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| By Simaelling from deviantart through wikimedia commons. |
Racism is a prominent issue to combat, and only recently the fields of video gaming and roleplaying have become battlefields to it. On one side, usually those identifying as "realists" and generally paralleling the political views of conservatives & reactionaries tend to reason that racism has to be acknowledged as part of a game and setting to promote realism and raise attention. On another side, there are those who promote diversity, claiming that a fictional world has all the room for racism to be eliminated on a lore-level, where it is missing from the history of the universe as a whole.
As I tend to, I agree with neither side. From the years I spent with roleplay, something was made clear: the former tends to promote a homogeneous world that is infamous for satisfying the "inner racist" in players, whereas the latter leads to racial stereotyping and tokenism in most if not all cases. Read on this blog post as I aim to explain more so the latter point than the former and my proposed resolution to it: the shelving of fantasy races as a concept.
