Disclaimer: I'm white. Making this in the first place isn't very anti-racist of me.
I first played Dungeons & Dragons when I was 8 years old. My dad had some 3.5e books, just around, and I decided to read them, got interested, and then my family played D&D together. My dad had been playing D&D since before AD&D. My brother and I played elves with names that sounded annoyingly like our names (at the time), and my mother played a half-elf. Our first encounter was with hobgoblins. They attacked us (I believe), we fought them, they surrendered, and we interrogated them. It was clear that the point of these hobgoblins was to teach us that, in this game, they're people too.
So, Dungeons & Dragons has biologically distinct races. This is already racist: race isn't biologically real. Read "On Being 'White' ... and Other Lies" by James Baldwin for a wonderful writing on the subject. On top of this, D&D (at least, 5th edition) claims that biological race affects your personality. Let's take a passage from the Player's Handbook: "Each race's description in this chapter includes information to help you roleplay a character of that race, including personality, physical appearance, features of society, and racial alignment tendencies" (17).
So, that's bad. But, if you're going to play fantasy roleplaying games, you also kind of have to deal with D&D. Again, I've played it since I was 8. If you're going to play a high fantasy game, how?
Well, if the concept of a race is racist, maybe the world is just racist.
I'll keep this part short. I think that if you want to play a game that comments on existing structures of oppression, that might be good and useful work if you have a party of cishet white men. My dad loves this method of approaching the racism of the high fantasy genre (and particularly D&D).
While portraying and roleplaying oppression is not bad, it is exhausting. I've seen complaints of Baldur's Gate 3 from BIPOC about how you get slurred at for being a tiefling character and how it serves to drain them (while still lauding it as a great game, mind you.) Similar with novels and movies and all sorts of other media. My dad's variations of racism and homophobia and misogyny in his world, divorced from the quality of these depictions, were exhausting, and I don't go to a game to be tired.
This approach, I feel, can be useful as educational, but at the cost of shutting out those actually oppressed by the oppressions you depict. This to say: it actually reproduces those oppressions by excluding and demanding more of those oppressed by it.
What is a "race?"
I have been watching the original Star Trek with my girlfriend lately. Not great about race, clearly, but it's had me thinking about how science fiction deals with its biologically distinct peoples. Let's go through one of these methods that I at least find interesting.
"Yeah. So what?"
Yes, these peoples are biologically distinct. In some variations, it even affects personalities. But, there are rarely any systems of oppression of these biologically distinct peoples. I'm mainly thinking of Star Trek, especially over the whole franchise (as someone only passingly knowledgeable: I barely remember watching DS9 and Voyager). The Federation seems to be equal (even if human-majority), and dealing with Klingons or Romulans or whatever other biologically distinct peoples is reasonably informed by past experiences with those peoples. There aren't often a specifically designated "alien mooks" other than whoever they're fighting a war against, in which case they might as well be humans.
So, now, questions arise. Is this a good method? With what limitations? Is this portable to high fantasy, especially D&D's high fantasy?
I think that this is genuinely a great way to sidestep portraying racism in more utopian science fiction. "Oh, a biologically distinct people? Yeah, I know what an alien is. How's it going, bud?" Great. It doesn't really work if there's a people that is oppressed (Hi, Solo, how's it going? Fuck you.), so... avoid doing that in your sci-fi. Also, if your world is not utopian, it's often less believable. Saying "all of the aliens are just as oppressed under the weight of dystopian empire" can probably work, but it feels like I don't immediately buy that.
I don't think this method works as-is in high fantasy, at least not well. Part of it is just the history of high fantasy: if you have orcs just exist with everyone else, those participating in the game will go "that's different." Aliens coexisting with humans has existed for a long time in sci-fi. If you abolish race in your high fantasy, it is now deviant from the expectations of high fantasy. Another part is that biology isn't a part of high fantasy's storytelling repertoire. You are telling a sci-fi story if you start talking about elves' genes.
Everything is too fantastical to have time to be racist
I want to look back at Tolkein. How are elves distinct from hobbits distinct from humans distinct from orcs?
2 answers pop into my head. Appearance is the most apparent. Hobbits short and British, elves tall and white as fuck, humans are just people, orcs are racist caricatures. Awful, I hate it, but whatever. The one I like, though, is what I like to call "crazy ass magic shit." Hobbits have strong souls/soles, so they don't need shoes; goblins have weak souls/soles, so they wear iron boots. Elves are pretty much demigods. Orcs are elves warped by Morgoth's evil. It's used to be awful, but it's kind of beautiful divorced from that. A stupid pun is a part of racial distinction here.
What if, instead of being awful, you used that same methodology to be cool as fuck. Orcs might have this culture subjugated by hateful gods forced into neverending war (God Hates Orcs on Goblin Punch is a great read) - maybe still not wonderful because it gives the world a reason to be fantasy racist towards them - or maybe orcs instead have a sedentary, isolationist culture that constructs fortresses of grand scale in an attempt to climb to the stars. Maybe halfling culture believes they have strong souls, and so they are predominantly magicians who court dark forces because who else will. Maybe a human culture likes to trade faces, I dunno. You can figure out whatever wonderful, terrible, awful ways to just say "yes. these peoples are distinct enough to warrant distinction. No need to have any racism though."
This requires a lot of care, though. If you say "orcs are often sedentary and isolationist," this is doing the racist thing that D&D's sourcebooks already do of assigning personality to "race." If you say "orcs have a sedentary, isolationist culture," that is still reductive but much better. Maybe the best way to say it would be something like "orcish hegemony encourages..." but that might be too theory-poisoned for most people trying to have fun playing pretend. I'd also warn against any sort of suggestion of how these cultures affect a generic individual within them. I'm personally okay with examples: think of an interview that demonstrates the cultural trend and not the inverse. I'd also try to find what you want to define each people as recognizably that trope, because otherwise it stops being that trope altogether. Orcish hegemony might need to still value strength and combat or might need to fit some other criteria because otherwise they lose their identity as orcs.
I like this because it uses high fantasy's methods to fight against high fantasy's messaging. Making these "races" explicitly distinct as groups and not individuals does a lot of work to deconstruct fantasy's idea of race.
Also, replace the word race with something like the word "people." Race is a fake ass social construct, a people is a real ass social construct.
Tieflings (and a few friends)
But then, when we think about D&D, we get to tieflings.
Tieflings are defined by not being a people, by being peopleless. They're individual demonspawn that are the results of trauma. To change that robs them of their identity. But, they're demonspawn. How is it possible that they aren't loathed?
I think the best thing I can come up with is for society as a whole to ignore tieflingness. Tieflings are about personal trauma, so treat it like it's invisible. This is not great, but the alternatives I can identify are to rob them of their peoplelessness or to have racism against them.
Aasimar avoid this by being angelspawn and so they're just... that. They get to be exceptional. That's their thing. You don't need to think about it really.
Changelings avoid this by virtue that they already find identity by being ignored or secret, so just continue to ignore them in their true form.
I think these "races" are just done dirty by D&D calling them a race and great examples of how race in D&D is stupid.
Mechanical adjustments
Boring part!
Conclusion
Play a different ttrpg, but if you must play D&D, do better than D&D about the racism of high fantasy. If you already have your group together and its a bunch of apolitical cishet white men, go ahead and make it as much about oppression sucking as you want. If you want to get a group together that already deals with being oppressed on the daily, I think Star Trek + magic works well enough.
Addendum
Turns out some other ttrpg obsessed trans woman did something even better
