A question was asked on Twitter last night, and it was something I ended up commenting on in a not-extensive-thread but a long enough thread that it made me think I should probably collate the thoughts here for posterity.
The question (from @MimiMerlot):
When a White person describes a POC NPC in their tabletop game, how should they go about it?
I began to respond on her thread, but then realised my thoughts around it were big and varied and that the number of characters on twitter, while I could caption some of them, just weren't enough for the emotions I wanted to express. I usually enjoy the character limit: it forces me to be concise and measure my responses. This time it felt like it drew my skin too tight across the form of my thoughts. So I took it elsewhere. My initial response:
Please no food. I don't want to be food anymore. I'm fine with "dark-skinned", "brown", "black" and "African American" (though that has its own issues because not every black person is African or African American). There's also an issue with normalisation that I'm noticing.
I'd really rather people didn't just mention race, skin colour or cultural background when discussing non-white individuals. It's very othering. Beyond that, White people come from all over and do not look the same either. Let's celebrate the differences there too.
I'd not considered until @RileyGryc mentioned that the *majority* is actually POC that we shouldn't need to discuss the skin of darker toned people. The average global skin colour is in fact darker than the skin tones we see in all current media.
Followed about an hour later with:
I've been thinking about the food issue for a little bit - I think it's that it very much contributes to the issue of fetishising blackness. I don't think that even when I've heard white people referred to as food it's ever been about men. Which makes it about ownership.
The great thing about a blog is that I can break these ideas down a bit, because it was very hard to just leave those there are concise ideas when my brain was exploding with words. So some further thoughts (from top to bottom):
"African American" as a concept (as well as "African", in fact) often refers to black people with the heritage of these places, or who live in these places. Sometimes, though, it's used as a catch-all that then hands people an identity that is not theirs. I'm not African American, and I think it would be disingenuous for me to say I'm African. Sure I have cultural and physical ancestry that very clearly and obviously links to Africa, but...I was born in the UK. I live in Australia. I'm not steeped in that ancestry, I wouldn't know the first thing about the cultures of Africa without research and while the rhythms and music styles of African art and music call to something deep in my soul, I don't know why or how. Similarly with American culture - I sit on the outside. I have a huge amount of US family and friends, and I spent a lot of summers in the US growing up, but I'm still an outsider to that culture. Assuming every black person is African American or African therefore ties a lot of very distinct things together turning them into stereotypes. The culture of African Brits is different again to Afro-Caribbean Brits (the culture I grew up as part of) in food, music, dance styles, clothing preferences...you see the issue.
And so my preference in TTRPGs is for people to simply say brown or black unless they're aiming for a specific cultural reference.
Which leads to my next point, actually. Why do we need to describe what people's skin looks like at all? It seems to only happen when it's people of colour. And while I fully appreciate the impulse to be thoughtful about the way skin tone is discussed, unless everyone is describing the skin tone of every single person they meet, the effect is to call out the fact that the norm has been violated.
And because of the way that media presents majority/minority balances, that norm is people on the pale end of the spectrum.
The result is that it feels othering. Despite the intention being to balance the table, balance the field and bring equity, in reality it makes me very aware that there are POC in a space that would not have had POC if the storyteller hadn't said so. It reinforces the norm as White.
And that's frustrating for a number of reasons.
1. The norm isn't White. The majority of the world is POC.
2. Just as POC aren't just POC (Black isn't a culture, after all), "White" isn't a cultural identity. It doesn't tell you anything about food, or art, or music, or language, or dialect or body type or how long it takes to burn in the sun or inherent likes or dislikes or anything at all about the person.
And that's incredibly sad.
So many people see White as a culture. Spend a day looking at Scottish mythology and then compare it to Icelandic mythology. The two places are close, but the differences in their stories and storytelling is vast. Now compare the cultures of California and Utah. Different again. Now compare the physical build of a Scot and an Italian. The bone structures (to generalise in a most hypocritical way) are on average incredibly different. And yet all these places we could place under the banner of "Generically White" and just walk away.
As a storyteller, the more specific you get in the stories you tell and the way you tell them make all the difference to the way culture is guided. It's the difference between a stereotype and a human (or elf or orc or halfling or automaton or or or). And when I say culture, I mean the wider world, not just the game.
Something I love about writing plays is that they're one of the fastest mediums. If something happens in the world, within about two months, maybe three, I often see something coming to stage reflecting the world we're in. What we write, how we speak, how we engage with the world can have such a profound effect on it.
And as much as I hate living in a time where people think they can take ownership of me by reaching out to touch my hair in a way that they will absolutely not do that to a White man, I love living in a time where I can step back, say no and they have to consider not just that I spoke up, but why.
I love that I live in a time where words and their impact is being recognised. TTRPG twitter has a lot of issues - a lot of loud voices wanting to be heard, a lot of arguing, a lot of anger, but it also questions itself and I respect that. It's alive and it's growing and it's a lot of valid storytelling voices who will pass down batons of culture to everyone who comes next.
And those changes in storytelling will broaden out to the world.
So keep telling them, but be specific, be kind, and keep asking questions.
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