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WHY ELON MUSK NEEDS DUNGEONS & DRAGONS TO BE RACIST  
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Adam Serwer
November 11, 2025
The Atlantic
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_ The fantastical roots of “scientific racism” _

, Wesley Allsbrook / The Atlantic

 

The fall of Constantinople wiped the last living Roman civilization
from the Earth. The city’s refugees fled west, helping spark the
Renaissance; its legacy shaped the religious traditions of millions
and the modern map of Europe and the Middle East. The fall also
inspired a book, which inspired a game, which inspired the world’s
richest man to lash out because his favorite role-playing game
wasn’t as racist and sexist as it used to be.

Last November, on X, the billionaire tycoon Elon Musk told the toy
company Hasbro to “burn in hell
[[link removed]].” Hasbro owns
the company Wizards of the Coast, which produces the game Dungeons &
Dragons. Wizards had just released a book on the making of the game
that was critical of some of its creators’ old material. “Nobody,
and I mean nobody, gets to trash” the “geniuses who created
Dungeons & Dragons,” Musk wrote. The book acknowledged that some
earlier iterations of the game relied on racist and sexist stereotypes
and included “a virtual catalog of insensitive and derogatory
language.” After a designer at Wizards said that the company’s
priority now was responding to “progressives and underrepresented
groups who justly took offense” at those stereotypes, and not to
“the ire of the grognards”—a reference to early fans such as
Musk—Musk asked [[link removed]],
“How much is Hasbro?,” suggesting that he might buy the company to
impose his vision on it, as he’d done with Twitter.

D&D was the original role-playing game, a structure that has
influenced every kind of genre fiction that followed. The game is more
popular than ever, reaching far beyond its original audience of
midwestern misfits and bookish nerds.

And for some fans, that’s a problem.

Fantasy and science fiction, with their imaginary cultures and
creatures, their wars between evil monsters and honorable heroes, have
always had a complex relationship with the concept of race, beginning
with their foundational texts.

D&D wouldn’t exist without J. R. R. Tolkien’s _The Hobbit_,
fantasy’s seminal 20th-century text, published in 1937. When
Tolkien’s German publisher, to comply with Nazi racial laws, tried
to determine whether the author was Jewish, Tolkien was outraged. A
draft of his response reads: “If I am to understand that you are
enquiring whether I am of _Jewish _origin, I can only reply that I
regret that I appear to have no ancestors of that gifted people.” He
expressed his disgust
[[link removed]]
to his British publisher: “I have many Jewish friends, and should
regret giving any colour to the notion that I subscribed to the wholly
pernicious and unscientific race-doctrine.”

Unfortunately, a “pernicious and unscientific race-doctrine”
permeated the era in which _The Hobbit_, and the _Lord of the Rings_
series that followed it, were written, an era in which many Westerners
believed that “races” shared particular natures, characteristics,
and capabilities. That genetic determinism seeped into the books.
Although uncountable readers were inspired by the tales of its
diminutive heroes defying stereotypes to save the world, some drew
other conclusions. The books, and the ideas embedded in them, would go
on to have a magnetic appeal to the political forces Tolkien had
rejected.

Today, we can see their influence on right-wing populists in business
and politics all over the world.The billionaire Peter Thiel named his
software company, Palantir, after the crystal ball in _The Lord of the
Rings_, while his AI company, Anduril, is named for the sword of the
human hero Aragorn. Joe Lonsdale, an investor in Anduril and Palantir,
founded a crypto-focused bank called Erebor, after the dwarfs’
mountain fortress. Vice President J. D. Vance named his
venture-capital firm Narya
[[link removed]],
after Gandalf’s magic ring. Giorgia Meloni, the far-right prime
minister of Italy, and defender of “Italianity”
[[link removed]]
against what she sees as the dilution of immigration, is a Tolkien
obsessive
[[link removed]]
who sees in hobbits, dwarfs, and elves the “value of specificity.”
When Peter Jackson’s Oscar-winning adaptation of the _Lord of the
Rings_ trilogy came out in the 2000s, conservative writers embraced
the films as a metaphor for George W. Bush’s war in Iraq
[[link removed]].

On the same day last month, Donald Trump’s Department of Homeland
Security posted a meme
[[link removed]] analogizing
immigrants to the armies of Mordor and the United States to the
hobbits’ home, the Shire, while Musk wrote on X
[[link removed]] that the British
need the far right to protect them from “illegal immigration,”
just as the hobbits could “live their lives in peace and
tranquility” only because they were protected by “the hard men of
Gondor.”

_The_ _Lord of the Rings_ is the story of how two hobbits—from a
“race” of short humanoids traditionally averse to conflict and
adventure—journey to destroy the Ring of Power. The ring is an evil
artifact created by the demigod Sauron, whose hordes of monstrous
orcs, backed by men called Easterlings and Haradrim, are threatening
to conquer the world. In their way stand the armies of Western men.
(Many Tolkien fans pointed out that Musk’s post got those “hard
men” wrong. They are proven time and again to be fallible and
corruptible. It’s the hobbits who save the world. But maybe it’s
not surprising that the planet’s richest man missed the point of a
story about the corrupting nature of power.)

The most charitable interpretation is that, when he is discussing
Middle-earth, Tolkien means _species_ rather than _race_. Regardless,
the late philosopher Charles Mills, a Tolkien fan, observed that
Tolkien presents a picture of a “white civilization besieged by dark
barbarity.” In it, elves are the “Fair Folk,” incarnations of
“justice and beauty.” The scimitar-wielding Haradrim are “black
men like half-­trolls” and fight for Mordor alongside their allies,
the “wild” and “savage” Easterlings. ” Orcs are described as
“swart” and “slant-eyed,” the better for them to be seen as
“black, utterly evil, lacking culture and history, the bottom link
of Tolkien’s great chain of being.”

Mills points out that this interpretation is supported by Tolkien’s
own writing about his inspirations. In private correspondence, Tolkien
refers to the “White city” of Minas Tirith as “Byzantine” and
the orcs as “repulsive versions” of Mongols. Rather than the orcs
being a metaphor for Nazism or communism, the plot of _The Lord of the
Rings_ appears to be influenced by the fall of Constantinople to the
Ottoman empire—except in Tolkien’s telling, the Eastern Roman
empire is victorious, and the slaughter of the orcs is considered no
tragedy.

The point is not that Tolkien was a Nazi, or that people who enjoy or
respect Tolkien (myself included) are Nazis. That would be a childish
way to approach literature. But the ideas embedded in his influential
stories have been reproduced in countless fictional works since. Few
examples are more vivid than Dungeons & Dragons.

Dungeons & Dragons was born in the early 1970s, a few years after the
insurance underwriter and cobbler Gary Gygax and a student named Dave
Arneson met at a midwestern tabletop-gaming convention. At the time,
war games using miniatures to enact fictional or famous battles were
popular. Gygax and Arneson innovated by having each player inhabit
just one character and interact with a storyteller, known as a Dungeon
Master; together, the players and the DM improvise a storyline. The
game involves dice rolls and numbers indicating character traits,
rules, and a referee (the DM)—but the best way I can explain it is
as a game of pretend.

I was a freak from the jump; I didn’t really have a chance. Black
and Jewish with a father in the State Department, I spent my early
life bouncing around Brazil and Italy before returning to Washington,
D.C., in 1994, when I was 12. Abroad I was American, but when we
returned to America I felt like a foreigner. So naturally, I fell in
with the nerds playing Dungeons & Dragons—the “dorks, dweebs,
freak machines, poindexters, and every stripe of pencil-necked
geeks,” in the words of Ben Riggs, the author of the D&D history
_Slaying the Dragon_.

It was rare for me to see another person of color playing, or a girl.
Dungeons & Dragons was still largely confined to the white, nerdy,
male subculture in which it was born. Most of these players wouldn’t
have thought much about the racial meaning of the game—even when the
stereotypes were blatant, like one inspired by a “traditional
African-analogue tribal society” set in a jungle featuring
dark-skinned “noble savages”
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and “depraved cannibals.” But for kids like me, the meaning was
always there.

The second-edition rule book, the one I first played with, stated that
the game’s references to “race” were not about “race in the
true sense of the word: caucasian, black, asian, etc. It is actually a
fantasy species for your character—human, elf, dwarf, gnome,
halfelf, or halfling. Each race is different. Each possesses special
powers and has different lists of classes to choose from.” Some
races, the rule book elaborates, “have fewer choices of character
classes and usually are limited in the level they can attain. These
restrictions reflect the natural tendencies of the races (dwarves like
war and fighting and dislike magic, etc.).” For example, a halfling
“can become the best thief in the land, but he cannot become a great
fighter.”

An early D&D concept was the idea of “alignment”: Certain
creatures are good, neutral, or evil, and, within those categories,
are lawful, neutral, or chaotic. For example, an orc warrior is likely
chaotic evil, while a human paladin is lawful good. In a 2005 forum
post, Gygax wrote that it was fine
[[link removed]]
for a lawful-good character to kill an evil character who had
surrendered, because “the old adage of nits making lice
applies”—intentionally or not quoting Colonel John Chivington, who
led the 1864 massacre of Cheyenne and Arapaho people at the Sand Creek
reservation. A congressional committee at the time referred to the
slaughter [[link removed]] as a
“cowardly act” that gratified the “worst passions that ever
cursed the heart of man.” You might say 1860s lawmakers did not see
it as lawful good.

Tolkien was hardly the only influence on D&D. But in the game, as in
the books, certain characters’ fundamental traits were determined by
their “race.” A dwarf couldn’t do magic; an orc was dumb and
violent; an elf couldn’t be ugly. Although some “races,” such as
humans, were capable of a range of classes and alignments, in a
fundamental way characters were born into their proper place.

The prevalence of racial stereotypes in such games stems partly from
the necessities of game design. Games, especially those meant for
teenage boys, are likely to revolve around action and adventure, which
means violence. A game designer needs disposable enemies—baddies who
are immediately recognizable as such and whom you can slaughter
without regret.

Austin Walker, a Black game designer who hosts the podcast _Friends at
the Table_, described this to me as “a terrible alignment of design
goal” and “cultural biases just being mashed together.” When
you’re playing a game that involves “taking down the door and
killing someone, you need to put someone behind the door who you’re
willing to kill.”

Read: The far right is becoming obsessed with race and IQ
[[link removed]]

Another way to describe this imperative is that creators are often
bound by the “hero’s journey,” Steven Dashiell, an American
University professor and sociologist who studies games, told me.
“The easy way to make sure that there is that moral struggle between
good and evil is just to say that individuals of a particular group
are inherently evil.”

One of the most enduringly legible symbols that a character is
different and therefore more disposable is race. Of course, the fact
that this is also true in the real world is the reason it became such
an effective shorthand.

As a business, D&D always seemed to be in financial peril. But around
the Great Recession, sales hit a nadir, while the retail hobby stores
that doubled as hangout spots where many kids were introduced to the
game started to close. No one expected the game to experience a sudden
renaissance. But it did. In 2011, the sitcom _Community_ ran a
D&D-themed episode. The nostalgic horror show _Stranger Things_, which
debuted in 2016, showed kids playing D&D together. As other geeky
pastimes became more mainstream—such as Disney’s Marvel
juggernaut—the stigma once associated with those activities began to
fade, a process I’ll call “de-geekification.”

A technological innovation, however, may deserve the most credit for
the game’s revival. After the streaming platform Twitch debuted in
2011, streamers began playing Dungeons & Dragons for audiences
watching  online. In 2015, a web series called _Critical Role_
started broadcasting these “live play” games, featuring
professional voice actors. Shows such as _Critical Role_, _Dimension
20_, and other series expanded the audience just in time for the
pandemic, when people had a new need for activities they could do with
friends remotely. _Boom_, Riggs told me: “D&D becomes bigger than
ever.” Wizards told me that 85 million people have played D&D over
the past year, and 21 million have registered on D&D Beyond, its
online hub.

Many new fans are being introduced to the game not by playing it, but
by watching other people play it first. In this format, D&D has become
less about combat, and more about storytelling and improv acting. Live
play has introduced D&D to a new, and more diverse, audience—more
women, more queer people, and more players who happen to look a lot
like the characters cast as disposable baddies.

Growing up in Orange County, California, in the 1990s, Aabria Iyengar
was good at volleyball and improv. She was aware of D&D, but assumed
it wasn’t for people like her. “The dynamics back in the day were
very, like, male and young and predominantly white,” Iyengar told
me. Then her boyfriend asked her if she wanted to play (“We need a
cleric”), and something clicked. Dungeons & Dragons was, she
realized, “a perfect tool to tell the stories we want to tell to
ourselves and to others, about ourselves and about each other.”

Iyengar has a charismatic presence, and playing on Twitch with friends
led to her trying out for _Critical Role_ and eventually becoming the
Dungeon Master for a spin-off, _Exandria Unlimited_.

Many longtime Dungeons & Dragons fans had recognized themselves in the
game’s crude cannon fodder, yet still found a way to make the game
their own. Black people, queer people, and women, Austin Walker told
me, “were always there in the community, but always marginalized.
That has shifted. We have found each other.”

Wizards saw that its audience was changing, and began to think about
how it could make the game more inclusive. This was a major
attitudinal shift: Back in 1975, when prodded about gender stereotypes
in D&D, Gygax had written
[[link removed]]
that he’d considered “adding women” to sections of the rule
book, including “Raping and Pillaging,” “Whores and Tavern
Wenches,” and “Hags and Crones,” as well as “adding an
appendix on ‘Medieval Harems, Slave Girls, and Going Viking.’”
The stereotype of the reactionary geek whose hatred for women
manifests in imagining them as the victims of sexual violence is,
let’s say, historically rooted.

But now the company was open to change. In June 2020, during the
protests following the murder of George Floyd, the D&D development
team acknowledged in a blog post that some earlier versions of the
game offered portrayals of fantasy creatures that were
[[link removed]]
“painfully reminiscent of how real-world ethnic groups have been and
continue to be denigrated. That’s just not right, and it’s not
something we believe in.”

In 2022, Wizards announced
[[link removed]]
that it would be removing the word _race_ from the game and
substituting _species_, noting that “‘race’ is a problematic
term that has had prejudiced links between real world people and the
fantasy peoples of D&D worlds.” It was also adjusting the “lore”
of the “D&D multiverse to be more diligent in extracting past
prejudices.” Since then, it has removed the kind of rules that made
it difficult for hobbits to be fighters or for dwarfs to use magic,
although different species retain distinct traits.

These changes weren’t just about women and people of color playing;
Greg Tito, a former spokesperson and podcaster for Wizards, told me
that white players “expected more and better from them too. And I
think that was, you know, significant, because everyone was wanting
D&D to do better.”

Well. Almost everyone.

If your identity was built around being a fan of a marginal pastime,
de-geekification meant that suddenly, you weren’t as special
anymore. Comic books, video games, fantasy and science fiction,
role-playing games such as Dungeons & Dragons—they were all getting
more popular, and trying to appeal to new audiences. Not everyone was
happy with the changes that effort inspired.

Those who objected could be divided into two categories: people who
found the simpler and more flexible game to be bland; and people who
didn’t like the game getting “woke.”
[[link removed]]
This is a slippery term, but it often boils down to things not being
quite as racist or sexist as they used to be.

Wizards had run versions of the game past audiences—“play
testing”—and consistently found the same thing: “Fans definitely
preferred it to be simpler,” Riggs told me. Many players, myself
included, had always been turned off by all the rules, which could
slow down the game tremendously and often led to session-killing
arguments. But for D&D obsessives, the difficulties created by all the
complexities were part of the fun. “Limitations breed their own kind
of creativity,” Iyengar said. “So if you’re playing a character
that cannot advance past a certain level because of their build,
because of something innate to them, that becomes a problem to solve
in a way that can be very pleasing.”

B. Dave Walters, an influencer who has served as the Dungeon Master
for the _Stranger Things_ cast, told me that earlier versions of the
game were “very adversarial, and it was ‘hard-core,’ right?”
Now “it is a collaborative story that you’re telling together.”
He has “no problem” with people feeling nostalgic or preferring
those older versions. The problem, he said, is when what “comes
right after that is: therefore no girls allowed; therefore the plot of
this adventure is the orcs have come and have enslaved all the women
and the children.”

For Riggs, acknowledging racist or sexist material in earlier
iterations of D&D is not a way to insult or denigrate its founding
fathers, but a tribute to the power of what they made, despite their
shortcomings. “The fact that D&D has spread all over the world into
so many different cultures, subcultures, races, religions, etc., is
proof of the power of the medium.” He added, “Clinging to the
racist, sexist, troubling things that they put in the early editions
of the game seems not only foolish, but disrespectful to the thing
they created.”

Besides, players who didn’t like the new rules didn’t have to
follow them: There is nothing stopping anyone from playing a version
that still has the original restrictions, or ones that feature more
traditionally heroic characters or storylines. The beauty of the game
is that you can play it however you want at your table with your
friends.

“It’s like, _Buddy, it’s make-believe_,” Walters said. “If
you want evil orcs and chain-mail bikinis and slaves, you can do that
at your house.”

“Go grab your boys,” Iyengar said. Go tell each other the story of
“_Lord of the Rings _for the thousandth time. No one is threatening
that, and frankly, no one cares.”

“Go play your game,” she said.

Maybe the most interesting thing about the reactionary backlash to D&D
is that it’s not unusual. Virtually every geeky pastime has
experienced something similar in the past decade or so, the downstream
effect of de-geekification. In 2014, Gamergate
[[link removed]]
began as a backlash to feminist criticism of video games. There was
the follow-up “Comicsgate
[[link removed]],”
during which a bunch of female and nonwhite comic-book creators were
harassed. Hard-core fans of _Ghostbusters_
[[link removed]]
(this subculture was new to me) erupted over an all-woman reboot.
Angry _Star Wars_ fans review-bombed the Disney+ series _The Acolyte_
[[link removed]],
starring a Black woman, into oblivion—a process that began before
the show even came out. Conservatives raged when the Amazon _Lord of
the Rings_ prequel, _The Rings of Power_,_ _did not feature a
whites-only cast
[[link removed]].

These backlashes all have the same basic catalyst, which is that
companies trying to expand their profits have sought out more diverse
audiences by creating content that features more than the usual,
square-jawed white male hero. When the damsels who were supposed to be
in distress and the members of the races that were supposed to be
disposable began to be the protagonists, some fans experienced that as
a kind of loss. And social media amplified those voices, even if they
were a small contingent. Greg Tito suggested that the backlash was
mostly an online chimera, and that “99 percent” of fans were cool
with the changes. The 1 percent who weren’t just happened to
include, well, the “one percent.”

We can all sympathize with someone who is disappointed by changes to
something they have loved for a long time. But sometimes, this
particular sadness is infused with something more sinister, a Trumpian
nostalgia for a time when America was more segregated, and the
hierarchies of race and gender that once defined American culture were
more secure. That nostalgia can be manipulated into a belief that
hounding and excluding newcomers will restore an idealized past that
never existed.

In June, Musk invited X users to offer “divisive facts” on which
to train Grok, the company’s AI chatbot. Lonsdale, the investor in
Palantir, Anduril, and Erebor, responded
[[link removed]]:
“Different races have different IQs, and that reality is a big
determinant of their supposedly-cultural advantages and
disadvantages.”

In an experiment
[[link removed]]
run in July by my colleague Matteo Wong, Grok was the only one of five
major chatbots willing to write a program that would “‘check if
someone is a good scientist’ based on a ‘description of their race
and gender.’” Musk has endorsed such biological determinism
himself. He has repeatedly amplified racist pseudoscience
[[link removed]] from X users who post
charts supposedly proving the criminality and intellectual inferiority
of people of African descent. After one such user argued (based on
highly dubious math)
[[link removed]]
that some Black students at historically Black colleges and
universities have IQs that indicate “borderline intellectual
impairment,” Musk replied
[[link removed]], “It will take
an airplane crashing and killing hundreds of people for them to change
this crazy policy of DIE,” referring to a United Airlines DEI
program that recruited candidates from HBCUs. (There is, of course, no
way to become a pilot without meeting the necessary requirements.)

Matteo Wong: Elon Musk updated Grok. Guess what it said?
[[link removed]]

The science backing up the idea that race can make someone a good or
bad scientist or airline pilot is as solid as the logic behind “orcs
can’t be wizards” or “a hobbit can never become a great
fighter.” This vision of racial rigidity, in which people can be
sorted into categories that quantify their potential, has nothing to
do with genetics; it is a political creation, a descendant of the same
racist pseudoscience that was prominent in Tolkien’s time. In this
sense, what we call “scientific racism” could be called “fantasy
racism” instead, a belief that people can be reduced to quantifiable
numbers, like so many digits on a character sheet.

The races might be fantasy, but the effects of racism are real. After
Musk’s DOGE gutted USAID, he insisted that “no one has died.”
That wasn’t true
[[link removed]].
People had already died, and hundreds of thousands more will follow
every year because America cut its food and medical aid to the
world’s poorest. Anyone could have predicted this catastrophic human
cost; Musk must not have cared. Perhaps he saw the dead of the global
South as so many nameless orcs.

The changes to the D&D community, however, cannot be easily
reversed—they are as much a product of the contemporary world as the
original game was of the 1970s, and as Tolkien’s books were of his
age. Iyengar told me she isn’t worried about Musk ruining D&D.

Musk is welcome to waste his money on “trying to make everyone play
the version of D&D that he thinks should exist in the world,”
Iyengar said. “That’s never been how that works. Everyone will
play it how they want, or they’ll play something else.”

_ADAM SERWER_ [[link removed]]_ is a
staff writer at The Atlantic._

_THE ATLANTIC: Essential Journalism - and a Free Tote_

_Subscribe to The Atlantic. Get a free tote bag when you start a Print
& Digital or Premium subscription._
[[link removed]]

* Elon Musk
[[link removed]]
* Dungeons & Dragons
[[link removed]]
* Racism
[[link removed]]
* sexism
[[link removed]]
* stereotypes
[[link removed]]
* Fantasy-Science Fiction
[[link removed]]
* JRR Tolkien
[[link removed]]
* The Hobbit
[[link removed]]
* the ultra right
[[link removed]]
* Twitch
[[link removed]]

*
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*
*
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