1. Jobs
Let's start with a hypothetical. You're playing a new Star Wars game. You blast your way into a crime lord's den and a cutscene starts. Who else is in the room? What does the crime boss look like? Who's playing music for him? Who's dancing for him? If you said Hutt, Bith, Twilek slave girl, congratulations, you are space racist. But, your space racism isn't totally your fault. Just as people around the world learn racist beliefs from
third party news and entertainment sources you have been told by nearly every videogame set in the Star Wars galaxy that your species is the major determiner of your job. Think I'm being a space drama queen? Look at the space evidence (but only the evidence I present.) Exhibit A: Literally
the search results for "twilek" in Google images Remember the pig guys from Jaba's palace, the Gamorreans? How many of them appear as technicians? Zero. They're always hired muscle for crime bosses, because in Star Wars games all Gamorreans are stupid and violent. What about Trandocians (the lizard guys)? All shifty bounty hunters and petty thugs. Hutts? Crime lords. Twilek females? Erotic slaves. The list goes on. Now perhaps cultural and economic situations could make a species more inclined to a skill (I might be thinking too hard about this). But, are we to believe there are simply no doctors on the Hutt homeworld, because everyone is a crime boss? If this still doesn't sound ridiculous, perhaps a more real world example can help illustrate the point. For the sake of fairness, I just did a search for "racial stereotype job" and decided to use the first hit as an example. The answer I got was "Asian fisherman," which I didn't know was a stereotype. Anyway. So Dr. Sue (actually a
leader in the field of racial interaction theories) walks into a local university looking for a job. He's been teaching for years at prestigious universities, and is the perfect applicant. The person hiring simply tells him "wouldn't you feel more comfortable fishing." Taken to an extreme, try imagining a universe where all fishermen were Asian. Now substitute "Twilek" for "Asian" and "Slave" for "fisherman" and you've got a Star Wars game. Of course, it's hard to imagine a horrible dystopia in which people of the same skin color or heritage were forced to work similar jobs because of systematic racial discrimination. That would be just too far fetched. Humans, on the other hand, are capable of mastering any profession regardless of race; in Star Wars games, that is.