I’m Greek. And I grew up in Montreal and Athens.
Growing up, I knew one black kid. And he was my first friend. And slavery was always bad.
And I was a huge Dungeons and Dragons fan.
As a Greek and kid who did well in science, I knew that if you stayed in the sun, you were this color
And if you stayed out of the sun, you were this color.
And so it was very confusing why the elves that were good and lived in the sun were this color:
And the evil elves that lived underground were this color:
For a Greek kid, that had no understanding of the evil racial history of the United States, this was very confusing.
If you lived in the sun, you were tanned. People who were white and did not tan were this color:
As I understood the world, people who lived in sunny climates tanned and were olive skinned, or darker. People who lived in climates in climates that were not sunny were very white and turned bright red.
And I stopped playing Dungeons and Dragons after I left Brown University. And I forgot about the Drow and their peculiar skin color.
And I didn’t give it a moment’s notice until I started playing with my six-year-old son. And he asked what a Drow is? And I said, well there are two kinds of elves. The good elves that are white and the evil elves that live underground and...
And I stopped talking. What was a mystery as a child, was sadly so clear as an adult. Of course, the good guys were white, and the bad guys were black.
And the blatant racism in the description of the Drow and Elves was evident.
And so I told Nick, a different story. The Drow because they live underground, are albino white and the elves that live above ground are olive-skinned and tanned.
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