We need to talk about how deeply rooted it is, the issue of the lack of diversity in roleplay groups, and how most of the community has no intentions of making efforts about this. It was already something that seemed so transparent for me in the past, but it only grew far more clear the moment I decided to admin a roleplay that is solely meant for diverse faceclaims, and while promoting it and creating messages, it was clear how other roleplays with the same theme were showered by applications with, guess what? white faceclaims. I mean, honestly, I’m seeing roleplays that were created after ours, already getting so many white applications.
And I think it’s important for me to state this: this is, by no means, a post to drive attention to the roleplay I’m part of the admin team. This is me, as a woman of color, saying how it pains me to see that we’re only interesting when we’re part of an absurd rule that if you have a white faceclaim for your first character, your second or third character should be a role of color. I mean, it does help, but it seems like we’re just a good plan b. After all, there’s always the chance those roleplayers will never get a second role, or if they do, they’ll only develop and focus more on connections for their white faceclaim, because that second one was just forced into them to have a faceclaim of color.
We need to talk about, how some people assume that by playing a white passing faceclaim they are doing something to help roleplay groups have diverse roles, but forgets about dark-skinned and brown-skinned faceclaims. How some people hide under white diverse faceclaims and completely ignore dark-skinned trans and body diverse faceclaim choices, for an example.
If you are an admin of a roleplay and 70% of your masterlist is white, that should be worrying. If you’re an admin promoting diversity but none of your characters are dark-skinned or brown-skinned, you’re not really being a good example. If you take a look at all the characters you’re playing and 70% of them are white or white passing, it should make you feel ashamed. I know that we can’t force anyone to play diverse faceclaims, to tell others to give a chance to bi-poc options when thinking of characters they want to portray. But, I’m tired of seeing how the racism in this community is showing, and if not that, the laziness. And I wonder white?
While navigating through tags, I should say that a few roleplays, mostly skeletons are the most beautiful thing to see for how diverse their masterlist is. Not only by always offering faceclaims of color in the options for the skeletons but also by making most part of their skeletons with a rule that the faceclaim should be bi-poc/diverse/non-binary. But, oh how some other tags are a shame when going through the masterlist of taken faceclaims.
And I know most people won’t read this because it’s long, but this is just me just being freaking tired of this still being a thing in the rpc.
