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Notes -
Ashley's non-white? Since when?
Huh, I assumed that was much better supported than it was. The Mass Effect Wiki provides a variety of pictures of her, that could reasonably be interpreted to my eyes as "tanned white woman" or "hispanic/part-black woman". My read was Hispanic, but I don't have good backing for that.
Reddit is as confused as I am (thread 1, thread 2) with a decent number of people suggesting she's hispanic, others suggesting part-black. One thing we see a number of is unsourced "the dev said she's hispanic".
I tried to trace that down and got this comment on the Mass Effect Wiki by the user Stormwaltz.
Does this random user matter? Well, Chris L'Etoile, one of the writers for Mass Effect 1 and 2 (but not 3) went by the name Stormwaltz in his prior work in Asheron's Call, with Reddit linking to a few of his archived unofficial Mass Effect dev diaries at the now-defunct stormwaltz.gamerdna.com. He also has a unique yellow color on the wiki, which might mean some special significance like being a dev, although I was unable to confirm that, as he seems to have removed most of his contributions.
I'll also note that her voice actress is Kimberly Brooks, a black woman. The original voice was E.G. Daily, a white woman, but she was replaced on the grounds that:
(from Wikipedia)
It's possible that that's a HR-speak version of "we wanted to divest from whiteness" but I'm not going to just assume that, a voice actor change would be a pretty significant step and I think that would need some executive buy-in, so I'll take that at face value.
She also has a sister, Sarah Williams, who is a pale-skinned white woman, but she also looks nothing like Ashley (something that Reddit points out, a contrast that's also helpful to highlight how Ashley is not obviously white). Stormwaltz's comment suggests that this might be a choice of genetic engineering, and since we never see parents, we don't know if it's "darker-skinned parents engineering a white child", "white parents engineering a darker-skinned child", or "parents were some mix of skin colors and we got two extremes of the genetic range from un-customized children". It's an open question in the sense that it's heavily dependent on your choice of axioms if a genetically-engineered Hispanic-genetics child of two white parents would count as Hispanic.
So the best info I can get is fairly ambiguous. But if Stormwaltz actually is Chris L'Etoile, I think that's sufficient to support my point: if the writers think she's Hispanic, that's what will matter for decisions about who to uglify and who not to.
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