danielhkwan
patreon
Oriental Adventures & Wizards of the Coast: Suggested Solutions
🕑 Added 2020-07-16 12:32:17 +0000 UTCIf you follow me on Twitter, you probably know that I've been very vocal against Wizards of the Coast continuing to profit off of racist legacy content like Oriental Adventures. It's left me feeling very apprehensive to do anything "D&D" and with respect to this Patreon, I'm unsure if I want to continue posting "Kwan Family Plays" as it directly references a Wizards of the Coast product.
Recently, they made the first steps to rectifying their ongoing troubles with diversity and inclusion. My Asians Read co-host Steve and I were recently interviewed by the Huffington Post about the issue and were asked what solutions we'd like to see. The article they wrote about us and Wizard's statements, was great, but did not outline a lot of what we discussed in detail.
So here it is for you:
Oriental Adventures (and similar books) on these online marketplaces represent a series of three intersecting problems:
- The content is harmful and racist
- Wizards continues to profit off of racism
- The current disclaimer acknowledges the first point in the most vague sense. It states that the product WAS wrong, but not the continued wrongful practice of selling it and keeping it canonically sound.
Bare minimum recommendations:
- The book needs to be demonetized. Wizards can’t continue to make money off of racist depictions of Asians. If the book, for some reason, cannot be removed, it should be heavily annotate the book with clarifications and academic resources. There are also issues with this that I outline below.
- A more prominent disclaimer on both the webpage and PDF itself. Consult with the East Asian TTRPG community on this.
- Annotate or even remove mentioned of Kara-tur (and the associated nations) from the digital versions of the 5e PHB, Sword Coast Guide (I think it’s in there), and DMG (the honour section).
- Remove the book entirely from commercial channels and move them to a demonetized archive. Keeping the book free to download shows people that the product has some sort of “value”. It also makes it even MORE accessible to people seeking official “Asian content”. BUT media erasure is also dangerous and dishonest. You can't do better unless you know what you need to do better than. If the book is removed entirely from commercial channels, Wizards should create an archived page on THEIR website with a gallery of problematic products, a public disclaimer & apology, and annotations written by paid Asian creators. This archived version of the book should feature the annotations of my first point. Moving the product to an official, corporate-sanctioned page, demonetizing it, and linking the product's information page to a public statement that both contextualizes and problematizes the product in the words of the cultural consultants, not the corporate heads, is something that has staying power. Less problematic works can stay up with a revised disclaimer.
- Acknowledge that this is damaging to the community. The community is a big issue. Through their inaction, Wizards has enabled a lot of the harmful behaviour towards the Asian community in this space. This needs to be addressed. A proper statement needs to be made about this issue that focuses on education and transparency on how OA does not fairly portray East Asian cultures and contributes to the systemic racism that this community faces.
Solutions I’m SKEPTICAL of:
- Donations to charities. This isn’t a great solution, as Wizards still benefits from the associated tax benefits and can stop donating whenever they’d like. There isn’t much transparency and accountability there. Donating the existing revenue is a sign of good faith, but should be done alongside the other solutions.
---------- Thanks for joining me on this journey!----------
Feel free to get in touch with me on the All My Friends Discord server I created. If you aren't able to access the Patron-only chat there, let me know and I'll fix it!
Champion-tier Patrons get access to all of the Kwan Family Plays content!
Feel free to get in touch with me on the All My Friends Discord server I created. If you aren't able to access the Patron-only chat there, let me know and I'll fix it!
Comments
Daniel Kwan
Oh my, that's bad! Thanks for even including some of this in the article! It means so much!
Jeremy Blum
Spot-on, Daniel! I wanted to include more of this in the article but space restrictions and the need to provide a broad overview of the issue for the uninitiated made it difficult. WotC still has a long way to go with this and yeah, Kara-tur's mentioned in the Sword Coast Guide twice. You can choose the character background "Far Traveler" and have one of the places you come from be Kara-Tur. If you do, the text says that everyone in Faerun is likely refer to you as Shou (AKA Chinese) because they think all Kara-Tur people are Shou. errrr...
