Ethnicity in the Morrow Project

[RandyT0001]

How do you as a PD handle race and ethnicity in the Morrow Project?

In the United States, the issues of race and ethnicity are ingrained in the psyche and culture of America. Typically, at present, a discussion of these issues are avoided until an event occurs that exposes the divisions of race and ethnicity followed by speeches that assign blame, promise fixes, etc. as people talk past each other. This is the norm. This perception of race relations are what the characters in a MP game will have with them when they wake up. The players have to compensate for this reality while playing MP.

As a PD, you have two choices on how the people in the future view and act to other people based on their race and ethnicity. The first is that the needs of survival over the past 150 years have shown that race/ethnicity is irrelevant and every MP society, culture, survival group, etc. is completely blind to race/ethnicity. The second is that people still use race/ethnicity to differentiate people into groups. Some groups will have a bias while some groups will not. Some people will have a bias and some will not. The spectrum of bias will vary widely depending upon the group or person. The first choice represents an idealistic outlook. The second choice is, honestly, more realistic.

Racial/ethnic bias will survive because the people survive. Those who seek power and control that have a racial/ethnic bias will use that bias to vilify others in order to advance their agenda. This has been true in the past, it occurs in the present and it will continue to occur in the future of the Morrow Project setting. A Project Director should not avoid the issue out of fear of offending a group here in the present but should understand it in order to incorporate it into the setting. It can add conflict to a storyline that the player-characters have to rectify.

On the character sheets that I created for MP, there is a box for ethnicity. There are certain physical facial and body characteristics that are common among people from general regions of the world. From what I have seen it is common for people in the United States to categorize others into one of these groups in the media and culturally. I use the six categories listed below for my games. If a person has mixed ethnic parentage then the ethnicity that dominates their facial characteristics is listed first. So a child that has one parent of Asian ancestry and one parent of European ancestry would be coded as As/Eu or Eu/As depending upon which ancestry dominates the child’s facial characteristics. Other PDs might use more or less or different separations and corresponding codes for race and/or ethnicity for their game.

European (Eu) - Northern Europe – Nordic countries, the British Isles, central and northern France, Central European countries north of Italy and the Balkans, Eastern Europe to the Ural Mountains

Mediterranean (Me) - Mediterranean Sea – Iberian Peninsula, southern France, Italy, the Balkans, the Levant region, the Arabian Peninsula, North Africa

African (Af) – Sub-Sahara Africa

Indian (In) - Indian subcontinent

Asian (As) - East Asia, Southeast Asia, Pacific Islanders

American (Am) - Indigenous people of North and South America