Racial Prejudice

Besides the obvious use of real world racism between players, the Warcraft Society itself has created racism and racial prejudice.  This prejudice focuses on the playable races which the player actually controls.  To date, there are now 13 playable races in World of Warcraft:

Alliance:

- Humans

- Night Elves

- Dwarves

- Gnomes

- Draenei

- Worgen

Horde: 

- Orcs

- Trolls

- Tauren

- Undead

- Blood Elves

- Goblins

Mutual Race:

- Pandaren

With such a variety of races to be played, one can see where the different stereotypes and prejudice can stem from.  Many players become quite devoted to one race or another due to the features and benefits from the race.  Each race has their own particular perks known as racials.  In this case, some races can actually be seen as better than others for certain roles because of these racials.  This is an early warning sign of prejudice, showing superiority between the races.  As much as Blizzard has tried balance racials, some player races are always better than the others.  Some racials increase damage and some can increase certain stats.  Therefore, we can begin to see prejudice between races when they are expected to fulfill certain class roles.  Many have argued over the years that Tauren make the best warriors, for example.  On Alliance side, there was prejudice against Gnomes tanking for a long time because they do not have any racials that help them tank and often their small size got them stuck during boss fights.

A major form of racial prejudice stems from the physical models of the characters themselves.  Before Blood Elves, Night Elves were the target of many players negative prejudicial attitudes.  Often, a Night Elf player would be taunted for their age because a common stereotype was that all Night Elf players were children.  A Night Elf as a hunter was often the worst combination one could be, and were dubbed "huntards."  This stereotype stayed among players until the racial swing took a different turn in 2007 and players began attacking the newly implemented race: the Blood Elves.  Blood Elf males took the most heat because of their feminine design:

Blood Elves were now becoming the target of not just racial prejudice, but sexual prejudice as well.  Many alluded to male Blood Elf players as homosexuals due to the similarities between males and females within the race itself.  Both had small frames, delicate features and long hair.  Blizzard has even alluded to a male Blood Elf in one quest as being a female.  It is decisions like these which reinforce the stereotypes placed upon the different player races, much like we in our own world have seen different races assume they are better than others.  What has happened though in the Warcraft Society is that races have been actually created so they can be better than others.  This is the ultimate fount from which prejudice is formulated from, coupled with character design.

Blood Elf Female:

Players do not hesitate to kill members of the opposing faction.  Known as ganking, players will often go out into the world and kill low-level players to annoy them.  Once the initial gank is complete, players will begin to camp the body of the player and continuously kill them.  This is a common practice.  This, however, can be paralleled to racial hate crimes.  What we see stemming from this racial agenda is that some players actually enjoyed ganking and camping players of certain races.  A horde favourite has always been the execution of Gnomes.  What arises then is a racial motivation to kill, a virtual lynching so to speak.  It is interesting to note though that racism within WoW is not as seriously taken as racism in our real world.  With that said, it is amazing to see that just like the world today, racism is still a major factor in the  Warcraft Society.

Here is a video of a player ganking strictly gnomes, clearly demonstrating the lynching mentality of some Warcraft players within the society:

TL;DR - Prejudice impacts Warcraft players in-game, just like it affects them out of game.