At the recent Creator Summit for D&D - a gathering of D&D content creators where the team from WotC fielded questions and talked about the future of the game - they clarified the decision to remove the Half-Elf and Half-Orc from the upcoming, 2024 Player's Handbook. I don't have a direct quote, but the reason that the D&D community seems to have heard was that they said that these terms were inherently racist.
I wanted to examine that.
I am someone from a mixed ancestry, but I'll say up front that the nuances of these discussions, and particularly the way that western culture defines things like "race," puts me in a weird position. One side of my family, my mother's, would in this day and age be considered unambiguously "white." It's a mix of Irish, English, German, and other northwestern European nations, with ancestors who came in as early as the Mayflower and some who arrived later. My father's side of the family is Ashkenazi Jewish. The Ashkenazi group is basically European Jews (though a number of Sephardic Jews have roots in Spain and Portugal, given the Iberian Peninsula's ties to North Africa).
Jews, (and here I primarily mean the Ashkenazi) in America and western society in general, are often granted a "white" identity most of the time. But we have always lived under threat of the sudden and often violent rescinding of that identity when bigotry becomes a powerful political force, most devastatingly in the 1930s and 40s under fascism, but certainly not confined to that one traumatic era.
Jewishness is also further complicated because it is both an ethnicity and a religion. Jewish religious practices have a millennia-old set of traditions and beliefs, and perhaps the fact that Christianity, which began as a sect and off-shoot of Judaism, is now the dominant religion in the western world (and many of the areas that were colonized by European countries,) the religious distinctions have also created a lot of friction and complexity in how the Jewish identity is seen and acknowledged.
I, for instance, received no Jewish religious instruction when I was growing up, because by my grandparents' generation, even before they suffered the horrors of the Holocaust, they had chosen a secular, irreligious lifestyle, so my father didn't receive such instruction either and had no desire to for me or my sister to study the Torah and learn Hebrew. But my grandparents were nevertheless targeted for extermination based on the idea that their Jewishness was inherent to them on a genetic level, and I have one fewer uncle, and far fewer cousins on that side of the family than I might have otherwise had if not for the determination that Judaism was an inherited and intrinsic trait, and an undesirable one at that (to be clear, I'm not trying to say that religious persecution de-coupled from racial persecution would be acceptable, but merely point this out to demonstrate the complexity of these issues).
And, despite having really just a philosophical respect for Jewish religious belief and practice, and having a primarily cultural connection to my Jewish heritage, I hold on to it with a sense of defiance and love for the ancestors who came before me.
But my hybrid identity is also very important to me.
I grew up in a city that had a very unusually large Jewish population, roughly one third. The city has two high schools, and the one I went to was situated in the part of town that had a denser Jewish population on top of that. So, while the actual numbers are not anything I'm totally sure of, the impression I had growing up was that perhaps a narrow majority of my classmates were Jewish. In middle school, there were many Bar and Bat Mitzvahs being thrown, and when we had a World Religions unit in 7th grade, I remember a classmate guessed Judaism when we were asked what religion had the most adherents across the globe, presumably basing this on his own narrow experience.
But given that my mother was raised Catholic in a family that to a large extent embraced my grandmother's Irish roots, it felt important for me to also carve out a space in my identity to acknowledge that side of things. With so many Jewish classmates, many of whom were going off to Hebrew school on the weekends and receiving their big winter holiday gifts before the holiday break started, given that Hanukkah usually comes before Christmas, I couldn't fully commit to a Jewish identity either (it didn't help that, kids being the sort of people who learn a rule and attempt to apply it with zero nuance immediately, many of my peers would refute any claim I had to being Jewish because my mother was not).
So, what does this have to do with D&D?
Well, I am someone who feels a very strong embrace of my identity as Half-Jewish. It's important to me that that hybrid identity is seen, acknowledged, and respected. It's important to me that one side of my identity is not ignored because it is more convenient for people to define me by my other side. There can be a loneliness in these things - when I am in a predominantly Jewish social environment, I can feel like an outsider, but when I'm in a predominantly Christian environment, I feel perhaps even more of an outsider (which I think is mostly a product of the fact that Christians in America are accustomed to everyone around them being on the same page, while Jews, as a minority, know what it is like to be around people who don't share their beliefs or lifestyle).
And so I don't necessarily agree with the idea that "Half-" identities are a purely racist notion.
That being said, I can see why one would come to this conclusion, and the argument is not without merit. In D&D, Half-Elves are presumed to have another half that is human. The same is true for Half-Orcs. The default assumption of Humans as the "normal" race echoes in many ways similar assumptions about white identity in the west - that until you are identified as "other," the presumption is that you're white and Christian (and straight and cisgender and so on). This "normativity" puts a burden on minorities to constantly have to define and defend their differences, while those who are in the dominant group can easily go about without having to think about these issues, and sometimes mistake the staking out of social or ideological territory for those who are different as an assault on their own identity because it's the only time they find themselves having to think about it.
A hybrid identity is the sort of thing that, when claimed by a person who defines themself that way, can be empowering, but when applied externally by others, it can be demeaning and - quite literally in the case of D&D - de-humanizing.
And this nuance - that it can be empowering or disempowering, depending on who is using it, is why I understand Wizards of the Coast's intention to discontinue its use. It is hard to convey nuance in a product that is ultimately just trying to give you game mechanics to use in your own games. The complexities of racial/ethnic identity are something that ultimately cannot be mediated by a distant corporate publisher, and so it behooves them to try to find the way to approach these subjects in a manner that does the best job of adhering to their most universally-acceptable manner of expression.
Furthermore, the presence of Half-Elves and Half-Orcs in D&D has always, to me, raised some odd questions. Surely, for example, Dwarves are just as common and widespread a people in these worlds as Elves, and have just as much of a history of cooperation with humans. Why should we not have Half-Dwarves along with Half-Elves? And then, if Elves and Orcs are both co-fertile with humans, what would we call the child of an Orc and Elf pairing? If my Warlock's mother is a half-elf, but his father is a full human, what, then, is he? Does a half-elf have to have precisely 50% ancestry of each playable race to count? Or would having a great-great-great-great-grandfather somewhere back there who was an elf, so far back that they don't even know his name, be enough to count?
As long as we have races, or lineages, or species (I find I prefer lineage,) as a key part of character creation that has mechanical definitions, these questions are not going to have a simple and elegant solution, except perhaps in a setting where we truly have no co-fertility between species. Such a setting might work in a science fiction setting where the existence of human-like aliens is a matter of an astounding coincidence of convergent evolution among fully independent evolutionary lineages, but fantasy has, since Tolkien at least, treated "races" as analogous to real-world ethnicities, and hybrids have been there all along - Elrond, for instance, is half-human, and Aragorn has elvish ancestry. (Actually, he's descended from Elrond's brother, so let's not think too hard about the fact that he winds up marrying his first cousin many, many, many times removed.)
So, I think that the solution they have come up with - which is to simply have people who want a character of mixed ancestry choose one or the other (or the other, if they're not the first in their ancestral line to have a hybrid identity) as the closest match, and make it clear that the actual truth within the fantasy world that exists, is that this character's identity is far more complex than a half-page set of traits in the rulebook is capable of expressing - is the best I've seen so far.
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