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Not So Anachronistic

Through the power of wireless, steam, and Gaming Ballistic's new GURPSDay feed, I was reading a post by Peter about "modernisms" in his campaign. One of them struck me, so I thought I'd put on my historian hat and discuss it a bit. This is what Peter says:
Racial Equality is generally a thing - so much so that you get a whack of points back if you aren't treated equally and few people earn those points.
The thing about that, from an historical point of view, is that if you're presenting a pseudo-Medieval society (which dungeon crawl games more or less are), then racial equality is, in fact, the norm, not a projection of modern attitudes.

Certainly, there were all manner of ways in which historical societies might divide the world into "us" and "them:" language, ethnicity, religion, place of origin, and so on. But by sets of physical differences? Not so much. Racism as we know it is literally a modern invention. Before the Renaissance, for example, "white people," as a category, didn't exist. And the idea of groups of people being superior or inferior to one another as an inherent, "genetic" quality rather than a matter of environment or upbringing was rare. One of "them" might be bad in various ways, but bring them over here and have their children raised "properly" and that'll get sorted out sooner or later. It really wasn't until the 16th century and beyond that the idea of biological origin being inextricably intertwined with mental and moral traits started to take off, and it really wasn't codified into the racial categorizations we're suffering with today until the later 18th century when bozos like Christoph Meiners and Johann Blumenbach created them.

So, then, far from being modern, racial equality is absolutely an historical thing. If you're doing GURPS, as we do around here, Social Stigma is inappropriate for racial templates. This is not to say that individual characters can't have, say, Social Stigma (Second-Class Citizen) or Social Stigma (Subjugated), but they won't have it just for being a half-elf or what have you...though they could if they're a half-elf who worships the wrong gods (though that's rarer and more complicated than it might seem), or an half-elf from that country. Congratulations, Peter, you're running an Historically Accurate Campaign™.





Comments

Peter D said…
If I'd known that medieval man treated Asians, Africans, and Morder-Americans ("orcs") so nicely I'd have skipped that part of my post!

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