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A thought on race and RPGs
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.
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.
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I've found that, when I ask someone to do art for me, for like a fic or a game or something, I tend to explicitly mention descriptive skin tones. I take the time to say "Skin Tone: Pale Pink," "Skin Tone: Ruddy Pink" and the like. This is partially because I find that doing so to describe a white guy is absolutely unneeded, which I find a little creepy. Partially because "White Guy" could be any number of skin tones. (Sigh.)