This brings up a very important question. How often have you played in a game of majority white/majority PoC? My first campaign I played in in high school, and what introduced me to TTRPGs, was primarily POC (Black, Filipino, Persian). This led to me being kinda taken aback at how few POC I encountered in tabletop spaces for years thereafter.
— Matthew Mercer (@matthewmercer) September 29, 2019
I find that most of the people I’ve played with don’t feel entirely comfortable trying to roleplay outside of what they personally know.
Add to the the fact that crossing racial boundaries is a lot more daunting than crossing other boundaries like sex, religion, economic status, et cetera. There’s a lot more inherent risk of being offensive if you get something wrong with race.
When you don’t personally know and understand a group of people, you have to fall back on stereotypes. That’s not a big deal in some cases – if a player who comes from a poor family uses stereotypes to portray a character who comes from a rich family, no one is really going to mind. They might fault the character for lacking depth and nuance, but no one is going to be offended.
But if a player of one race doesn’t have a proper understanding of the culture and nuances of another race, and they therefor rely on stereotypes to play their character, that can very quickly blow up in their face, despite best intentions.
The only thing you can do about that is invest a lot of time and work into researching a culture and immersing yourself in it to the point that you feel confident that you can respectfully deliver an authentic potrayal of it.
Obviously, not everyone has the spare time and energy to devote to such a project – particularly when they’re just playing a game for fun. And so, quite naturally, most people prefer to just stick to what they already know.