Originally Posted by monte cook
It's only in later artwork that Regdar seems to be pretty clearly the white male fighter we tried to avoid. And to the credit of a number of people--artists, art directors, designers and editors alike--our disdain for Regdar made its way into a lot of art. If you look closely, Regdar is getting thrashed on most of the early pieces he shows up in.
(bolding mine)
Wow. Speechless. Umm, thrash that white male some more!
Indeed. Simply stunning. Imagine if a wizards employee revealed that art was deliberatly chosen to show a character of some other race or gender being beaten over and over simply to make a statement about their race or gender.
A couple other thoughts:
1.While D&D is a game that covers a lot of ground thematically, at least pre-4e, the default setting has always been loosely modeled on medieval Europe. Warriors in medieval Europe were almost exclusively white men. Perhaps some artists in earlier editions were simply drawing upon the historical inspirations for the game, rather than making a statement about race, as current artists are.
2. One could make a pretty good argument that the efforts to show the white guy getting the snot beaten out of him revealed in the quote above would violate the new licensing agreement provisions about "not depicting any real world group as inferior to any other real world group" or whatever.
Make every character shown in the book white, black, brown, orange or purple. I don't care. What I do care about is the assumption that white guys are racists (and others are not) and using game books to push some real world political agenda- talk about metagaming!