Thread by @enibolas

Day 1/10 of my anti-racist #gamestudies thread series.

My aim is to highlight research in the intersection of race, social justice & games. No hierarchies, I discuss them in random order, using my own words

It's all stuff that I blew my mind and I find worthwhile discussing ✨

today: 'Habits of whiteness’ by @heyouonline. I focus on chapter 2, in which Young explains how fantasy role playing games create ‘habits of whiteness’ & why they do that.

Spoilers: racism in fantasy isn’t just ‘the way things are’. It is constructed over time. How?

Young calls this ‘genrefication’. In the 1960s both Earthsea and Conan are popular fantasy novels. Earthsea, which features a brown hero and sidelines white people, is one of the most acclaimed fantasy book of its time. But it’s Conan that gets picked up, imitated, recycled. Why?

Ursula le Guin, the author of Earthsea believes that white people weren’t ready for a brown hero. Sadly, history proves her right. The authors that get imitated are Howard, Tolkien, Lovecraft. All of their worlds feat. racial logics: A link between physical & non-physical traits.

This eventually creates a habit of whiteness in which racial identity is essentialised (fixed) by defining it as a matter of 1) biology/descent 2) geography/space. This kind of fantasy is obsessed with attributing value to biological appearance and origin. Creating hierarchies.

Young uses D&D for illustration: Dwarves are suspicious & greedy because they are dwarves, Orcs are short tempered because they are Orcs etc. This kinda logic has roots in fascism and white supremacist race theory: Aryans are superior because they are Aryans and from the North.

But aren’t Orcs and Elves just fictional races, and haven’t been consciously designed to be racist? Young provides four reasons why we should be cautious. First, remember that racial logics in fantasy exist because of imitation & adaptation. White supremacists made them.

Secondly, even if the ‘Orcs will be Orcs’ fantasy does not make a direct reference to real world cultures, it still draws a link between race & behaviour: Same racism, different world so to speak. A player might still pick this up as a legit model of race in real life...

Thirdly, many fantasy worlds have a ‘human’ race which is not only dominant but also described as white people. In D&D, some of the manuals contain illustration of white ‘humans’ only. They also often decend from Western regions that look lide medieval European places.

The fourth and to me most compelling reason is the many counter voices which exist in fantasy and which show that racism is not a feature of good fantasy. 2 highlights: The Sword and Sorcery series Imaro by Charles R. Saunders: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imaro.

Imaro is a black hero who Saunders conceived of partly as an “anti-Tarzan” and of Nyumbani, the Africa-inspired continent he inhabits as part of “a world in which Africa was never toppled from its ancient glories as it was in ours.” Imaro is the “Black Conan” of the 1980s.

Second highlight, Delany’s Return to Nevèrÿon series (1979–1987) which centres on brown- and black-skinned people. Importantly, there is racial diversity but without racial logics. Different skin colours aren’t 'naturally' linked to geographies or mentalities.

So, the presence of counter-voices like Delany and Saunders shows that "Fantasy’s habits of Whiteness are patterns developed through time and repetition, patterns which can be deviated from and perhaps ultimately changed.”

Feel free to share thoughts, examples, experiences... ✨

Full title and link to the book: Race and Popular Fantasy: Habits of Whiteness by Helen Young: routledge.com/Race-and-Popul…