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The multicultural illustrations of characters from different ethnic backgrounds within the Rules Cyclopedia were clearly more diverse than those in early core sets which only featured white men in their illustrations, yet the rules were still just small iterations on the systems which had already been published.
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In other words, by depicting Black humans in the illustrations of the Rules Cyclopedia, the manual itself offered an assimilationist perspective that promised a multicultural inclusivity within a belief system that evinced the most toxic fiction of white supremacy-that some races are fundamentally inferior to an invisible white standard of humanity. The illustrations in the Rules Cyclopedia even revealed this hero could be Black as long as they saw themselves as human in a system that classified others within a different species entirely (Figure 1).
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So while the teacher explained America’s immigration policy through the metaphor of the melting pot, I absorbed a twisted hidden curriculum from the Cyclopedia that encouraged me to internalize the opportunities granted to an invisible, idealized, and imaginary white hero. I assumed that we unified in our shared human-ness even though I know now that my friends saw my Blackness far more clearly. Here, I rarely saw Blackness reflected back at me through the experiences of my peers. To this point, I was surrounded by white friends and students in a middle class New Jersey suburb, within which whiteness was an assumed an invisible norm. The invisibility of whiteness works by positing a formula wherein to have race is to be non-white, and to be white is to control the conversation around who is visible and who is not. Thus, the Rules Cyclopedia simply seemed like an encyclopedia, an authoritative text which confirmed that which I already knew-that even in the deepest realms of fantasy humans were central, powerful, and even invisible, marked more by their occupation (fighter, thief, cleric, wizard) than their race.
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Of course, this all made sense to me at the time: I had read The Hobbit. My ten year old mind believed and internalized what my adult self shudders to read today, “Demihumans are more limited in their options than humans are, so the entire race can be represented by a single character class.”(7) Here it was, in hidden in plain sight, the language and logic of white supremacy-that some “races” are less than human, they can be reduced to a singular and monolithic “species,” and that these races simply have less career “options.” The designers even built in a glass ceiling and determined that no dwarf could rise above level twelve, no elf above tenth, and no halfling above eight. In rapt curiosity, as I sat reading about the different “classes” characters in this vivid new world, I learned that even in this fantasy world whiteness was as powerful as it was invisible.