RazorbackPirate
Well-Known Member
Do you have a comment about the actual point I made which was, people are roaming, mixing, and mingling more than ever before and the human race, the only race, is better off for it?
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DeletedUser33179
Let's see if I can get my final thoughts in before the locking of the thread.
Ah yes, "humankind". By definition, homo sapiens, the only human species in existance for the past several hundreds of thousands of years. What factual evidence do you have that there were only eight of them - identically colored, no less - in the beginning? No assumptions, just the incontrovertible facts backing up your statement.
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You haven't talked with any geneticists, have you. You do a 5minute google search with regards to less than half of one percent of all human dieases. From that, you assume all human diseases must indeed have the same concept of origin - alike genomes shared by only a single subset of local ethnic geopolitical origins. Pancreatic cancer, Alzheimers diease, impotence, etc... all the same thing. As that must of course be true, you then assume simple mixing of humans solves most/all medical problems. Alrighty, then.
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But this all boils down to the fact that you keep insisting that you can't be behaving in a racist manner, as many are claiming you to be. You support your argument that you yourself aren't making this about race because you insist there exists two universal truths....
1- white-washing itself has never ever happened anywhere under any circumstance. It's all an evil plot perpetrated by evil "revisionists" over the past 50 years. Furthermore, any mere hint of suggesting a drawing of a person may be portrayed lighter than they may have been in real life actually means that the person must really view it as "evil white" & "demon white". Those and other crude & derogatory sentiments thrown in as often as you could manage it, too.
Golly, your flair for grandiose, devil-hating sermonizing would've been a fantastic assest during the Medieval witch trials.
2- Race itself doesn't exist.
Yep, that's right. We all started as only 8 people with identical skin color living together. We migrated & started looking different colors. And yet we're mixing & mingling all over the world, and at a progressively quickening pace. The ultimate result is we will all somehow have the same exact skin color once again. And since you know we all started as the same color & must all finish as the same color, then there is no color, no race. Never has been, never will be. Doesn't matter if folks believe your facts or not, as those are the facts nevertheless. As there is no race. nothing you say here can possibly be racist in any way.
Although, you repeatedly proclaim that anyone suggesting anything contrary to your views must be a racist. You say it over & over... ""racial bias"... "textbook racist"... "racial slurs... "making it all about race." There Is No Race, except when it suits you to use those terms againgst others. How very convenient of you, playing it both ways.
Ah yes, "humankind". By definition, homo sapiens, the only human species in existance for the past several hundreds of thousands of years. What factual evidence do you have that there were only eight of them - identically colored, no less - in the beginning? No assumptions, just the incontrovertible facts backing up your statement.
-----
You haven't talked with any geneticists, have you. You do a 5minute google search with regards to less than half of one percent of all human dieases. From that, you assume all human diseases must indeed have the same concept of origin - alike genomes shared by only a single subset of local ethnic geopolitical origins. Pancreatic cancer, Alzheimers diease, impotence, etc... all the same thing. As that must of course be true, you then assume simple mixing of humans solves most/all medical problems. Alrighty, then.
------
But this all boils down to the fact that you keep insisting that you can't be behaving in a racist manner, as many are claiming you to be. You support your argument that you yourself aren't making this about race because you insist there exists two universal truths....
1- white-washing itself has never ever happened anywhere under any circumstance. It's all an evil plot perpetrated by evil "revisionists" over the past 50 years. Furthermore, any mere hint of suggesting a drawing of a person may be portrayed lighter than they may have been in real life actually means that the person must really view it as "evil white" & "demon white". Those and other crude & derogatory sentiments thrown in as often as you could manage it, too.
Golly, your flair for grandiose, devil-hating sermonizing would've been a fantastic assest during the Medieval witch trials.
2- Race itself doesn't exist.
Yep, that's right. We all started as only 8 people with identical skin color living together. We migrated & started looking different colors. And yet we're mixing & mingling all over the world, and at a progressively quickening pace. The ultimate result is we will all somehow have the same exact skin color once again. And since you know we all started as the same color & must all finish as the same color, then there is no color, no race. Never has been, never will be. Doesn't matter if folks believe your facts or not, as those are the facts nevertheless. As there is no race. nothing you say here can possibly be racist in any way.
Although, you repeatedly proclaim that anyone suggesting anything contrary to your views must be a racist. You say it over & over... ""racial bias"... "textbook racist"... "racial slurs... "making it all about race." There Is No Race, except when it suits you to use those terms againgst others. How very convenient of you, playing it both ways.
Agent327
Well-Known Member
DeletedUser29623
Whether the avatars resemble specific historical people accurately or not is not relevant. All the OP is asking for is Indian female avatars with skin color that reflects herself and the majority of Indian women. There are none, except possibly the maharani, and even she is pretty fair.
Most Indian women have brown skin, yet the Indian female avatars are depicted as, effectively, white. That’s all that white washing is. Hitting Wikipedia to somehow prove with a tombstone of text that this is ok because maybe the avatars are based on people who might have had light skin tone is just hand waving. She’s complaining that *Indian women as a whole* are depicted as fair skinned in the game and she is absolutely correct.
This is hurtful because color prejudice exists all over the globe, including in India itself. The OP has very valid reasons to suspect that color prejudice, conscious or not, is behind this omission/misrepresentation. It would be fantastic if eventually we all became the same color and this excuse to treat people badly went away, but that’s not the world we live in and therefore is also irrelevant. The issue is how people with darker skin are treated, including being treated as if they don’t even exist.
I get that some people in this thread have a kneejerk defensive reaction to certain words that they feel have been misused, but the truth is that white washing is a real thing that does actually occur, regardless of whether some people get overzealous in throwing the term around. If you want to argue that everyone should take more care in accusing people of it, you’d be a lot more credible if you acknowledged that it does in fact happen. The argument that it can’t be true simply because you hate everyone who uses the term is not great evidence that your reaction itself was unprejudiced.
Most Indian women have brown skin, yet the Indian female avatars are depicted as, effectively, white. That’s all that white washing is. Hitting Wikipedia to somehow prove with a tombstone of text that this is ok because maybe the avatars are based on people who might have had light skin tone is just hand waving. She’s complaining that *Indian women as a whole* are depicted as fair skinned in the game and she is absolutely correct.
This is hurtful because color prejudice exists all over the globe, including in India itself. The OP has very valid reasons to suspect that color prejudice, conscious or not, is behind this omission/misrepresentation. It would be fantastic if eventually we all became the same color and this excuse to treat people badly went away, but that’s not the world we live in and therefore is also irrelevant. The issue is how people with darker skin are treated, including being treated as if they don’t even exist.
I get that some people in this thread have a kneejerk defensive reaction to certain words that they feel have been misused, but the truth is that white washing is a real thing that does actually occur, regardless of whether some people get overzealous in throwing the term around. If you want to argue that everyone should take more care in accusing people of it, you’d be a lot more credible if you acknowledged that it does in fact happen. The argument that it can’t be true simply because you hate everyone who uses the term is not great evidence that your reaction itself was unprejudiced.
Last edited by a moderator:
Jase249
Well-Known Member
Good grief. I opened up this thread and I cannot roll my eyes any harder. I think my corneas are about to tear. Everybody screaming at each other over digital portraits of non-existent people in the pretend-land of a web browser game. Regarding the latest:
No, that would not be "fantastic". We don't all have to be clones. What we have to do is stop treating people differently based on the amount of melanin in their skin. I am perpetually baffled by racial prejudice. Demographics have nothing to do with what kind person someone is.
I'm not even going to try listing all the various quotes that should be responded to here. Just assume I quoted the entirety of pages 1-5 here. If you people want to debate racial genetics and hurl insults at each other, can this thread at least be moved into the "Debate Hall" forum? This has nothing to do with FoE anymore. There's a large swath of players (myself included) who play the game and yes, visit the Forum, specifically to get away from all the identity politics, personal insults, and general sense of hate that have completely saturated contemporary culture.
Seriously, there are five pages in this thread of people arguing vociferously over cartoon game portraits. Grow up.
Maybe we should just have no avatars at all, since no matter what they do they will not be able to have a perfect representation of everyone (unless we start uploading photographs). Cartoons will always be a little bit off from real life. That's why they're called cartoons.
No, that would not be "fantastic". We don't all have to be clones. What we have to do is stop treating people differently based on the amount of melanin in their skin. I am perpetually baffled by racial prejudice. Demographics have nothing to do with what kind person someone is.
I'm not even going to try listing all the various quotes that should be responded to here. Just assume I quoted the entirety of pages 1-5 here. If you people want to debate racial genetics and hurl insults at each other, can this thread at least be moved into the "Debate Hall" forum? This has nothing to do with FoE anymore. There's a large swath of players (myself included) who play the game and yes, visit the Forum, specifically to get away from all the identity politics, personal insults, and general sense of hate that have completely saturated contemporary culture.
Seriously, there are five pages in this thread of people arguing vociferously over cartoon game portraits. Grow up.
OK, I have to defend whichever poor moderator got this ticket here. I've worked in customer service in one aspect or another since I was 14 and I stick up for people who do that job because of all the garbage they have to put up with. Especially in this case because the people who do it are volunteers. It's not a matter "they didn't want to deal with it." What the OP did was essentially analogous to a spectator at an NFL game screaming at the referee because they find the uniforms offensive. Even if the offense is warranted (which I'm not stipulating in this case), what's the referee supposed to do? He/she is there to enforce game rules, not design the aesthetics.
Maybe we should just have no avatars at all, since no matter what they do they will not be able to have a perfect representation of everyone (unless we start uploading photographs). Cartoons will always be a little bit off from real life. That's why they're called cartoons.
DeletedUser14354
As I see it, there are two issues contained in the OP's first post:
1. There is an apparent lack of diversity in the avatars.
2. That apparent lack of diversity results from some degree of bias, conscious or subconscious, on the part of the developer.
The first is an opinion, and one that many here agree with. If the OP stopped there, I don't think anyone here would have had an issue.
However, the OP didn't stop there. The OP instead decided to attribute a specific motivation to that apparent lack of diversity. Is it possible it the result of subconscious bias? Sure. However, that is not the only possible explanation. What if it turns out the developer is of Indian descent? What if it turns out there is some technical reason for the use of certain color schemes? The point is that we don't know.
If your first instinct is to attribute improper motives to others, rather than seek a more innocent explanation, then you aren't looking for a dialogue. You are looking for an argument.
Please note that this is not an endorsement of the responses she received. The same point could (and should) be made without the vitriol.
DeletedUser
Time to close this thread as it has strayed far from the OP's proposal.
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