What about PoC?

@fairlyfairfighter
(I was agreeing with you.)

Yup, just googled some words and I can confirm, yes. You were.

Well, maybe we are really talking past each other.

A short primer to modern racist based ethnic or religious cleansing:

Neccessary ingredients: A population with pre existing fault lines, racial fault lines are especially powerful, followed by religious fault lines and then social and political fault lines. This is because race is not changeable, religion often isnt exactly malleable either, but social class and political opinion can be changed. Therefor, civil wars based on class or political belief are easier to end by a compromise, or by a surrender of one side, then civil wars based on race.

The other big neccessary ingredient is that economic conditions degrade enough that normal family/friend/ or even clan structures are no longer sufficient to ensure access to required levels of resources. Competition between various groupings for increasingly rare resources leads to coalition formation, and those coalitions will often form along ethnic or religious lines, even if ethnicity of religions were not a big deal before hand. In particular, increasing economic difficulties will greatly ease the way for formerly marginal racist thoughts into the accepted “mainstream”.
Both Yugoslavia and Ukraine used to be pretty progressive countries after all.

In a negative feedback loop, the increasing competition turns increasingly violent, which destroys already rare resources and thus makes them even rarer, thus increasing the severity of the competition for the remaining rarer resources.
Mutual grievances incurred during the competitions add up, and harden ethnic and/or religious coalitions. At some point, conflict reduces resources to such a degree that large scale ethnic or religious cleansing becomes an “attractive” stratagem. And so, Chechens cleanse Chechenya of Russians to get invaded by the Russian army in return, Bosniaks and Serbs murder each other, citizens of Donbass become “subhuman Sovoks” and citizens of Lviv “murderous Banderites” in the eyes of each other.

The whole thing becomes, depending on things like historical emnity, foreign interventions, particularly fulminant economic decline due to catastrophes, even worse in some occassions.

The core of such things however is nearly always economic. And no one is in the least immune to it. If you think Trump is either the last or the worst expression of such racist populism based and fueled by an economic malaise in the United States you have seen nothing yet.

The goal must be to prevent and preempt the formation of coalitions willing to do violence on ethnic/religious grounds (which will be difficult, but still much easier then breaking up those coalitions once the form, let alone harden). The best way to do so is to maximize contacts that bridge possible fault lines, the worst way to do so is to create additional boundaries, and seek shelter behind them while comfortably assuming all the worst of the “adversaries out there”.

Attempting to legislate racism away is A) only treating the symptom and B) unlikely to work anyway since racism is a pretty old evolutionary response to diminishing economic resources and thus very difficult to modify.

@Andrej_Schmelzer
The problem with making those contacts is that mutual exchange still occurs in an unequal balance of power. A dominant ethnicity is going to have a lot more advantages, and a lot more security than a marginalised group. That means that each group approaches the other with different attitudes and preconceptions.

In a way, the idea of the safe space helps counteract that: a dominant group has security by default. In the North American context, a white guy is going to be treated with considerably more tact than a black (or female, or black and female) counterpart by law enforcement, job interviewers, and even just people on the street. That shapes each respective individual’s mindset, and living your entire life treated as the “other” in wider society not only takes a mental toll, but helps internalise that other-ness.

The point of a safe space is to create an artificial area where people who are normally “othered” in wider society are treated as default instead. Excluding the normally dominant groups (be they men, or whites, or cisgender people) isn’t ideal, but it may indeed be necessary, since we (speaking as a cis-het guy here) bring our own biases to the table, and simply being present is both a reminder to the normally marginalised that they are an other (since society has already forced them to internalise themselves as inferior to the “dominant” group). Theoretically speaking, when those biases have been worn away, and marginalised groups are no longer marginalised, then there should be no more need for safe spaces, because wider society itself would be a safe space.

Then again, Marx said the same thing about the State in a Communist regime, and this is all theory, so I’m not entirely confident that this is all going to work out as well as we all hope: just because safe spaces themselves are often necessary doesn’t mean they can’t be abused.

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Safe spaces certainly have value, but they also have weaknesses . The first is that they can become too comfortably insular, turning into exercises in self-segregation for those that never leave them, which can eventually turn into ghettoes with reduced opportunities for advancement.

The second is that segregation, including self-segregation, turns discussion into an echo chamber, and makes the creation of distinct narratives that entirely blame the other side for all of life’s ills too easy. I found former President Bill Clinton’s recent disageement with the Black Lives Matter advocacy group rather interesting in this regard.

3 posts were split to a new topic: The politics behind the EU association agreement with Ukraine

When I was casting my secondary characters for MONHH, I tried to go for reasonable diversity without ticking off a checklist. I’d visualize some characters, swap their races around, see if they still fit, ask myself why not, throw out assumptions, and the result was a mixed group of characters with a mixed group of interests that weren’t linked to race. I’m still feeling out how much racism to add back into the story, but I don’t want to lean too heavily towards oppression-flavored urban fantasy.

A book about oppressed white people done pretty well: Naughts & Crosses. It’s set in an alternate universe where history has been reversed, so things white people take for granted now work against them (everything from major racism, to having trouble buying foundation and band-aids in their shade.)

I think the easiest way out of this loop is to acknowledge that it’s a semantic argument. There are two definitions of “racist.” By the older definition, of course you’re right - any race can be prejudiced against other races, or their own. A newer definition, that a lot of people have found helpful, thinks of racism as power + prejudice. There are two camps of people who do not agree on the more useful way to use the word, and that’s okay. There are bigger problems than what edition of the dictionary we’re using.

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First of all, I’d just like to say that MONHH is a great game. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve replayed it. Also, I really appreciated how you added some mixed characters. The fact that my favorite character is the same race as me makes my heart happy.

Haven’t heard of that book, but it sounds really interesting. I’ll have to add it onto my ever-growing to-read list!

:sunrise: Hello @sashira!

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Seems like I’m late to the discussion again… Damn.

Anyway, I don’t know if my experience will correlate with any others here, as I mostly live in a place where the color of your skin doesn’t matter.

My classroom, for example, is a mash up of white, Indian (as in color of skin, not actual nationality), black and mulato. And I don’t think race has ever been a really prominent subject there, or in the whole school.

But regarding the main topic, yes, I do rather like the option to choose what race I am, but I’m not going to feel particularly hurt if it isn’t. I grew inside an environment where I was taught that personality is far more important than color. My family is quite diverse on race too, to the point me and my brother are Indian, and my sister is white, so I guess that helped.

Must be the fried donkey meat…and the machismo though both are a very high price to pay for some racial harmony. :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:
Or maybe the fact that you all get to live in paradise @Jjcb you lucky dog!

As for me personally I’ve been bullied by white black and Asian guys and on the other hand I have been and am part of multi-racial parties and movements. Class and Religion are from my pov, far more serious fault lines than race.

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[quote=Sashira][quote=“P_Tigras, post:168, topic:15997”]
Is it that difficult to admit that all people can be racist?
[/quote]
I think the easiest way out of this loop is to acknowledge that it’s a semantic argument. There are two definitions of “racist.” By the older definition, of course you’re right - any race can be prejudiced against other races, or their own. A newer definition, that a lot of people have found helpful, thinks of racism as power + prejudice. There are two camps of people who do not agree on the more useful way to use the word, and that’s okay. There are bigger problems than what edition of the dictionary we’re using.
[/quote]

The problem with the “newer” definition is that power dynamics aren’t absolute in societies that are in transition. For example, many African Americans do have positions of power and authority in modern day America. And PoC are no more inherently saintly than white folk when it comes to power and its abuse. So an argument that “Black folk can’t be racist”, comes across as specious even by your second “newer” definition in a society where African Americans can and do hold positions of power. Worse, statements like that can be highly divisive instead of unifying.

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Well, yeah. Dominican Republic’s inhabitants still have a way to go on Machismo and Gay Rights. :sweat:

But Donkey Meat isn’t that bad. I wouldn’t eat it even if my life depended on it, but my father says it isn’t that bad.

And I’m sorry to hear about the things you had to go through. I used to get my fair share of bullying too, but I guess it died down once my classmates “grew up”.

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I think we’re in agreement that abusing power is a bad thing, and that no race has a monopoly on bad behavior. This argument is what’s divisive; why do people get hung up on the meaning of “racist” or “feminist” or any other “-ist” when we could be doing more constructive things, like talking about how to make good stories? Which, incidentally, should have more than one race represented in them, unless there’s a valid reason that won’t work. The answer to decades of whitewashing isn’t to ban white people from games and no one’s saying that, just like no one’s arguing that bad things have happened to white people, sometimes at the hands of black people or other POC.

It’s not about individuals holding positions of authority or power. Yes, Obama is President and Powell and Rice were SecState and Holder and Lynch are/were AG. The point is that there is system-wide prejudice enforced via misconceptions and injustice. The fact that a vast proportion of people behind bars are POCs, or that the vast proportion of the executed and death row inmates are POCs, or that cocaine and crack have different sentencing guidelines, or that marijuana is illegal at all are symptoms of (institutional) racism in America.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think that “black folk” are inherently “saintlier” than “white folk.” The point is that (institutional) racism is embedded in every aspect of life in America, and though we may be “in transition,” as you say, we are leagues and leagues away from being equal. This has been going on for four hundred years, and police can still kill black children with nigh-impunity. “In transition,” to me means, “we’re just beginning.”

Moreover, when you say things like, “statements like that can be highly divisive instead of unifying,” what I hear you saying is, “you [black people] need to stop fretting over your lived experience and the lived experiences of your family going back to their arrival in this country. You need to stop thinking about the bad old days, and stop trying to change things in the present, and just wait for good things to come your way, because anything else is disruptive and uncivil.”

To which my response is, power never diminishes itself unless it is forced to do so. Instead, I would posit, when things are still so persistently and systematically unjust, calls for “unity” are what’s specious.

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I definitely recommend that book to everyone. It’s a great way to learn about microagressions and about the way we see race/racism in modern western society

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Mostly the same here, except I’ve had to go through that cycle twice, once in high-school and then another time at college.
In both cases the first two years were the worst.

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The core of a person’s self image is how you define her or him. By saying I am a feminist you are attaching a set of ideas, concepts and limits on what my core is.

If my internal core is different then how you label me, how is it we can work on making games together? In other words, if I am labeled a feminist, and I come to you with feedback on a game, you will see that feedback with a different set of lenses than if I were labelled an anti-feminist …

Diversity is the key to getting great feedback but in order to make sure your feedback is coming from that diversity you need to know more about your testers. Random feedback is good but focused feedback will push your project to the next level.

No argument here.

Define “force”, because:

  1. This sounds like a call to arms.
  2. Violence begets even more violence.

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. would not have achieved so much had he wielded the threat of force instead of the spirit of moral authority.

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@P_Tigras Have you finally gone socialist on me in your old age, admitting that classism is the mostly silent “superpredator” that stalks our neo-liberal societies both in the US and here, across the pond?

A combined program of making sure working class incomes rise (so poor parents can either afford to stay home sometimes and do some actual parenting, or can afford to outsource it the same as wealthier ones) improvements to education, including apprenticeships and fostering more respect for “blue collar” work overall, and last but most important having a long breath (arguably the most difficult component in our time where the voting public spurred on by the media demands policies with immediate results, which is coincidentally why going ever more draconian is easy because the results can be seen almost immediately, even if they are mostly negative, is so much easier than the alternatives).
In short there no reason why some properly applied social democracy couldn’t work for the US of A.

Not in US society, but sometimes things like Gandhi’s infamous letter to the Jews fails to appreciate that there are some leaders in some societies who understand and respond to but one language…
For moral authority to work that morality has to be adhered to, at least nominally and in public, by the leadership you’re trying to influence with it.

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