Orcs are Racist Because...You Know...

Orcs are racist. Or rather, it's part of a persistent phenomenon of someone calling something out as offensive and potentially revealing their own biases in the process.

This Twitter controversy started out (I won't link to direct examples) with a description of orcs pulled from DnD 5e:

Most orcs have been indoctrinated into a life of destruction and slaughter. But unlike creatures who by their very Nature are evil, such as gnolls, it’s possible that an orc, if raised outside its culture, could develop a limited capacity for empathy, love, and compassion.

No matter how domesticated an orc might seem, its blood lust flows just beneath the surface. With its instinctive love of battle and its desire to prove its Strength, an orc trying to live within the confines of civilization is faced with a difficult task.

What made it unusual, is that it was posted with a content warning of "blatant racism". Of course this begs the question regarding why that description is a form of blatant racism. The best that I or anyone else can surmise is the description is supposedly a thinly veiled allegory of how "savages" (presumably natives or otherwise) can become properly civilized (presumably by adopting whatever corollary to "western values" there is). Some people guessed that it's racist because it's a thinly veiled description of black people.

A decade ago, two Connecticut police officers shot and killed a pet chimpanzee) that severely mauled and disfigured the owner's friend (the 911 call is very hard to listen to). The New York Post put up a cartoon of two cops shooting a monkey under the caption "They'll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill". This was exactly around the same time when the Tea Party movement got going in direct response to the stimulus bill. I remember at the time seeing the cartoon, and interpreting it as "The stimulus bill is so ill-conceived that a monkey must have written it." Fairly basic joke.

But no, because Obama was president. The cartoon caused a big national controversy and the accusation was the cartoonist was implying that Obama is a chimpanzee because he's black. (Someone noted that Bush has been routinely depicted as a chimpanzee, so much so that it spawned its own blog.)

I can't divine what the cartoonist was thinking when he drew the chimpanzee cartoon. I also don't know what all the contributors to the generally accepted orc mythology where thinking when added to the lore. I just find it interesting that there is a reflex or assuming those depictions must be racist. I think it's too simple-minded to say "anti-racists are the real racists!".

I think it's more complicated than that. But I want to figure out a way to describe the phenomenon where someone who apparently has no implicit bias against a race, nevertheless makes a negative implication connection in their head from an otherwise ambiguous situation. If you see orcs described as savage brutes and you think "this is racist against black people", is it because you potentially believe black people are savage brutes, or is it because you are hypervigilant about negative portrayals of black people? Not sure there's a clear answer, and maybe it's a little bit of both.