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Among the changes that they virtue signaled in 4eR was eliminating Eskimo from p. B137 under Gullibility.
“Of course the Eskimos are descended from Spanish conquistadors; everyone knows that!”
Has been changed to:
“Of course the Yupik are descended from Spanish conquistadors – everyone knows that!”
On the infamous p. B2 we have:
And then there were the words we were ashamed of – exclusionary words, prejudiced words, even outright offensive words. We were guilty of perpetuating ethnic stereotypes, and using terms like “crazy,” “cripple,” and “slave” in lazy, hurtful ways. In cases where the correction was simple – a person is “Black,” not “black,” and the culture is “Inuit” or “Yupik,” not “Eskimo” – we made it and moved on.
Speaking as a cane wielding cripple, I was not offended and I am increasingly offended by the able bodied being offended for me instead of asking me if the use of crippled offended me.
If you're going to capitalize "Black" you'd damn sure better capitalize "White." Just sayin'.
But the Eskimo thing stood out.
It's not a thing in the USA. The Inuit and Yupik thing is an article of Canadian political drama concerning "what do we call the first nations people so we feel better about conquering them?"
Oh, and you clearly did not make the change and move on. If that were true I'd have only noticed that Eskimo had been replaced with Yupik if I compared the books page by page or remembered the example and tried to show it to someone else with the new book.
The two main people doing this revision are Canadian and I think their political zeitgeist is creeping in while SJ Games is being taken over by all the people they hired from Possum Creek Games.
It makes me sad to see the change because SJGames was the different company from the others way back when.
It'll be interesting to see what they do with their legacy and classic stuff.
The customer for Old West is looking to recreate movies and TV shows, not try to figure out who the fuck the Ndee are.
Never mind you can make a Gestapo agent as a character from their WW2 line.
Slavery is up front in both Greece and Rome.
Things that really happened are far harder to sanitize than a wholly fictional universe like Dark Sun.
It makes me wonder if we're going to have to call corn maize because corn is the name applied to it by Europeans.
I wondered about the historical supplements. As for "Eskimo," a FB friend of mine, Karla Nemitz, is Alaskan herself and one of her best friends (online and in meatspace) is Yupik, but goes by "Eskimo Libertarian" online. Kind of like how most "Native Americans" prefer "Indian," if you aren't going to, or don't know for sure, their actual tribal name.
ReplyDeleteA lot of peoples' names for themselves are not what others call them. Germans are "Deutsche" in German, but "Allemands" in French and "Tedesci" in Italian. The Albanians call themselves "Shqip" but nobody else calls them that. And all is coolness. I think this sort of thing is a sort of arms-race about "I am more liberal than thou."
For a while I've been looking at who's actually offended. It's increasingly rare for the person being labeled to be upset about it.
DeleteThe funny thing is, most folks don't really care and will readily change from calling someone an Eskimo to a Yupik if you're half polite and explain it gently.
But notice how harshly SJG puts it?
In Northern Quebec the native folks go by Inuit. You think a Canadian would know that.
ReplyDeleteThat's my point. He's Canadian, so he does know that. Lower 48 Americans, you know the vast majority of the customer base, not only don't know but won't care.
DeleteIf you really wanna break some liberal's brain, ask them why there's a distinction between Indians and Eskimos in the first place.