Now, I will confess up front that I, myself, have never been to Africa. It just never came up. I’m aware of where it is, I’ve known a number of people who were born and raised in various parts of the continent, but I, personally, have never popped on over for a visit. Despite this fact, it has come to my attention that there are quite a few black people living there. Between Houghton-Mifflin, CNN, National Geographic, Eric Cartman or perhaps even Lethal Weapon 2, somewhere along the way I got the message. Many black people live in Africa.

As it turns out, this staggering pearl of wisdom is not limited to the United States. Over in Japan, where they also have cable television and access to globes, it is known that many black people live, as I’ve said, in Africa. So if a Japanese video game company (let’s say, oh, Capcom for example) were going to make a game that was set in Africa (where Africa /= Egypt), you might expect there to be many black characters featured in the game. Had Capcom developed a game set in Africa that was populated entirely by blonde haired, blue-eyed white people, it not only would have been strange, but it’s likely that a lot of people would have asked why they’d done such a thing.

As it turns out, populating their game with people who appear to actually be from the location the game is set in is a big no-no, especially if your character (as in most games) winds up shooting a lot of them. Enter Resident Evil 5, which is receiving a lot of “OMG racism” flak for exactly that reason. There is one particular blog that went off on a wickedly stupid tear on the subject, and I will not link to it simply because I don’t want the showboating attention stunter to get any more traffic than she already has.

Of course, the first three Resident Evils were set in the American Mid-West, and featured the indiscriminantly creepy killing of many white, white zombies. Resident Evil 4 was set in Spain (sort of), and the not-zombie enemies in that game were slightly more swarthy – dark hair, dark eyes, distinctly mediteranian looking. No problem there. I’ve played many games where the enemies were all Asian (Red Steel, for better or for worse, comes immediately to mind). And there seemed to be no outcry a few years back when those highly mediocre Desert Storm games hit the market. But RE5? A shit-fest of implied racism.

If the game featured dark skinned enemies based on the premise that you had to kill them because they were black, yes, that would be incredibly and embarrassingly racist. Even if the game featured mobs of black-skinned enemies who needed to be killed because they were dirty or impure or somehow less than human because they were black, that would also be racist (and in some ways, much worse). But the game features the enemies it does because of the location in which it is set, and the reason you have to fight these enemies is that they have been transformed from innocent people into vicious killers by an outside influence. Probably “The Man” come to think of it (where The Man = Umbrella Corporation). It’s only a matter of time before someone who isn’t getting enough web traffic decides that RE5 is a commentary of slavery. That’ll be a fun few days on Joystiq.

Of course, the other issue that seems to be upsetting people is that the central character is white. So it’s a white guy shooting black people. That he’s white because he was already white in previous games matters not, apparently. Though it does raise an interesting point. Suppose the central character was black. Would it still be racist? What if this newly pigmented hero was shooting packs of white people? And I mean, pasty-skinned white zombies, who were wearing Members Only jackets while playing water polo and listening to Toby Keith. Would that have sparked cries of racism?

Look, I’m not trying to defend racism or prejudices. I think they’re absurd, because if you really want to hate someone, all you have to do is get to know them personally – we’re all flawed enough to find an excuse. And I agree that there is still a shameful amount of racism in the world, even and especially in the Land of the Free. But stupid bullshit reactions like this do not fight racism. They trivialize it. They make it seem like an overblown joke. They excuse the real racism that hurts good, innocent people every day by lumping it in with this made up, oversensitive politically correct bullshit nonsense. Inventing racism where it does not exist furthers the cause of racism instead of diminishing it. And that is what is going on here.

But beyond the already terrible act of trivializing racism, reaction-spasms like this also make it harder to talk about the subject of racism in general. They add a finger pointing layer of obfuscation to the already murky and difficult discussion. They cause people to engage in verbal acrobatics to try to prove just how racist they are not, and those are exactly the sorts of acrobatics that wind up sounding like (you guessed it) racism. You don’t defeat racism by being a hypersensitive bitch, okay? And you sure as hell don’t fan the flames of self-constructed controversy just to get page views. Which is the only reason I haven’t suggested that assuming everyone else is racist might be, in fact. . . racist.

Oh snap! Bring on the flames.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 2nd, 2007 at 4:36 pm and is filed under Games, Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.