Wednesday, August 01, 2007

White Man vs Black Zombies = Racism?

An article on Kotaku brings up a piece written on Black Looks, a blog catering to black women.

Resident Evil 5 is set in Africa. One of the RE universe's characters is there for some reason and runs into a horde of zombies, who are correctly black skinned. Kym Platt, the blogger, says...

This is problematic on so many levels, including the depiction of Black people as inhuman savages, the killing of Black people by a white man in military clothing, and the fact that this video game is marketed to children and young adults. Start them young… fearing, hating, and destroying Black people.
Let's see here...
  • Why is "Black" capitalized and not "white"?
  • Where does the game say black people are inhuman savages. This isn't Resident African. It's Resident Evil. A game about zombies.
  • All 13 games in the series have been white zombies killed by white men and women. If anything, you should be pissed you weren't included a long time ago.
  • The game is rated M (for mature). No kids are playing this game unless you buy it for them. Oh that's right, you don't have any.
  • You don't consider yourself "Black"
  • Your damn right. I better be afraid and hate and want to destroy black zombies. Just as much as yellow zombies and brown zombies. Zombies suck. Really.
  • If I lived in a world where zombies existed, we would preach this game to children. I would personally show my son or daughter how to pop a zombies head off with shotgun.
  • If Chris Redfield was a black Chris Redfield, would you have written your blog?
I guess I enjoy opinions as much as she does. But if we go around making games about non-descript people in non-descript areas of the world, what does that mean?

Also try to remember, white people didn't make this game, Japanese people did.

No comments:

Post a Comment