Character Creation Has A Race Problem

[Rokke]

Ironic, really. What does "people of color" really mean?! Seriously, "black" is lack of color, while "white" is a compilation of all colors in one. That phrase itself seems to be more racist than most of the stuff that many of the people crying "discrimination" claim, seeing as it suggest that white people are "colorless", from which one can derive "empty". Now, do you see how that works?

Going by the American use of the word, its generally accepted as a reclamation of the word “colored”, which had been used as an derogatory term for non-white people (predominantly those of african heritage, essentially separating them by degrees of skin tone) till the American Civil rights movement. It has nothing to do with light spectrums.

[Melichoir]

Going by the American use of the word, its generally accepted as a reclamation of the word “colored”, which had been used as an derogatory term for non-white people (predominantly those of african heritage, essentially separating them by degrees of skin tone) till the American Civil rights movement. It has nothing to do with light spectrums.

[IMG]

In american parlance, the descriptors for those of african decent has evolved over the decades. At one point in time, "colored" was not a derogotory term (the NAACP has it literally in their name), same with "negro". Over time, however, it was used more as a slur, and thus new descriptors were created over time to describe those of african decent.

The newer term of "People of Color" is, from what I have observed most frequently, not a means of reclaiming the word colored, but rather an all encompassing term to refer to non white groups (this being asian, hispanic, black, etc). Ive seen a few people argue that it is exclusively people who are of a specific skin tone, and would exclude white-hispanics, some asians with paler complexions, and whites.

Problem with the term "PoC" is that it is not used consistently among activist organizations and political groups. This is probably because what qualifies as 'brown/black' enough tends to get subjective to certain groups.

In any case, broadly speaking, not all these terms last long term. Afro-american and its derivation of African-American (or black-american in some communities), have had some pretty long standing usages fairly consistently as being fairly politically correct and inoffensive. Meaning, new terms get invented, but people over time keep going back to African American.

[kikix12]

It has nothing to do with light spectrums.

I know it have nothing to do with lights spectrum and I did know what people mean by "people of color". Though I did not have any idea on where it originated from, so that's good to know.

My point is that this fancy little term uses very clearly defined words, then twists them into something nearly completely irrelevant to the origins of the word, THEN makes exclusions to that, fancy themselves prideful in being that (as part of a majority), while accusing the minority (if we consider the "people of color" as a group, that group constitutes ~67% of the world population) of them being discriminatory.

The whole concept there, the premises, are wrong. What's wrong with using non-white, non-Caucasian etc?! Seriously. Fighting fire with fire works, but fighting a bomb with a bomb does not.

[Rokke]

I know it have nothing to do with lights spectrum and I did know what people mean by "people of color". Though I did not have any idea on where it originated from, so that's good to know.

My point is that this fancy little term uses very clearly defined terms, then twists them into something nearly completely irrelevant to the origins of the word, THEN makes exclusions to that, fancy themselves prideful in being that (as part of a majority), while accusing the minority (if we consider the "people of color" as a group, that group constitutes ~67% of the world population) of them being discriminatory.

The whole concept there, the premises, are wrong. What's wrong with using non-white, non-Caucasian etc?! Seriously. Fighting fire with fire works, but fighting a bomb with a bomb does not.

Im no linguistics expert and thar be some buzzwords sprinkled in, please bear with me**: Historically it was used to unify “other” people, which why I think it continues to encompass a larger group of people. When you break “other” groups down into smaller groups you have a lot of folks vying for attention to their own cause which makes smaller groups goals less likely. Even amongst minority groups some are over represented vs others (a whole 'nother can of worms) but as a whole they tend to be underrepresented across various mediums of entertainment. I think people wanting to see themselves in [insert a thing here] is natural. I don't think it works in every situation, nor do I think demanding an insert in everything is the way to go, but I get the wanting.

a tl;dr: its Complicated™ because words, meanings, and racial relations all evolve over time.


** Personally, I don’t disagree with the fact that this is SE’s game and ultimately they can put whatever they want in their own game. Applying rl demographic breakdowns to a game where Genghis Khan’s stand-in is a 7 foot tall lizard man that rides a giant purple parrot is kinda moot, but at the same time I don’t think adding cornrows as a hair option would be particularly lorebreaking. But we're getting waaaay off topic here, so I'll end this with a picture of hair I'd want :)