3drinks wrote: ↑4 years ago
I'm certainly not saying you support that group by playing this card, of course not that's ludicrous.
I find it a bit offensive that you felt the need to say this.
I don't really think you can minimize such objections to the card as microaggression (there's a new word I never seen before) or overstated. Hundreds of thousands of lives were lost to these supremacists, crosses burned, people burned, to what can only be described as
domestic terrorism...what if you lived in the Southern United States and lived in the fear of a rally outside your window on a nightly basis? What if you had to endure family being merciless beaten to the brink by these infamous white hoods? Would that not drive you to madness or severe emotional distress? Who are we to say what struggles one has or hasn't endured in life, and what imagery may or may not
stifle their livlihood by having to see it in a game that's supposed to bring joy and happiness?
As best as I can tell, the klan hasn't been going around assaulting people in hoods for a pretty long time. I'm sure there are people alive who have lived through such things, and of course I wouldn't wish distress on those people. But I really doubt any of those people were sitting across from me at a commander table circa 2016. Especially given that basically all of my opponents were white kids in their 20s.
It's not cool to go throwing around images of racism, but this is ridiculous. I'm not sitting down to play a lot of games with civil rights leaders. While the comparison is a bit flippant, I'm sure there are people for whom the card
murder brings up troubling feelings, but it would be a bit ridiculous to suggest we all stop playing the card murder. At the same time, though, it would be cruel to say "pssh, murder didn't get banned for offensiveness, so if you have a problem with it then it's your fault". People are complex things, and it's hard to know what might bring up past trauma. Trying to excise everything that might be troubling is a fool's errand. The better solution, imo, is to be a compassionate person, and to use empathy to solve these problems, rather than trying to solve it by getting rid of some petty objects.
Two hundred fifty dollars, huh? Is that person's mental health worth that to you? People recover from trauma at different rates, some never completely recovering as a whole. If all I was out was a couple hundred bucks, sure I'm upset, but not near as upset as people that have had to see these daily reminders of a cruel world in the one thing that should be a reprieve from such hideous things.
I dislike this absolutism. By this logic, every potentially troubling thing, no matter how small or unlikely, is worth the entire value of someone's mental health (which is presumably of unlimited value). Obviously if someone had significant trauma from seeing the card, that could be "worth more than $250" - and possibly that could actually happen if a certain person saw it at the wrong time. But that's true of lots of things. Forget murder, if someone's spouse was killed two days ago,
murder of crows might legitimately traumatize them. Obviously the line should be drawn somewhere, and drawing the line to exclude IP is fair enough I guess. But that's not because some large percentage of magic players are suffering psychotic breaks just from glancing at the mere image, it's because a reasonable percentage of people find the image troubling, and maybe some tiny tiny percentage are significantly troubled by it. That's good enough reason to ban it, but acting like all POC are so fragile that they can't even see a depiction of something offensive - which I still think is in the context of "these dudes are bad and racist" when looking at the whole card and what it does - is pretty ridiculous.
cryogen wrote: ↑4 years ago
He is a literal neo-Nazi that illustrated a card with Klansmen on it. The art is racist.
1) I am aware of who the artist is.
2) Depicting a racist thing doesn't make the art itself racist.
3) The artist being racist doesn't make the art itself racist.
Not to say that those things make it not racist. But I never got a "look how cool these guys are" vibe from the card personally. I got a "these guys are racist bad guys, but bad guys are a thing that exists in fantasy games" vibe. Even if it's a little "too real" in this case.
It's not that anyone thinks seeing the card at a table across from them is going to cause someone to have a mental breakdown. It's that the card is a blatant reminder of how %$#% real life is and some people are, when the whole goal of Magic is to escape for a while and have fun. Normally I wouldn't bring real life politics into the forum, but this is relevant. We have a sitting president who was endorsed by David Duke. We have neo-Nazis counterprotesting in the streets. We have the state of Tennessee fighting a proposal to remove a bust of the founder of the KKK from a government building. The KKK is quite active right now in the year 2020 and they've been emboldened by the last 4 years of Donald Trump. Racism is a very real thing that for minorities is ingrained in their everyday life. So yes, to a privileged white person (in the overall demographic of Magic players) there is the attitude of "what's the big deal" because they have no idea what it's like to be a minority. But for a minority, seeing that card is yet another reminder of the %$#% they have to deal with on a daily basis.
3drinks seems to think it will.
I agree that it could be a microaggression to someone, and that's not an unreasonable reason to ban it. But I also don't think it was a huge problem, the card is incredibly rarely played. I also think that makes wotc's decision to be both trivial, and it happens to be inconvenient for me personally which is why I find it annoying. I don't have any particular love for the card, as I said it wotc offered to buy up all the copies I'd be a lot less bothered by it. Especially since they'd actually be putting their money where the mouth is, instead of making a meaningless gesture.
I guess there are some edgelords at my LGS, maybe one of them will buy the damnable thing.
cryogen wrote: ↑4 years ago
I don't have the exact quote, but WotC got called out for making the card and MaRo basically confirmed that it was a 7-11 joke.
This isn't about banning every card that could be slightly construed as offensive to someone. This is about drawing attention to the fact that WotC has a really %$#% history of encouraging a toxic culture of white frat bros pounding PBRs and high-fiving each other for the joke they made playing Cards Against Humanity, and getting them to actually desire to make a culture change, rather than just throw out lip-service every time someone calls them out.
I agree, but I think banning a bunch of cards nobody plays from decades ago that they've already made their money on is 100% meaningless lip service. And since it's meaningless lip service that hurts my bottom line, I find it particularly galling.