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This was a question that was on my mind today as i was eating breakfast...
Was there any guardsmen that were black, or maybe native american?
And if so, how were they portrayed? Were they a barbaric regiment, branded outcasts? Or were they part of the ranks, treated like any other guardsmen...
I was just wondering because i really wanted some black guardsmen in my army. (I only have 2 catachans that look like blade)

Thanks!

This should answer your questionable question:



EDIT: Fyi, they're portrayed as being part of wherever they're from. These guys were all Rambos. All of them.

I have black guardsmen in my armies ranks. Normal guard Cadians have at least 1 per sqd. My vet squads have them in them also as do some of my heavy weapons.

skin pigment in the ranges of ancient Terra etc aren't such issues they are all pure Terran humans. Its more in the corner of abhumans that things could become kinda tricky / slightly racist. But then again even ogres and ratings are accepted abhumans.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
or to put it in pictures.

This isn't nearly as strange

as this.

This sort of stuff used to be really well covered once upon a time, and I believe still is in the Imperial Guard Roleplaying game from Fantasy Flight Games (Only War).

http://warhammer40k.wikia.com/wiki/Category:Imperial_Guard_Regiments
That link seems to have a lot of them on hand.

But generally the idea is the Imperial Guard comes in all shapes, colours, sizes and tech levels. Mongolian barbarians armoured in furs and handed lasguns will fight alongside cold war era russians alongside Scottish SAS alongside Middle Eastern raiders on horses.

Typically we don't see any black guardsmen depicted in the fluff because GW have been focusing more and more and more on just the cadians recently and pretending all those cool, unique, regiments don't exist. But even then there will be significant differences in skin tone on any individual world so there is no reason not to mix up your colour pallet.

Explain it away any way you like, as the worlds of the Empire are uncounted, and diverse. 10,000 years is a long time, and many things happened during that time.

Look at the Space Marines for the vaguaries, and assume that not every person on the planet gets recruited into the chapter.
There will be an AM detachment using the local population.

Yes. Every race is represented, even in the novels there are different races even in the same armies. If you go way back you even have beastmen in Imperial Guard armies as normal troops even in mixed regiments.

Of course. My guard had a bunch of black, white and middle eastern guys in there.

No they're not barbaric, they're just normal blokes. Although I wouldn't put it past GW to make a ridiculous cliched racist guard regiment.

The main problem is two-fold:

First, GW has long ascribed to the horrible sci fi trope that each planet in the Imperium can be summed up in basically one word. This is the desert planet. Arabs live here. This is the snow planet. Russians live here. This is the jungle planet. Rambo lives here. Then to make matters worse, they stopped selling or even talking about the majority of those planets, leaving planet Rambo and planet NATO (both with the most hideously proportioned plastic infantry on the market). So there are very few options left for representing different races and cultures even in GWs insultingly simplistic way.

Second, GW is simply casually racist (from an American's perspective). I don't think Brits think about these things very often, but when you create a fantasy setting of this scope, and you fail to portray even a single non-white person, your personal biases are showing.

Authors may talk about different races (and mixed gender guard units) in novels, but they have a lot of leeway in what they portray. Meanwhile GW proper is horrible. The GW studio used to have at least have one black space marine chapter (separate but equal, eh?) Then they turned them into jet-black mutants. Outside the hideously mutated Salamanders, every guardsman and marine they show is white - what does that say about how they view people of color?

I challenge anyone to find a non-white human in any of the official 'eavy metal 40k armies from the past few years, or in any recent codex art. I'd love to be proven wrong on this.

 CalgarsPimpHand wrote:
The main problem is two-fold:

First, GW has long ascribed to the horrible sci fi trope that each planet in the Imperium can be summed up in basically one word. This is the desert planet. Arabs live here. This is the snow planet. Russians live here. This is the jungle planet. Rambo lives here. Then to make matters worse, they stopped selling or even talking about the majority of those planets, leaving planet Rambo and planet NATO (both with the most hideously proportioned plastic infantry on the market). So there are very few options left for representing different races and cultures even in GWs insultingly simplistic way.

Second, GW is simply casually racist (from an American's perspective). I don't think Brits think about these things very often, but when you create a fantasy setting of this scope, and you fail to portray even a single non-white person, your personal biases are showing.

Authors may talk about different races (and mixed gender guard units) in novels, but they have a lot of leeway in what they portray. Meanwhile GW proper is horrible. The GW studio used to have at least have one black space marine chapter (separate but equal, eh?) Then they turned them into jet-black mutants. Outside the hideously mutated Salamanders, every guardsman and marine they show is white - what does that say about how they view people of color?

I challenge anyone to find a non-white human in any of the official 'eavy metal 40k armies from the past few years, or in any recent codex art. I'd love to be proven wrong on this.

Gw isn't racist, lol. 40k is just themed after a period and place in time that there wasn't a lot of black people/whatever race because they hadn't gotten there yet, where's there was a lot of white people. And there is a black ultramarine terminator in one of their website bundles. Heavy armour or something? Point is is that there is in fact black people in 40k.

GW is just doing what all the other companies do in their time. Syfi and Fantasy used to be sexy, multicultural and filled with punk / metal symbolisn in the 80's . Mohawks, boobs/nudes (female and male ) and cool exotic minorities where everywhere. There was even a DND campaigns about the exotic and noble and religious arabic warriors who wanted to die for their god in battle. This is what the kids of that time liked to buy, cool exotic stuff. GW's models and art perfectly reflected this.

Things have change the majority of the customers do no longer like this vibe. Almost all modern media have chosen for the safer option and changed their content to fit the new demand. This results in game makers showing more dull male white humans or safe aliens instead of exotic and nude stuff. GW isn't an exception to this and just follows the trend with the exception of a few AoS models that seem to link back to the cool 80-90's style.

I don't think that GW is racist or anti mohawk, prude, anti boobs, sexist etc. It is just that they like to follow the trend and avoid taking risks.

Yeah I think you're right. This is why I mentioned it's racist from an American perspective. Here the safe thing for corporations to do is to include at least some diversity. In the UK, it might be safer to make everyone look like a white englishman - but doing that shows your cultural biases from an outside perspective anyway.

Are you trying to say the UKs culture is biased to white English men?

 Yarium wrote:
This should answer your questionable question:



EDIT: Fyi, they're portrayed as being part of wherever they're from. These guys were all Rambos. All of them.

These guys are pretty much aussies.... I had one guy argue they're basically US marines in vietnam.... I think the knife fetish, how they speak and like to mess around with foreigners proves they're the descendents of australians...

I think we can all agree sly marbo is rambo. Weirdy enough you see a fair few black guardsmen in the catachan codex.

 CalgarsPimpHand wrote:
every guardsman and marine they show is white - what does that say about how they view people of color?

I'm shocked that a predominantly white male development team neglected to pay lip service to every underrepresented minority with a tumblr account... in 2016 even!

There was a picture of a massive Guard army (Cadian obviously, though not in the traditional colours. They had black pants and brown highlights/ lines on their armour if I remember) and there were a few black Guardsmen prominently pictured near the front. Thought it was from the current book, but it must have been a WD thing.

There is no racism, sexism or ageism in the grimdark.

As long as you are human you will be treated with the same contempt and lack of regard as everyother human.

The only "isms" in the grimdark are those involving mutants, psykers and aliens.

Next Post:[/size]

TheWanderer wrote:
There is no racism, sexism or ageism in the grimdark.

ow there is : P

The IoM, the Tau empire, Orks and Eldar are all nasty empires who at least discriminate on race. This is just one of the distiopan dimensions in the setting.

 CalgarsPimpHand wrote:

Second, GW is simply casually racist (from an American's perspective). I don't think Brits think about these things very often, but when you create a fantasy setting of this scope, and you fail to portray even a single non-white person, your personal biases are showing.

This argument is so dumb it's painful.

GW is casually racist for not doing spesific black/Asian/whatever armies? They never made any of them white to begin with!
Nothing says marines are white, any marine can be of any "race", assuming separate modern day races would even be a thing after 38000 years of mingling.

You know why models are mostly white? Because GW employees are mostly white, and you make your own dudes. Not only because you attach to your own dudes, but because making a "different rave army" is just calling for SJW to hound on you and look for the slightest excuse to bring out the racist calls.

Is it a sign of the times that when I read the thread's subject, I thought, "while all Guard are Human, technically Beastmen, Squats, Ratlings, and Orgin can be considered other races, as crossbreeding with pure humans is pretty rare."

It saddens me that race still means shades of human.

SJ

Can it be argued that painting non-caucasian flesh is hard? I can't paint flesh at all, which is why all my Marines have helmets (suck on that, Space Wolves!), but I'm curious about that.

 jeffersonian000 wrote:
Is it a sign of the times that when I read the thread's subject, I thought, "while all Guard are Human, technically Beastmen, Squats, Ratlings, and Orgin can be considered other races, as crossbreeding with pure humans is pretty rare."

It saddens me that race still means shades of human.

SJ

....what are you talking about?

thats realy sad. in addition. who does honestly think that in aprox 38.000 years in future there exist still our clasic races as we know them.. thats ...

nevermind.

Is there such a thing as different raced guardsmen?

Yes yes there is.

How many "races" are there on the planet earth.

now how many planets are in the imperium that supplies guardsmen.

mind you i dont think there will be purple colored people as it might be seen as a full on mutation. but even ogryns and ratlings are a different race. almost a different species(?)

sure some planets might of fully homogenized by then but still they can be classified by planets.

 BoomWolf wrote:

 CalgarsPimpHand wrote:

Second, GW is simply casually racist (from an American's perspective). I don't think Brits think about these things very often, but when you create a fantasy setting of this scope, and you fail to portray even a single non-white person, your personal biases are showing.

This argument is so dumb it's painful.

GW is casually racist for not doing spesific black/Asian/whatever armies? They never made any of them white to begin with!
Nothing says marines are white, any marine can be of any "race", assuming separate modern day races would even be a thing after 38000 years of mingling.

You know why models are mostly white? Because GW employees are mostly white, and you make your own dudes. Not only because you attach to your own dudes, but because making a "different rave army" is just calling for SJW to hound on you and look for the slightest excuse to bring out the racist calls.

I don't think you even understood my post. I said GW was *lazy* for making factions in the fluff (like imperial guard regiments) that are basically "this whole planet is an ethnic stereotype", not racist. Then I pointed out that they got rid of most of those armies anyway, which is part of why you never see other races represented in official material.

And in the next paragraph I talked about how they paint their models. Note that in people's personal armies in White Dwarf and such you'll see plenty of humans of different races. In the official studio armies, you never do.

So when GW employees get to paint their armies however they like, sometimes you see other races. When the design studio is in control, every single model is white. That's a conscious decision made by someone somewhere.

Nope, you said GW was racist. Big difference between lazy and "casually racist".

If you want guardsmen with different skin colours than paint them different colours, voila ethnically diverse guardsman! If GW wants all white models then all the power to them. That in no way makes them "racist". To conclude that because someone painted the skin of the models all one colour instead of multiple colours they are "racist" is incredibly juvenile reasoning.

 jreilly89 wrote:

 jeffersonian000 wrote:
Is it a sign of the times that when I read the thread's subject, I thought, "while all Guard are Human, technically Beastmen, Squats, Ratlings, and Orgin can be considered other races, as crossbreeding with pure humans is pretty rare."

It saddens me that race still means shades of human.

SJ

....what are you talking about?

Different coloured people are still of the same race, the Human Race. Black Human = Human Race, White Human = Human Race.
Orc =/= Human Race. Therefore to describe, or even condemn, a preference for one Human skin colour over another as "racism" is...silly at best and even more "racist" at worst because it implies that those of different skin colours are also of different races ie. they are not even human.

 Desubot wrote:
Is there such a thing as different raced guardsmen?

Yes yes there is.

How many "races" are there on the planet earth.

now how many planets are in the imperium that supplies guardsmen.

mind you i dont think there will be purple colored people as it might be seen as a full on mutation. but even ogryns and ratlings are a different race. almost a different species(?)

sure some planets might of fully homogenized by then but still they can be classified by planets.

Purple doesn't seem so unreasonable to me. Nocturnians have unusual pigmentation due to the radiation on their planet, and some marine chapters develop odd pigmentation due to gene-seed problems. These might still qualify as "mutations," but there is precedent for acceptance of unusual pigmentation within the imperium. As for racial diversity among guardsmen, sure. There isn't a ton of diversity within guardsmen artwork, but we do see people of various races. And obviously there are entire planets/armies commonly themed around various races. So yes. Diversity exists in the 41st millenium. It just isn't always represented by the art.

 _ghost_ wrote:
thats realy sad. in addition. who does honestly think that in aprox 38.000 years in future there exist still our clasic races as we know them.. thats ...

nevermind.

reminds me of an Arthur C Clark novel I read as a kid, where the progationist is visiting earth from a settlement on Titan, and someone comments his skin colouration (forget if he was white or black) is considered very unusal on earth, because "the races by this point have all mixed that everyone tends to be more a shade of light brown"

Our current nation of race is based on outdated science. The sort of science that ordered animals and plants based on morphology and geography. Our current DNA techniques have proven that this wasn't a correct way to order them. The same goes for humans on earth. You can order humans based on heritage and call those different groups (with vague boundaries) races but his has nothing to do with our current popular notion of race. A American white supremacist might have less typical " European " DNA markers then some of the black lives matter activists.

Now back on topic.
40k is something else in here clearly defined human races do exist. Thousands of years of separate evolution on different planets resulted in sub races. Who are gracefully called ab-humans. Now are parts of the IoM racist to them ? Yes. the fact alone that they have to be certified ab-humans should tell you enough. There are even numerous examples the fluff where non standard humans are gunned down just to be sure even if they begged for mercy while claiming to be certified.