08 OCT 2025 by ideonexus
Race in Tolkien is Reality Rather Than Socially Constructed
In Middle Earth, unlike reality, race is objectively real rather than socially constructed. There are species (elves, men, dwarves, etc.), but within those species there are races that conform to 19th-century race theory, in that their physical attributes (hair color, etc.) are associated with non-physical attributes that are both personal and cultural. There is also an explicit racial hierarchy which is, again, real in the world of the story. Middle Earth is literally a racist’s fantasy la...08 OCT 2025 by ideonexus
Tolkien's World Makes Race Scientific Rather Than Legalistic
The core of the problem is that Tolkien conflates race, culture, and ability. Hobbits, he says, are a race, and based upon a combination their hereditary traits and cultural practices, are better at being stealthy than other races.
Tolkien does this throughout his novels, outlining the “racial” characteristics of men, of dwarves, of elves, of orcs, and those few of mixed ancestry (like Aragorn or the Uruk-Hai). As Helen Young, author of Race and Popular Fantasy Literature put it in a re...Race is a legal concept, but Tolkien's fantasy novels turn it into a scientific fact of his world.
21 OCT 2024 by ideonexus
"Race" in D&D
As a social scientist who studies male-dominated subcultures, I have done research that put me in spaces where I delved into reactions to issues of race in gaming. A key question is this: Given how charged the term race has been, why would games use it to discuss differences that have nothing to do with the way we traditionally use the word? Dungeons & Dragons is not the only game to use the term in this way; so have many other digital and analog fantasy offerings. But the celebrated game...25 JAN 2024 by ideonexus
When Whiteness is the Default for Success
It is now common—and I use the word “common†in its every sense—to see interviews with up-and-coming young movie stars whose parents or even grandparents were themselves movie stars. And when the interviewer asks, “Did you find it an advantage to be the child of a major motion-picture star?†the answer is invariably “Well, it gets you in the door, but after that you’ve got to perform, you’re on your own.†This is ludicrous. Getti...Folksonomies: racism
Folksonomies: racism
23 SEP 2023 by ideonexus
Tolkienesque Fantasy is All About Racism
But there was one problem: isn’t traditional “Tolkienesque†fantasy all about racism? Elves are different from dwarves are different from halflings are different from humans are different from orcs and goblins. Yes, orcs and goblins, there’s the rub. Isn’t the notion of a race representing the embodiment of evil a classic definition of racism?21 SEP 2022 by ideonexus
Race in D&D
Racial bioessentialism is a core design crutch for Dungeons & Dragons. Across fifty years of tabletop roleplaying games, multiple novels, supplements, and additional tie-ins, D&D has continually established monolithic culture building as part of its lore. The alignment charts that Gary Gygax (and many designers) focused on as a method of easy-to-understand character building did not help matters; entire races were designated as Evil using this alignment chart, and Gygax himself can be...07 NOV 2019 by ideonexus
How Racism Perpetuates Itself by Making White the Default
It is now common—and I use the word “common” in its every sense—to see interviews with up-and-coming young movie stars whose parents or even grandparents were themselves movie stars. And when the interviewer asks, “Did you find it an advantage to be the child of a major motion-picture star?” the answer is invariably “Well, it gets you in the door, but after that you’ve got to perform, you’re on your own.” This is ludicrous. Getting in the door is pretty much the entire gam...16 FEB 2015 by ideonexus
Religion and Racism
A meta-analytic review of past research evaluated the link between religiosity and racism in the United States since the Civil Rights Act. Religious racism partly reflects intergroup dynamics. That is, a strong religious in-group identity was associated with derogation of racial out-groups. Other races might be treated as out-groups because religion is practiced largely within race, because training in a religious in-group identity promotes general ethnocentrism, and because different others ...03 DEC 2014 by ideonexus
The Pretties
There was a certain kind of beauty, a prettiness that everyone could see. Big eyes and
full lips like a kid’s; smooth, clear skin; symmetrical features; and a thousand other
little clues. Somewhere in the backs of their minds, people were always looking for
these markers. No one could help seeing them, no matter how they were brought up. A
million years of evolution had made it part of the human brain.
The big eyes and lips said: I’m young and vulnerable, I can’t hurt you, and you want...A society that uses plastic surgery to turn everyone into a beautiful average as a means of reducing conflict.
08 JUN 2012 by ideonexus
The Scientific Basis for Segregation is Wrong
Segregationalists will even argue that God was the first segregationalist. 'Red birds and blue birds don't fly together,' they contend. ...They turn to some pseudo-scientific writing and argue that the Negro's brain is smaller than the white man's brain. They do not know, or they refuse to know that the idea of an inferior or superior race has been refuted by the best evidence of the science of anthropology. Great anthropologists, like Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, and Melville J. Herskovits,...Science shows the human races are not that different.