i know that skin color and stuff like that is not a problem but what is a troll wanted to have sex with a dwarf and have a family. si that accepted in this society. and what about homosexuals and other oddities like that. stuff like that how do the people of 2070 feel of that.

--the schmitz

humanis would probably react to the idea kinda like KKK react to mixed color familys today. as for the avarage joe, hard to tell. mostly i guess it would depend on the community and its individuals.

but as always i suspect that its the younger generation that will have the least problems with it.

simple, dwarf on top

that is if dwarf is female, i dont even want to contemplate the other way round...

Something that seems to get overlooked is still the regional and ethnic background behind the meta. I imagine that some still view the south as rednecks the french as... french, japanese are still fairly japanese, un(der)developed countries would be seen differently than the metroplex. I can't imagine that old prejudices, stereotypes and plain old racism would completely disappear after we developed a few new breeds.

For example a Tir'na'Nog elf is probably seen quite a bit different than an elf from Everett. Probably completely different accents and dialect even with Sperethial.

Re: the OP: You will get every kind of reaction. Those who think it's a little odd but don't have a problem with it. Some will actively encourage inter-meta relationships. Some will stage protests and marches against/for said behavior. Others will ignore it completely. Yet others will choose to ignore it saying it doesn't bother them simply because society says it shouldn't bother them.

In Seattle I most will never know about it and those who do will probably be friends who just accept it.

then you have the really crazy ones that will actively try to kill anyone even considering the possibilities.

if real life people can get themselves to firebomb a medical clinic because they perform abortions, i would say there are no end to what people can get themselves to do.

racism is one of the ways to present the bleak side of SR.

Remember folks the UCAS doesn't hate metahumans they just hate SINless and poor people.

yoippari touched on it but I'd like to stress that some cultures still are racist. SR (traditionally) playes up Japanese racism. For one they send their metas to a freaking island. But beyond that they think that Japanese are the best.

Unlike current american racism, which tends to have specific slurs for specific subgroups, the SR japanese tend to just use "gajin" which basiacally means "someone who isn't japanese" to refer to the rest of us. And in their mind the economic dominance of the Japanese in SR is evidence of that.

Remember SR should be a badguy rich environment. Racism helps with that.

Humanis probably won't care, except to show how depraved metas are. If anything, they'd want to keep the couple alive and relatively safe, because it's simply more evidence that metas will hump anything, but in this case, no real humans are in danger.

I haven't seen a lot about any significant dwarf 'culture'. Some dwarfs I'm sure would find the idea repulsive, some would be okay with it. Dwarfs on the whole have suffered less from racism than say orks or trolls, but still have suffered some. They might see it as marrying down, but acceptable, some might see it as a step in the right direction. So varies individual from individual.

On the ork/troll side (since those groups basically run together), I can imagine that poor fellow getting a LOT of teasing, especially if the troll is male, and especially about his umm.. endowments. I'm sure he'd get some nickname like 'stubby' or 'shorty'. Females might have it a bit easier, and in fact it might get the dwarf some recognition in the ork community (a tiny thing like you managed to tame that crazy woman? Wow.)

Of course, the more disassociated these people are with the ignorant, 'on the street' people, the easier things get. If they're both members of the academic community, for instance, any bigotry is almost certainly going to be very quiet undercurrents coming from individuals. Any company that hired trolls and dwarves is going to have a lax enough policy to let them marry without trouble, unless one of them is also crossing socio-economic lines (a troll janitor marrying a dwarf exec, for instance).

well there is always the militant wing of humanis, alamos 20k (or something like that), right?

Yeah, but again, Alamos 20k believes in violently fighting for human rights. Troll and dwarf gets hitched, how does that hurt humans? I think both Humanis and Alamos would agree, it's just proof that metahumans are depraved. Humans actually benefit from the arrangement.

If a troll marries a HUMAN, then you get out the crowbars and shotguns.

point well made

can i just say that the subtitle of this thread is the first belly laugh i've had all week?

Yeah, the SR universe has pretty much declared that the traditional racism has made way for the new racism. I recall a quote that really summed it up.. "Who cares what that guy's skin color is when that THING over there has hands the size of your head!?"

Now, I use the Humanis as a really easy tool. My player characters are generally decent hardworking folks who disdain wetwork. But for some reason, even the ethical mage comes unhinged when white hoods take the stage. So use Humanis as almost comic relief. They're so scared of change and metahumans that yeah, they'll even harass the dwarf/troll couple because 'they're making a mockery of marriage, which is for, and always will ONLY be for a human couple!!'

Plus any team that has a human in it along with any metas means Humanis will harrass them for being race traitors, because no one likes ork-lovers™, trog-nuzzlers™, dwarf-lickers™, and elf-toadies™.... or some equally ludicrous label.

I run the Humanis as so blinded by hatred they'll often fail to notice the runners are usually very well armed. Plus you have the average human agility+pistols/unarmed versus Shadowrunners, which is pretty one-sided. Or a comely young lad or lass will flirt with a meta runner, lure him to a nice, dark, secluded spot, where six friends with baseball bats will work the poor sod over. That's the blatant racism angle.

The subtle angle is the Johnsons who won't offer top dollar for runs if their least-favorite metatype is on the team. Maybe his daughter ran away with one, his wife was leered at by one, who knows. But contacts and Johnsons and anyone else can (and should) have varying levels of racism as well. The Elf Neighborhood will watch orks and trolls like hawks. The Ork Underground keeps a wary eye on the smoothies. Maybe the fixer who dislikes elves always jacks up that character's prices by 10%, or drops their fenced loot by 10% as well. That's easy racism, as "Gear that meets your needs is harder to come by than Human Samurai Bob over there."

"But we both wanted stock Ruger Super Warhawks!!"

"He asked first, and his seller was trying to offload it quickly. Yours was much harder to come by, and market forces always win. Sorry, chummer. I could always sell it to the local go-gang, if you decide you didn't need it?"

more force and power than a megacorp? what are you talking about? i haven't described anything near as over-the-top as your typical Red Samurai unit, or the Jaguars, or the Seraphim... the list goes on.

Some of you guys are really bigoted against racists...

Seriously though, Humanis is a policlub, not a paramilitary gang. What's that mean? Well, you have a bunch of educated people who have seen the sociology studies that clearly show that diversity has a COST, and especially now, that cost has become unbearably high. There is little question that diversity leads to unnecessary conflict, to confusion, to inefficiencies. This is undisputed fact. "Anti-discriminatory" measures are almost always discriminatory, costing bright kids the chance to go to college so that someone who didn't apply himself as well can get in solely based on his bone structure, that people who are not competent for their duties are hired on to meet racial quotas, and the best people are overlooked for promotions in order to keep up the facade of equality. This costs money, jobs and safety. Japan is kicking UCAS' ass in part because Japan can boast a largely homogenous population. This diversity is costing us, with no apparent benefit.

Sure, some people join Humanis because they're feeling left behind or personally threatened, that they're feeling obsolete, but people only need to look at the facts to realize such a position isn't so paranoid after all, when a 4.0 GPA isn't worth as much as being born elf. But not everyone joins because they're racist. Some join because it just makes good economic sense. You think Renraku has pro-troll recruitment policies? Of course not, it costs them money, and when in competition like they are, spending money unnecessarily isn't something you can afford. So it's better to chip a little money into Humanis to allow them to operate how they please then to allow the UCAS to try and enforce laws on them or their subsidiaries that would harm business.

Like most groups of this nature, the majority of Humanis supporters aren't officially members. You can expect that for every one card carrying member, there are 10 people who unofficially support their position, and will work to further those ends quietly in the background.

Portray Humanis like clowns if you want, but you're setting yourself up for a very real surprise. Humanis oriented organizations make more money, have a strong sense of loyalty, and lower crime rate than their competitors. That gives them an edge, an edge they don't mind cutting trouble makers like you in half with.

'zactly.

what does troll height have to do with anything...?

the fact that Brackhaven didn't win simply means that not every human votes their prejudices first. Dunk promised them a magical fairy kingdom, and they were gullible enough to buy it.

Just wanted to highlight some of the snappy catch lines in this thread...

1) A dragon ISN'T as much of a threat as a troll. Dragons don't marry humans, they don't take human jobs, they don't look at you threateningly while you ride the subway. Dragons aren't a threat because they aren't personal.

2) What 'metahuman right laws'? Metahumans, by and large, don't have SINs, there are no requirements they get appropriate accomodations in businesses, they don't get affirmative action, etc. No, no Humanis is not the KKK. It's twice as effective as the KKK ever was.

it's non-humans who don't get SINs, not metahumans.

not every Humanis member, much less every Humanis sympathizer, is rabidly anti-meta. most of them likely aren't. Humanis does not present itself as anti-meta, it presents itself as pro-human--and a lot of humans buy into that.

humans, orks, trolls, elves, and dwarves (and their subspecies) can get SINs. if you're not one of those, it requires an act of Congress (or, one assumes, an act by a similar authority in countries besides the UCAS) to give you a SIN. that's what i mean when i say metahumans can get SINs and non-humans can't.

as far as Humanis victories go--the US has lots and lots of laws against discrimination, but that doesn't stop discrimination from happening. one of the biggest signs i see that the US still has discrimination problems is that we've never had a female president. meanwhile, freakin' Pakistan has had a female prime minister. the number of anti-meta regulations that Humanis has or has not passed is, in some ways, irrelevant, because there are always going to be perfectly legal ways for a populace to express its discriminatory tendencies.

similar to how the shin fein (sp?) is/was the political front of the IRA, i belive the humanis is the political front of the alamos 20k. as in, the smart people, those that can talk the talk, walk the walk and look good in a suit, are members of humanis. those that just want to burn metas and crush skull, those are in alamos 20k.

now mess with humanis and humanis will only react with politically correct means. but if those dont work, you may well find yourself on the alamos's target list.

as in, the humanis will never dirty themselves. thats what they have alamos 20k for.

Humanis also has the Night Hunters, who are essentially double-secret junior members.

The Sprawl Survival guide pretty much states that miscegenation is the only remaining sexual taboo in the UCAS. You could be a homosexual polygamist zoosexual who is married to 27 gay male penguins and no one will so much as blink an eye, not even the most conservative of religious extremists; but, if you so much as look at a member of another metahuman race the wrong way even the most liberal people will spit on you and call you names.

to an extent. i tend to think pretty much every organization in existence in SR has a shadow budget. Alamos20k may handle Humanis' heavy stuff, the big statement projects, the way the Red Sams handle Renraku's important strikes or the Ghosts handle the Tairngire's important jobs. but any of them will be happy to hire runners for the little stuff.

I do confess to being a character actor, and as a GM that includes sympathizing with some fairly unrespectable folk, but considering my players play sociopathic terrorist rapists for hire, I don't feel especially dirty in comparison.

i gotta get into more of those games.

The reason I play Humanis as jackbooted thugs that aren't very bright is because to me, they aren't.

The whole premise of Shadowrun is that capitalism and corporations have grown so powerful they literally trump the laws of the nations they operate in. Those corporations can kill anyone on their soil. They can ruin the lives of any of their employees on a whim. They pollute, pillage, steal, and murder... all for a couple percentage point increases in the profit margin. They can behave in any manner they see fit (within limits set by the corporate council, which is made up of.. yep, corporations). The power has shifted completely to the golden rule. The corps have all the gold, so they make all the rules.

And in the midst of that, the Humanis focuses on the section of society that has it technically worse than any other. I expect the major megacorps have mostly (with a few exceptions) human CEOs. So when I look at the SR world, and see a group of people ignoring the very real problem for one that is not only wrong, but totally unoriginal and completely irrelevant to the massive social problems that face the 6th world... yeah, that strikes me as buffoonish.

The 'dumb hick' descriptor was started by another person. I know that Humanis is fronted by average goons who are very stereotypical, but their higher eschelons are filled out with people who are misguided but intelligent and very skilled. But the runners never meet those people. They meet the robed goons holding a march, or trying to torch a dwarf's restaurant, or hassling people for 'fraternizing with the enemy'. That's their right to think that way, but the way they are presented makes them seem... clownish. Let's find the old book with the Humanis Policlub contact and his quotes...

"They're worse than the heathen, these so-called metahumans. They and all who side with them must be annihilated if the true way of the world is ever to be followed. Tell me, have you fallen under their spells, brother?"

"Black, white, or yellow is no longer the question at hand. Now it is simply a matter of us and them. Humans and metahumans."

"I would take my sister's life before I would let her poison our bloodline in marriage to one of them."

And the kicker is the notation at the bottom that claims "The humanis members tend to be pack-animals." They don't make that statement regarding the elf poser gang, and the only similar statement is used in reference to the Der Nachtmachen Policlub member, who "travels in pack of 1d6+1." The original way they were presented was a blatantly racist organization which harbored a violent terrorist group (Alamos 20k) within.

Now, have I used them as intelligent individuals? Yes, several times. But my point is the average person who follows the Humanis creed is not thinking clearly when it comes to blaming whole sections of society for ills they have no control over. I've had the Humanis send in undercover agents with 'elf poser' and 'ork poser' positive qualities to enable them to hinder metahuman-only gangs. I had a background plot where an Ancient gangmember discovered the reason his go-gang and the Spikes (a troll and ork gang) kept butting heads was due to two Humanis poser agents setting up the confrontations to weaken both gangs. The Spikes don't need help hating elves, they needed help finding them, and Humanis was willing to play both sides. But would your average robe-wearer be able to suppress their blatant racism long enough to gain acceptance into an all-metahuman gang? Hardly.

And the real nastiness of these humanis goons is not so much the the beatings they do to the hapless metas. It's the "donations" of food or medical care in an ork heavy population, and all of a sudden the number of sterile people in that area shoots up.

Keep in mind, characters from the contacts are only a single sample individual, not the template from which all other characters should follow.

Secondly, while megacorps really run the world, the majority of people do not work for a megacorp or a megacorp subsidiary. Something like what, two thirds of all corporations do not have AA or better classification? Those corps DO fall under UCAS laws, and therefore Humanis is very effective. We aren't told that Humanis isn't involve in corporate politics, and I would assume they are (as you pointed out, most CEOs are human), but we really don't get a lot of information on the specifics of corporations (because it would have to be repeated 8 times for 8 different corps). We are just given the general information, generally for the UCAS. Finally, most metahumans fall under the umbrella of the UCAS, not under megacorps boasting extraterritoriality. So working directly with the gov't is taking the fight to their turf. As long as you keep them down in the UCAS, none will climb high enough to jump over to the corporate world and begin to stir stuff up there.

Remember, Humanis has enough clout to field a viable Presidential Candidate (who probably would have won if Dunkie hadn't decided to run). The chances of a proud KKK member running on a platform of racial hatred getting elected President today aren't very good. In the Sixth World, he was beaten by a dragon by a landslide, but he would have had a very good shot if the dragon hadn't run. The irony of it is that this human candidate is revealed to have fraudulently taken the identity of a murdered ork and it actually helps his campaign, despite the fact that running under a false identity is usually a no-no.
And Brackhaven has a pretty good chance of being Seattle's governor come next election.

So the Dragon won because most people did not want to vote for the opposition?
Hmm that sounds familiar.

your bug standard election that, people vote for the least evil (or the evil they know) of their options...

Dunkie won because he was absurdly popular. Among all the candidates, he was the most high-profile. He even had his own national talk show. Ever since he first awakened, he did his best to cultivate a good relationship with the metahuman media and present a good face to the public. People actually knew him and what he stood for. At least, people believed that they did. Since the other candidates did not have their own national talk shows their public exposure was limited and they were not nearly on equal footing with Dunkie.

Of course, it didn't hurt that SR readers and players were the ones who actually voted.

Addressing schmitzzy's original post, I think that racism in the Sixth World is a lot more complicated than what SR publications typically describe, which Sterling summarized as, "Who cares what that guy's skin color is when that THING over there has hands the size of your head!?"

While I imagine that some social truth inheres in the radical new "racial" differences created by UGE, Goblinization, and SURGE, I agree with yoippari's assertion that the regional and ethnic background of big-m Metahumans (all the subspecies of homo sapiens) in the Sixth World is important and usually overlooked / discounted in SR publications.

While my old SR campaigns, set in Seattle and played in the first edition (and a little in the second), sometimes explored the Humanis Policlub / Alamos 20k racism against non-human (little-m) metahumans, as I return to the Sixth World for a new SR4 campaign set in the S.F. Bay Area, the importance of racisms regarding "Japanese," Aztlaners, elves, and Amerindians seems obvious.

Even as far back as the Neo-Anarchists' Guide to North America, Cal Free was painted as a place of White Anglo Human retrenchment. Once great California, cut off from the U.S.A., spurned by the UCAS, invaded by TT and Aztlan and then duped by the Japanese Imperial State -- consenting / abetting the transformation of the predominantly black or colored East Bay into a "metahuman" ghetto -- the racial logics are foregrounded.

Returning to the original post, I agree with hyzmarca's assertion "that miscegenation is the only remaining sexual taboo in the UCAS." In our 20th century US, anti-miscegenation laws remained legal until 1967 -- twenty-three years after Brown v. Board of Education's repudiation of the "separate but equal" doctrine.

And in the Brown litigation, a substantial debate regarded whether the civil right of access to equal public education might bleed into the social right of free marriage, i.e., the abolition of states' anti-miscegenation statutes. A description of Loving v. Virginia is available at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loving_v._Virginia although it fails to mention the explicit white supremacy that the Supreme Court of Virginia concluded was the state's legitimate purpose in enacting its anti-miscegenation law. (For a copy of the opinion, see http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/f...law/loving.html at Section I.)

Returning from the inadvertent law lecture (sorry about that), I will end by noting that the old anti-miscegenation laws prohibited marriages between "white" people and certain "colored" ones, usually "black" or "Negro" people. These laws typically did not prohibit marriage amongst "colored" people, such as marriage between people of Chinese and African heritage.

So I don't know about the rest of the UCAS, but in Cal Free, I would not be surprised if an anti-metahuman-miscegenation law existed although of course Cal Free's "Wild Wild West / A-Team" themes suggest that such a "national" law would have less importance than the social force (coercion and other violence) of the locale.