Entropsy said
This is a topic that really bugs me when I rp.I think a lot of women play as femme-male characters as opposed to female characters--which I have no problem with--but there's usually not a lot of girls...I wonder why? I mean, I do it too, but I kind of wish more people played as women.For the same reasons I always want to see more POC characters in roleplays, but I'm conflicted about playing one myself. I mean, I could never understand what a person of color goes through, so would it be right for me to play as one? Isn't that a bit disrespectful? A lot of roleplays are really, whitewashed, though, and they need more racial diversity.
"I could never understand" is sort of an empty phrase, like saying that everybody is so fantastically different that empathy is impossible. I think ideas like this, whereas they may have good intentions, tend to feed into the defacto segregation of society and worsens the racial situation for everyone. At the end of the day, people are people.
You might never succeed in understanding, but it is not wrong to try, and writing characters (so long as they are honest and well thought out, not caricatures) that exist outside of your own experiences can better your understanding of the human condition.
That being said, you don't want to approach things from the position of pop-sociology. That will just create caricatures. People are people, each with their own struggles, their owns strengths, and their own personal weaknesses. If you write a character from the perspective that their only personality trait and condition is being oppressed... yeh, you're going to end up with a disrespectful representation. You'll create an image of helpless child-beings being abused by the big, strong white man. History is much more complex, and humanity much more nuanced, than being just the stories of the oppressors and the oppressed.
...also, since i've spent the last few years RPing a series of characters spanning across Africa in Precipice of War, I think I might have the least whitewashed RPing history of anyone here. That is coming from a poor white boy from the midwest.
