If it was not deliberately about slavery, why did they write that it was? Are the slavers at least obviously evil bad guys you are supposed to fight (or join, assuming your character is evil)? I always got the impression, in any case, that your basic D&D world was a crapsack world saturated with slavery, genocide, racism, sexism, and so forth, a conscious or unconscious reflection of real life.
If anything, the 1982 version may be less objectionable. It sounds like the slave backstory is a recent “innovation.”
It’s sure as hell a violent world, with little in the way of democracy or law and order in the sense we understand it in the real world. The real world, however, is dull. No one’s coming over to play a campaign called “Going To Work At Bauman & Smith’s Accounting And Tax Preparation.”
I suppose the lore writers can be given some charitable interpretations of their intentions - in the effort to produce ass-piles of new content it’d be easy, in creating a bazillion monsters, creatures, species, factions, guilds, characters and images, to come up with one that might arouse thoughts of racially insensitive portrayals. But, you, know… just change it. It’s no big deal to dump this one thing; D&D is such a vast well of content. It’s not like DC getting the cold sweats trying to figure out how to excise Ezra Miller from The Flash.
Are we still cool with the Gith being former slaves of the Mind Flayers?
No, the bigger issue is those horrible skin flap things they have. Gods, those freak me out.
When I was a wee lad, Aunt Jemima was just a nice lady who wanted to feed me delicious pancakes. It wasn’t until I was much older that I learned about the history of the image of the African American as a domestic servant used in advertising or referring to them as “aunt” or “uncle” in real life. I suspect a lot of people are ignorant of the images of minstrel caricatures because we’re long past the era when such things were common. Even though this message board is made up of a bunch of old people, most of us just didn’t grow up seeing those images on a regular basis. And when we did see them, we might not have recognized them for what they were.
And that’s kind of where I am too. I can see how this might have come up as one of the ideas while they were trying to think of something new for the Hadozee, but I’m surprised it got to the point where it was published.
You joke, but a lot of younger players, at least the type who post on message boards or Reddit, don’t want to see slavery in D&D at all. Not even when its the bad guys doing it and you’re supposed to go crack their heads.
Hell, “a superior species enslaves and then uplifts monkeys, who then rebel against and overthrow their oppressors” is the literal plot of the Planet of the Apes reboot. It just goes to show you how deeply a lot of these ideas are baked into our collective fantastical language.
I don’t see a need to attribute this to malice or even stupidity. This is precisely how a system uses inertia and history to reinforce itself. Some oldschool gamer wrote it, another oldschool gamer edited it, another oldschool gamer approved it.
You know what they say about those who do not learn history…
To be fair, there’s a lot of history out there, with more being manufactured each day. You can’t expect people to learn ALL of it.
ALL of it, no. Minutiae, no. High notes and low points, yes. And a low point like minstrelsy, which had a not insignificant cultural impact on the US, and by cultural hegemony, on the wider world? Yes, I do expect people to know about it. I mean, I’m not even American, nor of an age where it was cultural currency, and I know about it.
Minstrelsy was a low point. But not every depiction of a person holding a stringed instrument is minstrelsy. I mean, how do you draw a picture of a bard without “overtones of minstrelsy”?
Don’t make him part of a race of previously enslaved monkey men?
While our secondary schools are not great when it comes to teaching the history of race relations in the United States, most Americans are aware of the high points including slavery, Jim Crow, and the Civil Rights movement. But that doesn’t make us familiar with minstrel imagery. It’s not unreasonable for someone to see the illustration of the Hadozee with the instrument and not immediately think of depictions of minstrels. If I hadn’t majored in history and gone to graduate school were I specialized in American history from 1877-1940, I wouldn’t be so familar with it either.
The race of previously-enslaved monkey men might be problematic. I can’t see how one of them being a bard makes it any more problematic. Especially since part of what’s problematic about minstrel shows is that the minstrels weren’t of the enslaved race.
I don’t know about that. I think that image definitely evokes a certain stereotype, the same one portrayed by, say, the crows in Dumbo. It’s in everything from the stance to the outfit to the instrument, and I think most Americans would recognize it to some extent because it’s quite pervasive.
Now, you may recognize the image but not realize that it has racist roots. This might lead you to take elements and tropes from that image and add them into your own art, perpetuating harmful stereotypes without intending too. Often, this is what D&D is guilty of.
The outfit is pseudo-Renaissance, the instrument is a lute, and the stance is holding an apple with one of his feet.
Would you feel the same if it were an elf instead of a Hadozee?
Just to be clear, I’m not arguing that you’re unreasonable for seeing it. But I can see how it’s not obvious to everyone when they see it.
If it was obvious to everyone who sees it, I doubt it would’ve made it into the book in the first place. WotC is definitely trying to phase out problematic content, but some baked-in stuff will inevitably make it through. The wider world will point it out, light will shine on the issue, WotC will fix it, and the world will be just a tiny little bit better. And so it goes.
Total agreement.
That part is excusable.
Pushing back when it’s pointed out, though … naah.
You can start by not drawing them in that pose… the skin colouring and the facial expression aren’t helping, either (other Hadozee are painted much pinker, and with different face shapes, see #597).
There’s nothing minstrelsy about the bard in the DnD Beyond page:
Because they’re not depicted capering like a literal Jim Crow…