Uniformly Pale

I was texting back and forth with my niece; I'd asked her what she knew about Cyberpunk 2077. She doesn't really follow video games (understandable) and so the answer was basically not much. So I asked her this:

Did you know that the guy who created the world originally is Black?

She didn't. And I'm not really surprised by this. While Mike Pondsmith has had recent articles penned about him in both Wired and The Atlantic (among others) due to CD Projekt Red's Cyberpunk 2077 being one of the most anticipated titles in gaming, the fact that he's Black is never really mentioned. It's beside the point of the pieces, which are basically there to credit him for his work on the cyberpunk genre. A quick Google news search brings up nothing about him that appears to emphasize this part of his life.

I mention this because when I asked my niece if the world of Cyberpunk 2077 has been created by a Black man, it was because I wanted her to know that Black people were involved in such things, because it's not often mentioned. Race isn't often a big deal unless it's the focus of a story, and that means that it is easy to miss.

To a certain degree, I don't want all of her role models to be Black, because that's limiting. Part of the problem with the quest for role models is that it can put people into the position of waiting for others who can't have or don't themselves need narrow role models. If Barack Obama had needed a Black role model to demonstrate to him that he could be President of the United States, he never would have become the President himself. Being the first at something, or even the first person one knows, means not having a role model to show you that it can be done. But I didn't want her to think that if she went into the production side of the entertainment business, that she'd be there alone.

Sure, there are Black movie directors and the like, but they're mainly known for making things for Black people, rather than general audiences. And the fact that they are Black is a major part of the news stories about them. And I think that this creates the impression that they are rarer than perhaps they are. Which contributes to a sense that the worlds they live in are almost completely White. When I worked for Wizards of the Coast, the company that publishes Magic: the Gathering and Dungeons and Dragons, people would sometimes ask me what it was like to be the only Black person there.

"I wouldn't know," I answered, "there are a fair number of Black people there."

Not that Wizards was as ethnically diverse as the nation as a whole; it was significantly Whiter than that. But it was nowhere near exclusively White, despite the fact that tabletop roleplaying, like Dungeons and Dragons or Cyberpunk are considered to be the sorts of nerdy pastimes that are engaged in almost entirely by White people; with only a few Steve Urkel types to break up the monotony.

And part of this is due simply to the fact that the Black people in the industry simply aren't talked about that much, leaving the impression that outside of a few independent creators who are women and/or non-White, that the whole place is populated by Gary Gygax lookalikes. Understandable, but it does a disservice.