Researching the Correlation between Dungeons & Dragons and Racism

  We can't just look at this issue from a purely Dungeons and Dragons standpoint (unfortunately) and if we were to, we'd probably come to an early conclusion of "well, it used to be kind of racist, but it doesn't really seem to be anymore", which isn't really what we're after.     So, lets talk a bit about racism.   I started looking into racism, and what causes it, and while looking through the 10,000+ articles in the Nexis database, I got really really really bored (or overwhelmed?) and decided to play with Google. Google brought me to a lovely little article entitled Tolerant Tykes: Small Children Aren't Inherently Racist, which is about a study done by Tara Mandalaywala about race in early childhood. The main goal of her study was to examine three main questions: "(a) To what extent do young children hold essentialist views of race; (b) how do these beliefs develop; and (c) what are the implications of such essentialist beliefs for the early...

The Wizard from the PHB Why Play a Human?   As explored in my previous post, through the 4th Edition of the game there were only 2 pictures of non-white adventurers in the entirety of the Dungeons and Dragons Core books. In 5th Edition of Dungeons and Dragons (which is the best edition, fight me) there are eight non-white humans in the entire 293 pages of the Players Handbook (PHB) alone, not to mention the six in the Dungeon Master's Guide (DMG) Which is an upgrade, but we'll talk about the seemingly more forward thinking writings of the 5th Edition a little later in this post.   The biggest question in 5th Edition is "why play a human?" In first and second edition of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (AD&D from this post forward) humans don't get any bonuses to their stats, because they are the only classes that could reach level 20 in their chosen class, as well as the only race that could multi-class or take the paladin class. In 3rd Edition D&D, ...

Image from the cover of the Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide,   Alright, back to blogging. I was pretty sick for the past week which is why nothing got posted and I've decided I'm making up for it this week. Woo extra blog posts!   I read an article by Chris Van Dyke entitled Race in Dungeons and Dragons  which I found while doing my initial research and seemed to really nicely delve into the topic at hand.   He starts off by associating the standard human adventurer to a run-of-the-mill white male, with quotes from the Player's Handbook (which, when paired with the Dungeon Master's Guide, makes up the D&D bible), as well as mentioning that in ALL of the first 4 editions of the game there are only 2 non-white characters denoted in the core guides. This made me want to do a bit of my own research on my edition and see if any players are non-white, but since I don't have the 5th Edition PHB or DMG in front of me, I'll update this blog post later with t...

Turns out I already did a bit of a boolean search in my last blog, and may not have gone into enough background research, but we're pushing forward. So I went to the Auraria Library website (more specifically  https://guides.auraria.edu/az.php ) and searched Dungeons and Dragons: nothing. Roleplaying games: nothing. D&D: actually got me a hit, but it was thinking I meant D&B. But then I thought about it and was pretty sure I was doing it wrong. Turns out I was getting ahead of myself and searching for my topic before the database. I'm kinda new to this. So, I jumped in the Nexis Uni database (as recommended by my teacher) and searched dungeons and dragons, and lo-and-behold, I got over 10000 hits. I'll need to narrow it down a bit obviously, but the second article is about a Dungeons and Dragons Dominatrix. That just seems like an interesting read. In order to narrow it a bit more, I added a search term: racism. Down to 323 articles, but so far we don't seem ...

So, I have this question in my brain, and its pretty easy to guess what that question is, since it is basically the title of the blog, but just in case you don't want to look at the top of the page, the Question is "How does Dungeons and Dragons Affect our Understanding of Racism?" Not a bad question if I do say so myself, but in order to begin finding an answer, we have to do some background research. First stop is the Google, at which I type in Dunge to which Google immediately responds "You're looking for Dungeons and Dragons aren't you?" Yes Google, stop knowing what I want... I opened Wikipedia, because while it isn't a good collegiate source, it is a source to find a good source. Also, we can get general information there, which is what my we are after for this blog post. Learning some stuff real quick: D&D was designed by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson in 1974. They're two very white guys, we'll learn more about them later. T...