While I think the thesis of this post covers the lion's share of things, I figure I ought to defend it.

So I don't think it needs be explained that for various reasons, most creators, GMs and players in the ttrpg space are white. As a result, much of the social and cultural texture of the space is centered from the white "culture", experience, and mythology. I think @aaronsrpgs put it best their tweet from April of 2019,

"D&D is a Midwestern folk art that accreted around a creative commons, its original curators were cheated of money or never legally acknowledged, and someday I'll be sued out of existence for printing the words "umber hulk," "carrion crawler," and "mind flayer."

This was an cultural art built with certain ideas and cultural contexts from a certain era of history that people like me were not built into as standard, or put more aptly, as protagonists. (I know this is about other things, but shush, quotes can pull double duty, and this is a good one)

As a result, the presumed protagonists of the game were people of european descent in a europe based setting, or at least what the midwestern creators of mixed western and central european descent believed that to be. Which means that anyone who fell out of that were not considered, or worse: were the monsters.

Okay, but if I did play a human, what would happen? Well culture clash for one. Most American ethnic groups live segregated from each other for one reason or another, but more often than not because certain folks don't want to be neighbors with everyone else. So when populations are physically separated, their culture also separates. Up until high school, I went to a majority black and brown school district with people from all different cultures. Meanwhile, most white people don't even have friends who aren't white. And when I started going to PWIs (Primarily White Institutions) starting in high school, I had to change a lot about how I operated in social environments. The words I use, the styles I wear, the interests I shared, it took time. And I had to be the one to bend my back for them, not the other way around. Even now, working in the adult world as an "adult", I have to bend to what the white idea of culture is to survive.

So when I went to college and learned about what D&D and tabletop games were, my first real character was a half-elf, then a tiefling, and there was probably a half-orc in there at some point. I didn't want to be human, it was too "normal", too close to an experience I only knew from the outside and didn't particularly feel similar to what I knew in my life. If I was gonna play based on what I knew, playing characters that were adjacent to, but explicitly kept out of "normal" was it.

Now that was almost 11 years ago now and I think I've matured my opinion, but the feeling still remains the same. I play humans sometimes in fantasy games. tho I regularly declare my characters are Black. Even if it doesn't exactly map to things in the given setting, and the GM is white, and I still walk and talk for the majority white tables I play at, I don't mind because I do it for me, and now I know how to put some black in there even if it isn't acknowledged much or at all. I just want to feel a part of myself in there, even if that means making my character socially a bit of a pariah.