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I dislike this article. It’s a little old now, but there are several things blisteringly wrong with this idea at its heart.
Purely for example, if you read a book on dragonflies and take offence because you see racial similarities between whatever race a person is and dragonflies, that’s an issue with you, not the source. You are relying on your opinion on what the source says. Since opinion varies per person, you should not dictate policy based on opinion. It’s an insurmountable hill to cater to whatever opinions are since opinion will always change - it’s an unsound basis for any form of logic.
Let’s do a thought experiment:
If a trailer-dwelling white person in the USA reads about the Vistani, and takes offence because they also live in a trailer, sees that as a negative, and assumes the Vistani are a potshot at him, is he right to be offended and call for a ban?
If a nimble Canadian POC (which is also a terrible term as it literally applies to everyone on the planet) reads about Elves and assumes they’re talking about him because he also happens to know how to use a bow and is skinny with a lithe frame, is he correct in calling for a ban? What if he sees being nimble as a negative for some reason (because positive / negative characteristics are opinions and what people see as negative is not objective)? What if he sees it as being racist by saying the source is calling ALL Elves nimble and therefore good at sports? “But they stereotypically have a different skin colour!” I hear you saying. So do Orcs. That argument applies here and if you can’t square that circle, then the logic falls apart utterly.
Personal identification with aspects of characters in a source material are not cause for alteration. You are an individual; you are not a group. Grouping people into camps based on visible traits or histories is a disgusting habit.
Treat people as individuals and racism dies. Treat people as groups and call out the differences constantly and you’ll have people fencing themselves in while calling themselves inclusive.
Treat people as individuals and racism dies?
Not sure about your reality but in this one I constantly treat people as individuals and racism is thriving.
Your response is reductive, intellectually bankrupt and reeks of privilege.
So with you treating others as individuals, are you stating that you frequently still have racist thoughts and ideas then? Or perhaps are those groups still expressing racist ideas treating the groups they oppose as a group and not individuals?
In my main response to the article, I was referring (I thought quite clearly) to those ideas in produced media and on a global scale such as D&D.
For a functional proof, see how media historically treated the Irish or the Polish. Racism against those two groups is mostly dead because it became essentially ignored. Although I’m sure you can find some minor modern examples, it’s more of a cultural oddity than a problem at this stage. Are you able to articulate why this occurred (as well as other examples through history) so that it tracks with what you’ve stated above?
Individualism is the only viable solution to racism that I have ever seen. Every other solution I have seen proposed doesn’t deal with the reality of the world, and instead relies on how we wish things were and discards other opinions as invalid, but keeps our opinion as true (which is deeply condescending). Instead, ALL opinion is invalid for requiring change. It’s the only viable way to find things objectively true and progress things in a logical fashion.
I am not proud of my background, it’s simply how I arrived here. It’s part of me, but does not in any way define me. I do not celebrate it, but I acknowledge it. If you think I should behave in any way because of a perceived group membership, you are wrong. I am an individual and so is everyone else.
We can not, however, force people to only think good things about the groups they may see us as belonging to. That is not an achievable or enforceable goal. The realistic way this horrible thinking dies is simply… removing any presupposition entirely.
It’s the same with many partisan political issues, and it’s the reason they won’t be solved until looked at with a utilitarian lens; again, opinion causes strife and knowledge defeats opinion.
Do you have a functional example of why you would be correct and why my way would be worse?