining about this in the thread about Hadozee having offensive lore. That's a really, really bad look for you, on top of you defending the presence of said offensive lore in earlier posts.
If you want to complain about races not getting much lore in newer books, feel free to do so. However, this is not the place to do so, and you doing so is making you look bad.
I don't give an eff about the Chitine and they are not relevant to this conversation.
A race previously being enslaved is not a problem. If it was, people would be complaining about Githyanki/Githzerai, Kuo-Toa, Duergar, Grimlocks, and every other race in D&D (which is about half of them) that have been previously enslaved by the Mind Flayers. Get that into your head, please. Slavery being in the background of a race is not racist and no one is saying that it is.
However, when you have a race of previously-mindless monkeys that were elevated to sentience and given society when they were enslaved by a "higher species" and work on boats and were freed by the good members of that "higher species" because they were too dumb/weak to do it on their own . . . that's a bad look. That looks really, really bad because of how it echoes real world racist propaganda dating back to the Transatlantic Slave Trade.
No one cares if slavery is mentioned in a book so long as it's approached well and respectfully. This was not that. This was nowhere near "respectful". You defending that lore looks really, really bad for you, and you coming in here and complaining about a general complaint that is in no way only pertinent to the Hadozee makes you look even worse and shows that you're trying to distract from the conversation with strawmen and other red herrings.
But it's not a blank canvas. And even if it was, there's probably millions of 5e players that make up their own lore for the races/reskin them as they like. The DMG even recommends doing that (saying that Halflings could be Micefolk in a homebrew setting). One of the most popular settings in D&D history, Eberron, does the exact same thing, telling you that every race and monster can fit in the world if you reskin it and attach it to one of the common lore hooks in the world (Mordain the Fleshweaver, the "kalpas", the Mournland, Xen'drik, experiments during the Last War, etc).
People like reskinning races and adding their own lore. If I end up using Hadozee, I'll certainly do that. This game is about imagination. Use it and stop complaining that lore a bunch of people thought was racist was removed from the game.
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I would like once more to clarify that slavery is not racist. It is an uncomfortable topic, sure, but it is not racist. The very idea that the Hadozee were slaves is not, by definition in and of itself, racist towards any group of people. Nor has it been justifiably proven as fact that the inclusion of the Hadozee race as it was was previously was done with racist intent. I have not now, nor have I ever defended racism. But I want to stress that slavery as an idea is not racist. It still stands out to me that the Hadozee were slaves previously but are considered racist based on flimsy arguments, but the chitines still are eugenic slaves, and they are not. The end result is that some people were offended by the lore of the Hadozee and it was scrubbed, which is bad, but no one is offended by the lore of the Chitines, which has been out much longer and remains unchanged. It's a double standard and I'm not happy about that. Especially when Spelljammer did have content warnings attached to it. It's the equivalent of taking a child to a rated-R movie and then being upset that they saw something you felt was inappropriate. That is what a content warning is for.
What is it about the removed text that you covet so much? That has motivated you so strongly to misunderstand the arguments of your opponents. Which lines do you need to see to finally be at peace?
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Stressing a point literally no one is making is not a defense of your post--all it shows is an unwillingness on your part to actually read the thread, or even the post, you are responding to. The "but slavery is not racist" argument is a straw man which has already been disposed of multiple times on this thread--and not even Wizards has said that slavery is, on its face, racist. The problem is not that the Hadozee are a slave race--the problem is that (and, let me be lazy here and just copy and paste what I already wrote in the very post you quoted but evidently did not read): the lore literally uses the exact same justifications used by slaveholders to justify the enslavement of an entire people, the exact same justifications used to try and exile that people back to their homeland when slavery ended, and contains a weirdly specific stereotype that, to this very day, is responsible for statistically measurable worse health outcomes for the same race. Roll that all up in a monkey race--a word which is used as a racial pejorative for the same group--and you have something that is not merely discomfort, it is actively offensive.
Furthermore, it does not matter that Wizards might not have had racist intent in their lore--it is so overwhelmingly offensive to anyone with a basic understanding of history and empathy that Wizards was, at best, completely negligent in allowing the obviously problematic content to reach publication. While there might not have been a racist intent, the fact that Wizards allowed something like this to fly under the radar is, in fact, a type of racism--it is a clear indication of systemic flaws within Wizards where they do not have employees with the experiences or training necessary to catch something that should have been obvious to someone.
You content warning argument is, likewise, nonsensical. You are forgetting--and it is such an obvious point that I expect you are willfully being obtuse--that D&D is a game for all ages. A better analogy would be taking a child to a G-rated movie and getting the abject racism of Song of the South.
1: Most of the time lore is omitted in home game tables and homebrew setting, but not as often in established official settings where they stand as a framework to the world as a whole, for both players and DM's. If lore meant nothing there would be no point in printing books of any kind, especially Setting books like Forgotten Realms or Eberron. There is no "subjugation", it's no different than reading the lore about any race in any official campaign setting book. That is how the race functions on average in that world, though a PC may vary slightly.
2: the Hadozee lore as published in 5e is wholly a 5e concept, it's 2e lore was very sparse and effectively as non-existent as it is now. I'm not defneding it as a treasure legacy. I'm arguing that the new lore was scrubbed because the idea of "slavery" is wrongfully seen as "racist" when it isn't, even when other topics involving slavery are still present in the game. Identifying a fictional race with a real world human is a great stretch unless you suddenly assume it was done deliberately with racist intentions, which then begs the question of why?
3: And you insulting my intelligence by assuming I don't know the difference between "legacy trauma" and "phobia" is absurd. Both are abjectly learned behaviors though both are deeply rooted in the psyche, albeit one can manifest in a far more serious degree, that being an actual phobia. I don't know if you've ever actually seen someone have a true panic attack before due to a phobia but it is more than just "emotionally triggering", and disregarding the mental anguish some individuals go through because of various phobias is also insulting to them. "Legacy trauma" is likewise mostly a learned behavior and is carried down generations because it is kept that way often by a family or community. No one in America lives today who was ever aa American slave, nor were there any known living slaves left in America when this game was first published in 75'. Though institutionalized "slavery" still does exist in some nations to this day, though it goes under different names and structures it is not the "slavery" people are equating to "racism".
I don't disagree this made up lore for the race, which is entirely a 5e construction by my understanding and NOT found in any earlier rendition of the race as a whole, is directly negligent. But I would not consider it remotely racist WITHOUT racist intent. If this game is intended for all ages then no child, nor adult for that matter, in their right mind without prior knowledge of the issues you tout will lead them to equate the Hadozee with any human at all, past or present. Their ignorance of the perceived stereotype does not make them racist either. No different than showing a child the movie Dumbo nowadays. Without EXPRESSLY telling someone the crows are a racial stereotype they simply aren't. At risk of sounding crass, in order to find it racist, you'd need to specifically looking to find it racist. In a vacuum it simply isn't.
Stay in school, folks. I barely got here and am already disgusted to the point that I must leave.
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Why are the Chitine's not considered offensively racist in need of immediate company apology and retcon but the Hadozee are? What about one situation is acceptable when the other is not? I don't covet removed text I want this explained to me. Why is one bad and the other acceptable.
Multiple people on this thread have said “I do not see how this is racist.” Each one has been told “this is a situation where Wizards used the exact same language used to justify a unique and very dark chapter in history - it is the use of congruent language that is the problem.” Each and every other person on this thread who was initially blind to the racism subsequently responded by saying “wow, that is much worse than I thought - I can’t see why this was a particularly horrific oversight and should be excused from the game.”
You are the ONLY person doubling down on defending the negligent inclusion of hate in D&D.
Might I suggest some self introspection as to your motives? Because, from where I am sitting, looking at a lone person defending something everyone else can see cuts far too close to actual hate to be anything other than offensive… it is hard to accept the notion that lone defender of inadvertent bigotry is motivated by something innocent.
No, no, I agree it was negligent, but then I use Occam's Razor and I think to myself "It would be horribly racist if it was meant this way and would never have made it past the sensitivity review boards the company is supposed to have for this kind of thing. So either it was deliberately written this way (as there is no prior lore like this) and made it past all the checks and balances somehow to coincide with a "racist" depiction of a bard all completely intentionally, or it wasn't meant that way in any shape or form and is completely coincidental which then make this whole argument entirely a perception thing which is being blown remarkably out of proportion. And knowing how quick people on the internet are to knee-jerk react about things, logic tells me this was not meant to be racist and is being seen as racist".
I stand by what I said, in a vacuum this is not racist. It only becomes racist if you attribute racism to it. I understand your argument entirely and I always have, but I have not been looking at this issue solely from the perspective the the American whites, or American blacks. I have been looking at this solely from a perspective devoid of American history and socio-politics. Does that make me or my argument racist?
The reality is we do not live in a vacuum. As aforestated, the parallels are so incredibly close - “this is in the uncivilised monkeys’ best interest to be made slaves and civilised”; “these monkeys cannot save themselves”; “these monkeys are great at shrugging off injuries”; “now they’re freed, let’s send them back to take our civilisation to their savage lands”; etc. - to the word for word real world statements made against African Slaves (including the monkey imagery to really drive the point home) that it IS offensive to anyone who isn’t so ignorant as to pretend the real world does not exist.
Now, while maybe it was not intentional (and both fantasy and D&D have current and historical issues with racism in design, so big maybe there)… the fact that they missed something so obvious is, in fact, a form of racism. As you even admit, it was “negligent” for them to publish things - negligent, by definition, ascribes a degree of culpability and blame. Negligent racism is a lesser degree of racism, but it is racism nonetheless—it betrays that your company does not properly vet its publications, does not have marginalise people in their review process, does not have people trained to recognise insensitively… everything about this negligent oversight indicates an institutionalised degree of racism within Wizards’ design process, likely a holdover from the fact the game was literally invented by an outspoken racist.
Not only are you trying to advocate in favour of institutionalised racism within Wizards, you are also advocating that, once informed that their content was offensive, they should continue to publish something that reeks of racism. Choosing to continue to publish problematic, hateful content takes an inadvertent, negligent decision, and suddenly turns it to a wilful decision to promulgate hatred. That suddenly raises the level from negligent publication of hate to the higher culpability of wilful publication of hate.
Your entire conclusion is to support the continued publication of harmful and offensive content. You admit that the lore looks really bad, can easily be seen as hateful, and was negligent to publish, then you demand that, instead of fix their negligence and remove something that should never have been published…. They wilfully continue to disseminate content that hurts people. At best, your post lacks empathy (“I can see why this is problematic, but other people should just have thicker skins and ignore that”)… at worst, your posts are actively racist, seeking the continued publication of something you know hurts others. That your posts make the same exact arguments perpetrated by racists to defend their own racist tirades certainly does not help your position either.
"Whoa, whoa, whoa….buddy. Calm down. Let me explain. You have to stop looking at this solely from the perspective that I’m your best friend and she’s your wife. See, I’ve been looking at this from a perspective devoid of any history between any of the three of us. In a vacuum devoid of any of that we don’t even KNOW each other, so labels like wife and best friend...they don’t even exist. No one could have possibly known that those labels existed unless they were expressly told. So she couldn’t have been your wife when I slept with her because I was thinking about us in a vacuum, man. In a vacuum."
Yeah, it's some real delicate footwork trying to dance around the issue in this way, and it just doesn't come together right in the end. We're willing to say that it was negligent...but don't you dare call it racist....oh and also negligence isn't a good enough reason to remove it even if we don't consider it racist (despite all of its obvious racist parallels)?
If you believe that I am, then simply tell me that I'm a racist and be done with it. I submit that placing this book, lore unedited in most any other region of the world without direct connection to say, the internet or knowledge of american history or politics, would not attract as vitriolic a response as it currently has. Likely because without such knowledge the lore does not come off as racist in the same manner or even at all. We may not live in a vacuum, but America and it's politics and history are also not the whole of the world nor the only lens through which we should view it. What I meant by negligent is that Wizards (being a company and therefore focused on making money and little more) would allow anything like this to willfully harm their profit margin by "alienating" their public. It was negligent of them to make anything that could in any way be misconstrued as offensive, which is a pretty hard tightrope to walk.
So once again, if you want to call me a racist for viewing this as fiction and nothing more, not a racist commentary or parallel to american sin and history, but simply fiction, then please do so and let's be done with this.
No one has called you racist. Some have started suspecting it I assume, because you're oddly defensive of very obvious and unnecessary parallels to a VERY LARGE portion of history that, by it's very nature btw, did not just affect American history or politics as you imply. You are right though, America is not the whole world, and is not the only lens through which things should be viewed. It is one of the very large lenses that should be used though; and a period of history that covered 4 centuries and much more of the world than just the Americas is a second very large lens that should be used.
Again though, no one has called you racist. You're the one who has seemingly jumped to some odd conclusion that people are calling YOU racist personally, just by calling THE MATERIAL racist or very problematic. Seemingly because you're able to ignore the parallels or not care about them? I'm confused why honestly, but no one implied that being ignorant of the issue, or being able to happily ignore it, means you are racist. I'm honestly not sure how you've started turning this into a personal attack and not the attack on the logic of your defenses for the material that it has been from everyone.
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I've started assuming that others see me as racist because I have been insinuated to be one for defending neutral ground. I can see parallels as well as anyone but correlation does not imply causation. Two things may look similar but may not be related at all. My arguments are based on looking at this like it is unconnected with American history, not as if it were a parallel of it. I see it as complete fiction that may have unintentionally appeared in a manner which could be misconstrued as racism, even if it wasn't. It makes more sense to me from a business standpoint, and from a logical standpoint, that all of this was the result of a series of unfortunate coincidental mistakes and misunderstandings and the internets inherent ability to overreact to things rather than an inherently racist idea from the get go. This has likely cost WotC a significant sum of money and probably a few potential customers and the already tumultuous peace of those they had. Considering the societal climate of the recent years and the main stream prominence of the company as a whole it doesn't make sense that this would just "slip under a radar". It's entirely possible that people are seeing racism through the parallels because of a perseverance and willingness to do so.