one lens
tarot decks, representation, and the rating system I'm building...
Robin Wood Tarot was published in 1991. It has seventy-eight cards. Exactly one of them features a woman of color. The rest is whiteness, broken up by hair color and who has a penis.
Sure there are cards you could argue aren’t necessarily of a white person. But you’d have to argue. That’s the point. They were drawn so a white person could see themselves on every card without having to think about it. It was a different time. Which doesn’t make it a good one. It means whiteness was the wallpaper.
It’s the deck I learned tarot on. I bought it from the lesbian bookstore in downtown Vacaville, California, in the mid-90s. It taught me what shuffling felt like before my brain understood what any of the cards meant. I loved it. I will always love it.
I also know it suffers from one of the great tarot plagues of our time: white people.
This isn’t a Robin Wood problem. It’s a tarot problem1. It’s an everything-I-loved-as-a-young-witch problem. The decks I learned on. The books. The pop culture. The same lens, again and again — and not just the white lens. The straight lens. The cis lens. The thin lens. The abled lens. They come packaged together because they ARE the same lens. The lens that misses Black, Brown, and Indigenous people misses queer people misses fat people misses disabled people. They don’t fail one axis at a time. They fail in tandem. It isn’t a convex lens that makes space for everyone. It’s a concave lens that reduces the world to stale, pale, and male.
Here is where I have to say what I am.
I am the product of a bunch of white people. Talking about whiteness in something that I love, in this case tarot, is hard. Not because the truth is hard to speak — though it is — but because so much of the resistance to talking about it is fragile white egos. I include my own. I would rather not be the toxic link in the white patriarchy trying to keep a stranglehold on yet another realm that isn’t theirs. So I’m going to call it out. I’m going to be wrong sometimes. If I’m wrong about something specific and you feel comfortable bringing it up with me, I want to hear it.
What I’m not going to do is pretend I didn’t notice.
The Major Arcana is supposed to map the whole human journey. The Minor Arcana is supposed to map the textures of daily life — work, love, struggle, plenty. When you put those structures into a deck, and that deck exalts one body type, one race, one gender presentation, one orientation, and one ability — what you’re saying, accidentally, is that *the human journey* is the white-straight-thin-cis-abled journey.
Other people don’t have a Fool stepping off a cliff. Other people don’t have a Lovers card to find themselves in. Other people don’t have a Hermit who looks like them.
That’s the cost, when one lens runs the whole show.
Here is where it gets harder.
Some decks are faithful adaptations of source material that was itself made within a system that defaulted to whiteness. The Labyrinth Tarot, for example, is built on Jim Henson’s 1986 film. The film has four human characters — David Bowie, Jennifer Connelly, and two adult bit parts. The other seventy-four cards in the deck are creatures and objects from the world of the film. The deck is faithful to the film. The film cast four white humans.
Is that a “diversity failure” of the deck? Or is the failure upstream — in 1980s film casting, in studio systems, in who got to make movies for kids, in what stories got told and by whom?
Both. The answer is both.
What I don’t want to do is punish a faithful adaptation for being faithful. What I also don’t want to do is let the industry off the hook by treating *”but it’s accurate to the source”* as a complete defense. Because that defense lets every adaptation, every reissue, every “classic” reprint, every Marseille-style tarot ever made keep doing what it has always done while the world changes around it.
The Robin Wood deck doesn’t have the Labyrinth excuse. The Robin Wood deck is original work, made in 1991, by a white woman illustrating her own conception of what tarot should look like. The whiteness there isn’t faithfulness. The whiteness is defaultism. The whiteness is the lens.
These are different cases. They deserve different conversations.
I have been building a rating system for tarot decks because I want to be able to have those different conversations clearly. The system has three sections that do three different kinds of work.
Section one: Craft and Personal Take. This is where my judgments live. Overall, craft, emotional weight. Subjective. Mine. You can disagree.
Section two: Content Advisories. Gore, violence, nudity, sexual content. These are descriptive — here’s what’s in the box, choose accordingly — the same way movie ratings work. No moral verdict. A 5/5 on gore isn’t ”bad,” it’s information for the reader who is or isn’t into gore. Same for nudity. Same for sex. People who love horror want a deck with teeth. People who don’t, don’t. Either is fine. The rating tells you which one you’re picking up.
Section three: Representation. Multi-axis, descriptive. Not a single score. Each axis named honestly:
Race: monochrome / limited / varied / wide
Gender: binary-only / includes queer, trans, nonbinary / fluid throughout
Body: single body type / multiple / wide range
Age: young-default / varied / includes elders
Disability: invisible / present / visible across cards
I don’t give representation a single 1-5 score because the score would do moralizing work the content advisories don’t have to do. *”You got a 1 out of 5 on diversity”* is a different sentence than *”You got a 1 out of 5 on gore.”* The first one is a verdict. The second one is information. Conflating those two kinds of measure is what made my earlier drafts of this system feel wrong.
Splitting them out lets the verdict, when it lands, actually land. It lets the Labyrinth-style decks be described accurately without being punished for an upstream problem. It also lets the Robin Wood deck be described accurately. The verdict, when it lands, lands.
There are decks built differently. Two I want to point at right now — full reviews coming.
Modern Witch Tarot by Lisa Sterle was the first deck I held that was built for actual representation of women. By which I mean women of multiple colors, multiple sizes, multiple genders, multiple sexualities, multiple presentations. Not sexualized. Not made sexless to compensate for the long history of sexualization. Not for the male gaze. Just women, drawn with the kind of care that makes you understand the artist had to think about it. *Whose perspective is centered, who got left out?* Lisa Sterle thought about it. The deck shows.
Pulp Girls Tarot by The Pulp Girls — sisters Cailie and Brianna, with Cailie illustrating — takes the bone structure of the Rider-Waite-Smith deck (the one Pamela Colman Smith created, the one she was barely credited for for almost a hundred years — that is another essay) and updates it with a retro-fashion sensibility and a feminist hand. The Hierophant is a witch with a pointed hat flashing the peace sign instead of the pope. The bodies on the cards are racially diverse, multiple sizes, multiple presentations.
Both decks are doing what Robin Wood didn’t. Both decks are doing it on every axis at once.
Because the lens is one lens. Widen it in one direction and it widens in others. Widen it for women and you find yourself widening it for race and body and gender presentation and sexuality. The lens that fails one axis fails them all. The lens that opens on one axis opens on others.
Real reviews coming. Decks that are doing this work deserve names and pages and time.
Loving Robin Wood is not the problem. I love it still. It is my childhood tale. It taught me to shuffle. I will keep loving it.
It was a different time. And many of us were myopically normalizing whiteness as the be all and end all. But this is no longer that time.
What I won’t do is teach with it. What I won’t do is hand it to someone whose body and self need a deck that lets them step into the Fool’s place. What I won’t do is pretend it is a record of *the human journey* when what it actually is, is a record of one human journey out of many.
The rubric I’m building isn’t a moral weapon. It is a way to see the deck I am holding. To name what is on the cards and what isn’t. To love what is there without lying about what is missing. To call out the defaultism when it’s defaultism. To honor the adaptation when it’s adaptation. To make different conversations possible.
Loving and noticing aren’t opposites. They live in the same room. They share the same lens.
That’s the essay.
It’s a whole fucking world problem but I can’t zoom out that far. I just want to acknowledge that. I’m naive. But I’m not, like, that naive.