NPCs Are People, Too! - Social Insanity, Part 1

This is the first post in a series that will look at different components of the amorphous blob called society and how they're relative to realistic game worlds and to Shadows & Silver in general. Today's topic: Racism.

Sociology is the study of society and social structures and practices. Like literary criticism and economics, it's often called a "soft science", which is to say that, unlike mathematics or physics, you don't need to have concrete evidence to support hare-brained theories. You can basically just pull ideas out of your ass and people will nod thoughtfully and award you Nobel prizes. (Okay, maybe physics isn't the best example of an opposing science; work with me here.) You don't even have to make sense and, indeed, we often hold beliefs that are based on foolish theories about society that we didn't even know we had. Building a worldview (or, in the case of game developers, a world) on such mistaken assumptions can lead to a faulty end product.

(TANGENT: This is similar to why the U.S., which has for the past century held to the ideas of Keynesian economics, now finds itself in the current financial crisis. The assumption that the economy can be improved by violating the principles that make it work at all is flawed. In practice, the faulty idea actually produces the opposite of what it was supposed to: recession. Yes, it's deeper than that, but this is a post about racism, not stupidity (which, yes, will have its own entry).)

Anyway, finish these sentences.

1. Racism is bad because...
2. Racism exists because...
3. Racism is perpeturated by...
4. Racism can be eliminated by...

No, don't just keep reading. Actually do it. Finish the sentences. That way I can show you why your underlying social theories are illogical and that you suck. (Okay, no, it's so you can compare your logic, evaluate it against my theories and decide which makes more sense and why. If you disagree with me, comment and tell me why.)

If you're like most people, your answers probably go something like this:

1. Racism is bad because... all people are created equal, so no race is inherently better than another.
2. Racism exists because... people don't understand each other's cultures.
3. Racism is perpetuated by... racists spouting their ideas until people believe it.
4. Racism can be eliminated by... punishing racists for showing prejudice and/or spreading cultural awareness.

If you're like most people, you probably chose those answers as knee-jerk responses, because that's what society tells us. What we hear every day is usually what we regurgitate when people ask us what we think. (Hmm... maybe that's support for point 3?)

How would these ideas translate if placed into a game world? Take a typical example: dwarves and elves hate each other. The origin of this trope is found in the Silmarillion, in which a cadre of elves slaughtered a bunch of dwarves because they wanted their mithril mines. In Tolkien-dom, dwarves hate elves because the elves took the shiny stuff they like so much. The elves, of course, hate the dwarves for not understanding that they love shiny things too. Using the theory outlined above, we see the dwarves and elves hate each other because they don't understand each other's culture, right? And the hatred is perpetuated by the surly dwarves not wanting to see both sides of the issue. And the rift can be healed by folks deciding to set aside their differences and get along, a la Legolas and Gimli, right?

This is often the route we take when deciding on the social makeup of fantasy world. Why, in pretty much any given world, do dwarves and elves hate each other? It's not that it's a pervasive stereotype, but that there's a pervasive mode of thought that gives birth to it. Ridding yourself of the stereotype does nothing to rid yourself of the foolish thought that caused the stereotype to exist in the first place. The world in which dwarves and elves are friendly is not significantly different than the world in which they are enemies.

"Wait a minute," I hear you say. "So we're not supposed to make dwarves and elves enemies, but we're not supposed to make them friends, either?" No, the point is that, in either case, the core assumptions are there.

Tolkien does not make the same assumptions about racism that we so often do. In his mind, the dwarves and elves do not hate each other because of a lack of cultural awareness, nor is the chasm between them bridged by a conscious act of goodwill. Tolkien has a specific context, a reason for the enmity: the slaughter of dwarves out of greed. It's not a lack of cultural awareness: it's a natural reaction of hostility after a tragic crime against dwarfdom. No matter that thousands of years have passed. Elves and dwarves are still at odds over a real and very hurtful wound. At the end of the Return of the King, Legolas and Gimli heal the rift not by overcoming cultural differences but by finding that they can love and trust each other and, by extension, each other's races. In Tolkien's world, it's a wondrous statement of the power of friendship. When we try to keep the trope but rob it of the context, our worlds pale in comparison to the Master's.

"So that's it, then? Just give people a reason to hate each other rather than doing it as a matter of course?" No, while that's a step, there's much more to a realistic examination of racism than that. And chances are, if you care about internal consistency at all, you already have reasons for your racial conflicts. But if this is all you've got, then that's just what it is: racial conflict rather than racism.

"Dammit, Michael, what's your point?!?"

Lemme lay it out for you. In Tolkien, the crime against the dwarves was a conflict, and anger towards the perpetrators is an extension of the conflict. Racism is when the hatred towards those who committed the atrocity is expanded to those who did not commit it. So, in effect, it's not a group of elves that killed your people and took your mines, but the elves. That is racism.

Racism is the judgement of a person based on his race, a superficial quality, raher than on his identity, qualities, or actions.

So to a racist dwarf, Legolas is not a valiant warrior who stands out because of his own deeds. Rather, he's an elf, and all that that implies.

Context provides conflict, but, in the minds of racists, it also gives weight to the beliefs they hold. Indeed, the context is seen not as the cause of the racist beliefs, but as their vindication.

To take a real-world example, most of the Christian era has seen racism towards Jews. Common racist beliefs were that Jews wanted to undermine society, destroy the Church, and steal all the Europeans' money. One of the primary reasons for the hatred was that "Jews killed Christ", thus, by extension, making all Jews Christ-killers. "Only a people possessed by Satan could kill Jesus," they'd say, supposing that this was all the proof they needed that Jews were unpatriotic, intolerant, and greedy. Thus the conflict was used as vindication of the beliefs about them. It wasn't a lack of cultural awareness that could be healed by a sudden wave of understanding and the urge to stand around in a circle and sing Kumbaya. While there's still some racism towards the Jews, most of it was squashed by the Holocaust. (To think about: is this because people suddenly realized how ludicrous and dangerous it was to lump others into a group just based on race? Or was it because people suddenly said, "Dude, I think what we did to them is worse than whatever they supposedly did to us"? Since racism is still so widespread, my money is on the latter.)

Why does racism exist? I believe racism serves an inherent social need: namely, to associate with others who are like us. We want to find a group to which we can belong and feel safe with. The more homogenous, the better. In addition, we want to place others in groups and define why they don't belong in ours. You see it in high school: the nerds hang with the nerds, and the jocks with the jocks. If you decide to buck the system, you're a social outcast that none of the cliques want.

But that's not all racism is, right? After all, that would imply that jocks excluding nerds from their clique is an example of racism, right? Correct, which is why we go a step further. Racism is defined as sorting people into groups based on superficial characteristics like physical appearance or ancestry, things that have no bearing on a person's identity (unless they're superficial people as well; the stereotypical high school cheerleader, for example, finds her identity in her appearance). Furthermore, we make the assumption that all people who share that quality share other qualities as well. Jews are soulless, unpatriotic, and greedy. Blacks are uneducated, criminals, and violent. Whites are power-hungry, hateful, and oppressors. The list goes on.

It's not a lack of cultural awareness that causes this but that drive to associate ourselves with a group and hate anyone that's not part of that group. It's not solved by learning some random facts about someone else's group or eating some sort of weird ethnic food (despite the current trends in American schools). It's done by recognizing that people are people, real and unique and worthwhile in their own right, not cardboard cutouts whose only quality is their appearance.

So what does it all boil down to? Basically this: if you're going to have racism, understand how racism works. Have reasons races are at odds, but recognize that the creatures in the game are all people, too. They hate each other to the degree that they choose to find differences upon which to base their persecutions. They also don't all fit the mold you want them to.

Not all dwarves hate all elves. And if that doesn't occur to you when you add a "dwarves hate elves" trope to your world, you're probably either lazy or a racist yourself.

Lore snippet: Humans in Enna enjoy their place at the top of the world. The rest of the races aren't demi-humans; they're subhumans. Orcs, goblins, and even dwarves, are all their misshapen, under-evolved cousins. Nature has destined humans to be dominant, and why not? They're the good guys after all, right?

In Adunay, no one suffers more than goblins. Unlike Krunag orcs, which are openly reviled, goblins are treated as you'd treat a dog turd on your shoe. Goblins have no legal status in Adunay, and can be enslaved, tortured, or even killed without question. As such, there's no goblin society to speak of, save that which can survive in hiding.