White as natural
“We can not fight for our rights and our history as well as future until we are armed with weapons of criticism and dedicated consciousness.”
— Edward W. Said
Video games are a powerful form
of art, it can put players into the lives and shoes of many. You can be a
warrior or a wizard, fighting for a cause, a robot navigating through a
post-apocalyptic world, at times, you may even be a bug, a cat, a god… You can,
for a brief moment, exist as someone else, morph into a different body. Art,
such as books, cinema, theater, all have this power of making us see through
the eyes of another, but video games are special because they are interactive
media. On films, you may watch the characters solving a puzzle, on video games,
it is you who’s solving them. On books, you may read as a character has to take
some harsh decisions, in video games, it is you taking the decisions. In other
media, the characters tell us their stories, in video games, we shape their
stories. There’s a question in which players have to face in games: “am I me,
or am I this character? Am I taking these decisions using my lens, or theirs?”
There’s the inner struggle between taking decisions in a game based on my own
morals, ideas and life experiences or doing so based on the character I’m
playing as. Still, as diverse the background, ideas and personalities of all
the characters we’ve played as in video games to this day, there’s one striking
resemblance in most of them: their skins, their bodies. It’s bizarre, really;
to think how the vast majority of characters we’ve been interacting with, connecting
ourselves with, all share this one single similarity: them are white.
Image: Some of the main characters we can play as in video games.(via: SVG)
As long as we keep
repeating the mistake of showing only white faces and white culture on cinema,
literature, video games or whatever art form we do in for creating stories, all
we’re simply doing is reinforce the notion that being white, being part of a
white culture, or simply having fairer skin tone, is the norm, is natural, and
that all human beings that are not white, not from a “white nation” (as well as
those who are not heterosexual, nor follow the rules of what being heterosexual
is, and so many other groups so marginalized in our society), are not. When we
remove these whole groups of people from our stories, we’re putting them in a category
of subhuman, what is being said is that they’re not natural, or normal, it is
said, consciously or not, that them have “a race” or “a gender”, while we, do
not. We’re normal. We’re natural. They’re not. They’re deviant and weird. Not
just different, but deviant and inferior. It’s the false and harmful notion
that there’s a natural human condition, that all humans are, or should, be born into the same
body and mind, it’s hegemony at its most gruesome.
This, to me, shows some
things. It shows that, if we want to genuinely change this destructive notion
of “white as natural”, this nonsensical, absurd idea that has caused nothing
but harm and violence for generations, of whiteness as the natural human
condition, we need to tell new stories. We cannot possibly believe that
art does not have the power to shape our reality or that it does not exist on influence
of the same.
We see Ged, from The Wizard
of Earthsea, a dark-skinned character, a powerful and wise wizard, and we’re
shocked. “Why?”, it’s said, “Gandalf wasn’t black”. We see black elves on a new
television adaptation of The Lord of the Rings, and we’re shocked. “There were
no black elves in Tolkien’s original story”. When we say these things, repeatedly
as we do, we are, consciously or unconsciously, following a racist notion that
non-white people shouldn’t exist in stories, because them never did, and so it
is just natural that them continue not to. We say these stories have become
“political”, but why? Well, because there’s now “race” in it. When a story is
only about white people, there’s no politics in it, there’s no “race”, it’s all
natural, all normal, the so called natural human condition. The Lord of The
Rings became a blueprint for how we create fantasy worlds, but there’s no story
without history, so if in our fictional narratives people of color are either
exotified or erased completely, that is a way to decipher the real world, the
way reality is being performed, the way it currently is. There are no stories
that exist without influence of our history, but also, stories can change the
way we act in reality, it can help we us comprehend it; video games as they are
interacting media have the immense capacity of encouraging empathic attitudes
and in developing critical thinking. Game developers interested in creating
everlasting art, and not just commodities for consumerism, or worse, tools in
service of oppression, are able to create worlds, stories and characters
capable of shaking us and impacting our perception of reality, it can make us
better, make us capable of shaping a world where it’s easier to love.
The idea of race is engraved
in fantasy as something key to worldbuilding, it’s hard to find fantastical
stories that nominates different creatures as species (for example), but rather
always as different races. The word race is hardly used for group identity, but
to emancipate some while subjugating others, to name some as naturally good and
the others as inherently evil; on this dynamic, evil is always one-dimensional
and have no hope whatsoever, they are always monsters who commit atrocities
without thought and without reason, and therefore must be expunged, so “good”,
also one-dimensional, can live in peace. Stories like this are told in binary
perspectives of black (evil) and white (good). The fact that the Orcs from The
Lord of The Rings are dark-skinned and portrayed as hopeless monstrosities
while the elves are white-skinned and portrayed as righteous, civil and wise
tell us a story. Back to video games, a series that I’m familiar with ever
since childhood and have very dear feelings for, is Kingdom Hearts; and
analyzing it today, it’s important to point out how some of the key villains in
the story, Ansem, Xemnas, Xehanort… are dark-skinned, while the vast majority
of the cast who are the heroes, are white or close to it. Xehanort, the main
antagonist and villain of the story, is dark-skinned, while his long friend and
counterpart, Eraqus, usually portrayed as good by the story, is white. See how
this mental connotation of — white = good/black = bad — is problematic to the
way we perceive the real world, as we apply this to human beings as well,
following a simplistic and binary vision where nuance doesn’t exist. We perceive
evil as something that is just this: a problem that must be extinguished,
demonized, destroyed and eliminated; while doing the same to all that is black
and dark, including human lives.
Naoki Yoshida, producer of
the upcoming video game title “Final Fantasy XVI”, a series I love so dearly,
said in a recent interview that this new title won’t have a proper
representation of black people, brown people, people of color, because they’re
“following a more realistic idea, geographic and anthropological, for the
games’ setting, which will take place in the Middle Age Europe…”, Yoshida even
acknowledges that some people may feel disappointed about this fact. I must say
that I have much respect for Yoshida’s and his history in video game development,
but yes, my disappointed (and I sure this is a mutual feeling I have with a lot
of people too), is immeasurable. This is the mindset of “white as natural”.
Yoshida is not working on an anthropological study about medieval Europe — and
if he was, it wouldn’t be an accurate one, as we have studies today showing
that medieval Europe wasn’t this age free of people of color, as some seems too
eager to believe so — he’s developing a video game, a fantasy game. Drawing a
line on “having non-white people and their culture in my story is not
realistic” is a hurtful stance we need break free from. We need to tell new
stories. We can’t, in self-conscious’, continue to exclude whole groups of
people from stories, from fantasy; nor can we continue to sustain this lie told
to us for so long now, that people of color in the past existed apart from all the,
so called, “natural ones”, or that people of color simple did not exist back
them, lies told to us by those who would praise this falsified old ages for
being a white-only period, and repeated by ourselves, based on the lies we’re
told and that have been sustained by some so called “intellectuals” on the last
centuries, who refused to do in-depth studies about black cultures, African
cultures, indigenous cultures and their pasts, to instead ignore or exoticize
them, feeding this notion that story began with white people and were always
about white culture and their so called civilization. Another interesting point
of analysis after watching the trailers we got thus far for Final Fantasy XVI,
is the lack of women characters. Were there no women in Europe back then? The
last mainline Final Fantasy game (FFXV), released back in 2016, had the
audacity of not including a single woman in the main group of characters, which
ended up as a group of 4 men instead. Is this what we’re going to do? Is this
how we step forward towards inclusion? “[…] the story isn’t any good if he
isn’t in it.” Says Ursula K. Le Guin, on her incredible essay “The Carrier Bag
Theory of Fiction”. Something else I find strange in the trailers, is how all
the men we’ve saw (which is pretty much 95% of the cast of characters, men and
boys), look very much like contemporary men to me. Through paintings from back
in the Middle Ages, we can see that a vast group of men, kings and aristocrats,
had long hair, wore wigs, heels and makeup, but the men in Final Fantasy XVI
all have short hair and wear really regular ideas of armor. Well, I ask, is
there no “drawing a line on realism” on this? Or is the idea of showing men on
the game having long hair or wearing those attires now too much for audiences
in our contemporary time, whom have an idealized version of what a man is
supposed to be today? Maybe making them see men with long hair and makeup could
be too shocking to their notions of “what’s natural”? Is this fear of, say, “femininity”
and womanhood?
wearing his luxurious vestments, including high heels and tights.
We need to tell new
stories. When we say and repeat, over and over again, be with words or images,
that “white is natural”, we are, unconsciously or not, following the path white
supremacists have set us upon. In my mind, race and gender are some of the
biggest and most terrible works of fiction created in our history, and ones that
continue to feed hatred and exclusion all over the world. I call them
fiction, you may call them social constructs, but we shall never call it
“natural”.
Many people, creators and audiences, say that fantasy shouldn’t be just mere escapism, but rather a metaphorical window that show us a story that is not necessarily ours, a story that helps us understand and engage in our own collective history. How can we use this genre to help people develop critical thinking, kindness and empathy, if we don’t have the people who ultimately suffers from our systemic dilemmas and discriminations, like racism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, poverty, global warming… in our narratives? How can we tell their stories without them? How can we develop more and better solidarity and understanding towards people with disabilities in our world, when we don’t see them in art? In the Japanese manga “Witch Hat Atelier”, created by the incredibly talented mangaká Kamome Shirahama, there’s the character Beldaruit, a wise, kind and powerful witch/mage, who has a disability. This very topic is much explored in the story. At one point in a later chapter, one of the central characters, Coco, talks to a friend about how to create a better world for people with disabilities, a world that fits for them. That’s what we need, that’s what we should be striving for, stories that encourage compassion, inclusion and empathy, not ones that just totally excludes all bodies them don’t consider as “normal”.
(via: Goodreads)
We are — or rather — should
be, human beings first and foremost. To quote Gwen Marshal, a writer and game
designer who came up with the wonderful idea for a zine where the word and
concept “race” is replaced with “ancestry” and “culture” for the tabletop RPG
Dungeons and Dragons (D&D), she told The Guardian: “Race is not a
biological reality, rather, it is a social concept constructed and employed
differently at different times in history and in different places in the world
[…] Because these harmful concepts have no place in our world, they need not be
in the stories we tell with our friends, either”. There is nothing natural or
organic about the concept of race, nothing that, as some like to say, in truth,
proves that race is a biological part of human beings; it’s forged, it’s
fantasy; a fiction that does nothing but excludes, segregates and is used as a
tool to spread hatred based upon nothing. As social beings, sharing this space,
this planet we call home, we should celebrate our differences, we are different;
— different just like nature, just like the trees and flowers with all their unique
shapes, — different just like cats with all their different fur colors, —
different just like zebras, all with their different stripes’ patterns. And to
celebrate different, we need to tell stories where difference exists and are
multifaceted. Difference is natural.
References:
It’s time for fantasy fiction and
role-playing games to shed their racist history:
https://www.theguardian.com/games/2020/nov/03/racism-fantasy-fiction-role-playing-games
Race, Racism, and the Middle Ages: Tearing
Down the “Whites Only” Medieval World:
https://www.publicmedievalist.com/race-racism-middle-ages-tearing-whites-medieval-world/
Edward Said on Orientalism:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fVC8EYd_Z_g&ab_channel=PalestineDiary
Not Your Exotic Fantasy - Tropes vs. Women in
Video Games:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2hYdBxxTTM&ab_channel=FeministFrequency
Race and Racism in the European Middle Ages:
https://www.getty.edu/art/exhibitions/outcasts/downloads/heng_race_racism.pdf
Why are fantasy games so hung up on Medieval
Europe? | Black Girl Gamers:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMjTCHCbkQ4&ab_channel=BlackGirlGamers
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