@egg said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:
@Kestrel Why shouldn't I be mad? If I spend most of my leisure hours in a place where "representing yourself" = white (and even moreso, Aryan half of the time), shouldn't I want to see change there? Is it as important as the film industry changing its racial bias? Of course not. Does that mean I shouldn't care at all? No.
Because the kinds of people who predominantly play white characters, especially in such a way that telegraphs their obsession with "white heritage", aren't the kinds of people you want playing people of colour. If their biases are apparent when playing their own ethnicity, imagine how gross it would be to see those biases apparent when they portray a different one.
I know an honest to god fascist in this hobby, and by that I don't mean 'some dude who is kinda racist', I mean, 'uses an iron cross as a forum avatar, obsessed with authoritarian and nationalistic themes, checks every item on the Ur-Fascism list.'
His characters are all, without exception, male, significantly above 6', muscular and athletic, and have descriptions that wax lyrical about how fair his hair is and how structured his strikingly white face is. Ideally, I'd kind of like him to, I don't know, catch fire or something, fall into a woodchipper, leave the hobby, whatever. But insofar as we're stuck with him (on games where he has yet to be banned), I'm just GLAD he only plays this one type of character, both because it makes him easy to identify and avoid, and because if this is his idea of white masculinity, just imagine what his idea of asian masculinity might be. (And I already know what his ideas of women are, based on a persistent pattern of harassing them.)
He's a pretty extreme example but he has little red flags I tend to notice in other people in the hobby who aren't as awful but, shall we say, mildly suck.
Researching your character is a good idea, but research can't undo biases. I know a seasoned anthropologist who will tell you this quite glibly -- many of her white male colleagues find foreign tribes entirely fascinating, and know a lot of facts about their culture, but that doesn't change the fact that they fetishise, objectify and exoticise them like they're some interesting little growth on a petri dish, a cute pet or a fashion accessory.
Should white people work to undo their biases? Of course. Are MU*s the battleground on which we can help them do that? I am doubtful.
I know plenty of people in this hobby who play characters across the full spectrum of the human experience, and do it well. These are people who, for the most part, don't actually need more encouragement -- they already take it upon themselves to read up, ask people from the culture they're roleplaying for feedback, and do it because they just want to, not because they want some kind of medal.
And then you also have people who never have and never will, and you know what, it's probably best they just stick to that, too.
