A thought on race and RPGs

[benlehman]

Since there is so much discussion of it recently.

So, my people in Polaris are explicitly (rather than implicitly) white.

"The people that live in the memory of Polaris are tall, thin, and beautiful. Their hair is silver and gold and all the colors of the sky at night and their skin is so thin that you can see their pale blue veins beneath it."

Now, anyone who is white and reading this, please do me a favor and turn over your arm. Note that you can very clearly see the blue blood in your veins through your skin. It's a pretty standard trait of white people.

Nonetheless, almost everyone who has talked about these people with me makes the assumption that they are, you know, albino, or translucent, or in some other way super-white, or that they are magical elves (they are neither), or in some other way different in appearance from, you know, skinny northern Europeans.

I wonder if this is because whiteness is so much the assumed default that, if the writer takes the time to describe the skin of a character, that character must be divergent from the norm somehow.

Or it could just be that I'm an unclear writer.

Comments

[emergent.livejournal.com]

If I read that passage in any work, I would get a mental image of individuals paler than (almost all of) my white peers. First, the slightly-unnatural hair description sets them up as looking somewhat ethereal. Second, there's a vast difference between pale enough to see veins on underside of arm where one does not spot them in normal conversation/interaction, and seeing them on places that would be immediately apparent- e.g. face. The latter is uncommon, though certainly not impossible, among standard issue New England whiteys.

[russiandude.livejournal.com]

Upon first reading the passage, I did immediately get a feeling that these people were much paler than I am. However, upon further reading, it occurred to me that there was nothing saying they were explicitly white.

After all, they could have darker skin so thin you can see the veins beneath it. And/Or their veins could be a bit more prominently blue.