“what color paper?”, you ask.

of course you would ask that, because you’re obviously a filthy despicable racist.

and that’s just it.  the debate thus far about Resident Evil 5, Capcom’s latest release in the venerable survival-horror-zombie-killfest videogame franchise (which has also spawned a hugely successful movie series), has little or nothing to do with the game’s alleged racist content, and *everything* to do with the latent racial prejudices and/or sensitivities of the observer.

at this point, i will state for the record that i am white.   but i have an opinion or two about race, and racism, and Africa.  and, for that matter, about abortion and capital punishment and gay marriage and landmines and global warming and a million other things.  but we’ll get to that later.   the thing that’s got me worked up at the moment is a blog post i read back in March, claiming that Resident Evil 5 is racist.  i could barely believe my eyes.  and then i googled resident evil 5 racist and realized that there were hundreds (if not thousands) of people who shared the author’s opinion..   and it seemed like a decent topic for my re-inaugural post on this clean slate of a blog.  so here goes:

i say ‘observer’, rather than ‘gamer’, because for the last 20 months the majority of the critics of RE5 seem to have been people who lack even a cursory familiarity with Resident Evil, the characters, the backstory - they were people who hadn’t even played a single game in the series, let alone the one they were critiquing.  better still, they were basing their opinions on a 60-second *trailer* for the game (itself still nearly two years from completion) which premiered at E3 in 2007.

‘OMG!’ they gasped collectively.  ’a white man with a gun! and he’s… he’s… shooting black people!’

nevermind that the ‘people’ were black because, this time around, the game was going to be set in Africa.  

nevermind that the ‘people’ he was shooting were actually zombies.  

nevermind that this same white man, Chris Redfield, had most recently been shooting non-black ‘people’ in Antarctica (Resident Evil Code: Veronica) and Russia (Resident Evil: The Umbrella Chronicles).  

because, again, they weren’t actually people.  they were zombies.  staggering, lunging, flesh-hungry zombies. 

after all, this was a trailer, a sneak peek at a videogame with another two years of development ahead of it - what better time to bust out a pithy critique of the blatant, disgusting, overwhelmingly racist overtones in every scene?

first up was Kym Platt of the blog Black Looks, who said, among other things:

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.

first i have to say it’s really special the way she capitalizes the ‘B’ in ‘Black’ but not the ‘w’ in ‘white’.  almost subliminal.  and not racist at all.

second, the trailer isn’t depicting ‘Black people’ as inhuman savages.  it’s depicting ZOMBIES as inhuman savages.  which is, if i’m not mistaken, exactly what zombies are.

third, RE5 is NOT marketed to ‘children’, any more than an R-rated movie would be.  the game is rated M (for Mature), meaning if you’re under 17 years old, chances are you’re not getting it.  unless of course you happen to be related to Ms. Platt.

lastly, by the time you’re 17 years old, you’re most likely a senior in high school.  and if that’s Ms. Platt’s idea of  starting them young, then all i can say is w0w.

and it seems Ms. Platt didn’t even come up with this knee-jerk reaction on her own, but was jumping on a bandwagon driven by Bonnie Ruberg of the Village Voice.  Bonnie’s a gamer, but she was basing her opinion on the trailer, not the game. so her general discomfort with the trailer’s contents seems motivated more by political correctness than genre appreciation.

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then there was Jason of microscopiq, who seems to have a life-long love of videogames.  he’s also a researcher w/ IBM’s Social Computing Group (i’m especially fascinated by his focus on ‘undeserved communities’ - i’m sure it’s a typo but w0w, what a typo), and he has a Ph.D.  AND he played RE4, and loved it.  so far be it from me to be too critical of his critique.

but just the title of his post (Blackface goes HD? The case of Resident Evil 5) seemed odd - after all, these are zombies we’re talking about. not minstrels, not caricatures, but ZOMBIES.

then i read the post and realized he was picking up on a point raised by Alejandro Quan-Madrid’s blog on 1up.com, in which he claimed that LocoRoco (perhaps the most innocent-looking videogame of the past decade) was subtly racist, and reminiscent of that shameful period in American history (from the early 1800s to the early 1900s) in which ‘entertainers’ would paint their faces black (or, in some instances, blacker) and lampoon the African-American race through exaggerated stereotypes.  Mr. Quan-Madrid then went on to ‘prove’ his point by creating a fake cover for the game, and superimposing a slice of watermelon over one of the characters (a Moja, one of the ‘villains’ of the game).  to which many of his commenters replied, ‘OMG! of course it’s racist! there’s a freaking watermelon right there on the cover!!!’

so Jason expanded this point, saying:

If LocoRoco’s Mojas were a kind of high tech blackface, Resident Evil 5 takes blackface into the HD era.

and the thing is, it takes a wild imagination (and some crude photoshopping) to draw any kind of comparison between the Mojas of LocoRoco and the blackface of the 19th & early 20th centuries.  but it takes an even wilder imagination to assume that if a zombie is African, its characteristics have more to do with African (and/or African-American) stereotypes than they do with the undead.  black zombies are just like white zombies: they’re reanimated corpses, hungry for the flesh (and, presumably, braaaaains) of the living.  and the only stereotypes they’re portraying are those of… zombies.

blackface-accusations aside, Jason was, to his credit, less concerned with the portrayal of race in the game than he was with the portrayal of Africa.  he’s right, there ARE positive stories coming out of Africa - but they are inevitably overshadowed by the negative.  the African house on fire gets more press than the African house NOT on fire.  at least until Lindsay Lohan shows up at another party.  but this game is not about portraying, or exploiting, negative stereotypes - nor does it paint Africans as mindless savages.   the only mindless savages in this game are the ZOMBIES.   and since Jason’s critique was focused on the trailer, not the game, i’m going to hope that he will have something more to say on the subject once he’s actually played RE5.

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then in March of this year, as the first few levels of the game were made available as a downloadable demo for XBox360 owners, Wesley Yin-Poole of VideoGamer.com posted an exclusive interview with Glenn Bowman, whom Mr. Yin-Poole claimed was “one of the UK’s leading experts on racism”, in order to add some gravitas to the still-raging debate.  Mr. Bowman viewed the actual game, rather than just the trailer, and then delivered his verdict:

“I think it’s silly to call it racist.”

kotaku.com then picked up on videogamer.com’s ‘exclusive’, running their own story about the interview and the expert’s verdict.

which is all well and good, except for the fact that, as Brinstar @ Acid for Blood points out, Mr. Bowman is NOT actually one of the UK’s leading experts on racism, and furthermore had never claimed to be.

this doesn’t necessarily invalidate any of Mr. Bowman’s observations, but it does tend to disqualify him as an expert in the field, and also to disqualify Wesley Yin-Poole as a journalist of any integrity.

kotaku updated their post accordingly, and videogamer.com revised their post to hide the fact that they’d ever claimed he was an expert on race in the first place.

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but that sure didn’t stop Earl Ofari Hutchinson from chiming in with his own ill-informed review of the game over at Huffington Post:

It features a white male (modern day Bawana) mowing down a pack of poor, primitive disease-challenged Africans.

to refer to a pack of zombies as ‘disease-challenged’ is perhaps the most ridiculous and inappropriate euphemism in the history of euphemisms.  you may as well call a cemetery a ‘gated community for the life-challenged’, or a mass-murderer ‘conscience-challenged’.  Mr. Hutchinson clearly has no knowledge of, or interest in, the game’s premise or its history.  he sees a white man with a gun, shooting black people - so of course the game is racist.

Mr. Hutchinson went on to list, without attribution, 1up.com’s Top 5 Racist Videogames… but included in his list was a game called “Hommie Hollerz” - never heard of it?  well, that’s because Mr. Hutchinson didn’t do a very good job of copying & pasting.  the game is actually called Homie Rollerz, a MarioKart-style racing game for the Nintendo DS.

now, don’t bother asking Mr. Hutchinson what his problem with that game is, because he doesn’t even know what it’s called.  but 1up.com listed this as their #1 most racist videogame, for the way it portrayed “brown people”.  which might come as a surprise to David Gonzales, the ‘brown person’ who co-developed the game and created the Homies over 20 years ago.  of course, back then it was just a cartoon strip featured in that notoriously racist publication, Lowrider magazine.  since then they’ve moved on to figurines, of which roughly 20 million have been sold. and now, this obviously self-hating Chicano says of Homie Rollerz:

“I believe my fans will appreciate the storylines and most importantly, the fun of racing through the various tracks with some of the same popular characters they already have in their prized Homies collections.”

sorry for the lengthy tangent, but the point was basically that Mr. Hutchinson might want to do a little fact-checking (and/or spell-checking) before he does any more ranting about racism in videogames.  and that 1up.com might want to do the same.

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there have been other negative reviews of the trailer (not the game, mind you - just the trailer), including MTV’s interview with N’Gai Croal of Newsweek, who’s troubled by the imagery:

“That’s the whole thing where only Chris Redfield appears to be human before they turn into zombies; the humanity of other people is in question. It’s like you barely see their faces, he doesn’t really interact with them…”

i’m pretty sure that’s a dramatic technique known as ’suspense’… otherwise it’d go:

hi everyone! my name is Chris and i’m here to kill zombies… do you guys know where i could find some zombies?

It’s like when you engage that kind of imagery you have to be careful with it. It would be like saying you were going to do some sort of zombie movie that appeared to be set in Europe in the 1940’s with skinny, emaciated, Hasidic-looking people.

tell you what - if i’m walking through Germany in the mid-1940s and a zombie with blood dripping from its mouth tries to attack me, i’m not going to wait & see if it’s a nazi, or a jew, or an allied soldier.  i’m going to shoot the zombie.  fear of reanimated corpse trumps fear of political incorrectness.

that’s all i really want to say about MTV’s review - it’s hard to take seriously any discussions about race from the network that spent a year or more pimping out the Ying Yang Twins, the same network that’s leveraged ‘yo momma’ jokes into a half-hour show.  and if they care that much about the portrayal of negative stereotypes in videogames they may want to look at something like Def Jam: Icon instead.

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now then, onto the game itself - and the further baseless accusations of racism it has inspired:

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* WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD *
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“it’s a white man shooting black people” 

yes, Chris Redfield is white.  and his partner throughout the game is a black African woman named Sheva Alomar.   another prominent character in the game is an NPC named Josh - he’s a black African soldier, and Sheva’s mentor.  and the only black people they’re shooting throughout the game are those who have become FLESH-EATING ZOMBIES.  
the game’s true villains are not the zombies, though - they’re the white people (and corporations thereof) who have developed these horrific viruses and knowingly infected the local populations.

“it depicts Africans as primitive, spear-toting savages” 

true, there are a few sections of the game with tribal imagery right out of deepest Africa.  think Zulu on steroids.  this occurs in the marshlands, near an oil refinery.  somewhere around Chapter 3.  and, as a document left behind by one of the village youths reveals, the men of the village began acting strangely, and dressing like their ancestors, soon after being given ‘medicine’ by the people running the refinery.  a.k.a. the white man.   the ‘medicine’ turned out to be the Progenitor virus (CORRECTION: Type 3 Plagas parasite).  and they were testing it out on the locals.  sort of a reverse Tuskegee Study - that is, if Syphilis turned you into a zombie..

“there’s already a virus ravaging Africa: HIV/AIDS.. this game is promoting the slaughter of infected Africans”

yes, HIV/AIDS has infected and killed millions of Africans over the years.  but the real-life myths in Africa about this real-life virus (e.g. having sex with a virgin will cure you) have the potential to do more real-life harm than a million videogames like this ever could.  and if HIV/AIDS turned regular humans into bloodthirsty zombies (it doesn’t, btw -  and i’m not sure anyone anywhere is claiming, or even insinuating, that it does) with carnivorous plant-creatures shooting out of their mouths, then you would have a point.  but you’d probably be too busy protecting your loved ones from the bloodthirsty zombies to make it.

“Sheva’s ’secret’ unlockable costume is as racially demeaning as it gets”

why, because she’s wearing a leopard-skin bikini, and some bodypaint?  hmm, i wonder where the designers may have gotten their inspiration for that get-up?  perhaps from Eva La Dare, whose alter ego (Karen Dyer) is the voice & mocap actress behind Sheva herself?

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as far as i know, nobody’s interested in making reality-based videogames about Somali pirates*, or residents of Darfur fleeing the Janjaweed, or Ugandan children leaving their villages every night and walking for miles to sleep in a distant field for fear of being kidnapped into Joseph Kony’s LRA.  so until that happens we’ll have to settle for Capcom’s portrayal of Africa - a land where corporations with unspeakably evil agendas exploit the locals for profit, and only a handful of individuals (both indigenous and foreign) resist them.  

and with that, i’m off to face the final villain in this oh-so-racist game:  a blond-haired white man.  

seriously.

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UPDATE - 05/08/09

* as if on cue, Kuma Games (the company behind such ‘reality-based’ projects as Zarqawi and more notably, U.S. Attacks Iran) has announced the release of Somali Showdown: Pirates on the High Seas… in which players can choose to be either a Maersk Alabama crew member, or a Somali Pirate.  Allahu Akb’AAARRRrrr!  (gamasutra via gamepolitics)

UPDATE - 5/11/09

hopefully the last i’ll be writing about this subject - there’s too much else going on in the world.  anyway, Tom Cross of gamasutra has a pretty interesting take on the racism issue.  my response to his piece follows, as posted on that site:

…Chris and Sheva find a butcher’s block, topped with a dead animal and buzzing flies. The game’s helpful text blurbs will then say something like “The smell is awful. Why would this be here?” A butcher shop with meat in it isn’t offensive or out of the ordinary, and in fact is part of everyday life all over the world. …the peculiar Othering of normal occurrences (like a butcher shop having meat, knives, and flies) so that they fit into a frantically horrified conception of village life in Kijuju is pervasive and carefully orchestrated.

what also seems ‘carefully orchestrated’ is a misrepresentation of the cutscenes in the game by the author. perhaps it’s unintentional - but without this inaccurate account of the game’s opening scenes, the foundation of this opinion piece would collapse.

the author is absolutely correct that there’s nothing out of the ordinary about a butcher shop with meat in it. but Chris investigates the meat and remarks “It’s swarming with bugs.  It looks rotten.” hopefully Mr. Cross would agree that a butcher shop full of rotten, bug-infested meat is a somewhat less-than-normal occurrence. then, moving on to the butcher’s block with a dead goat on it, Chris remarks “It smells rancid. It must be the heat that does it.” that’s probably as “objective” a reaction as one could hope for, in a room full of rotting meat. objectivity that is completely ignored by the author. but then, Chris didn’t come to Kijuju to buy a rib roast - he’s there to kill zombies.

as for the second part of the misquoted game text (”why would this be here?”), the closest thing to that particular phrase is spoken after Chris and Sheva have already left the butcher shop. while walking down a back alley, Chris & Sheva encounter what appears to be the headless corpse of a dog - its legs are bound together and it’s been impaled with sticks. and when Chris investigates, he remarks “The body’s still warm. Why is this here?” - now surely even Mr. Cross would acknowledge that while there may be one or two butcher shops in the world where rotten meat is ‘ordinary’ and ‘normal’, one would most likely not expect to find a hog-tied, decapitated canine out back, its still warm carcass being picked over by birds. and if one WERE to encounter such a scene, it might understandably instill a mild sense of unease. if not a smidgen of horror.

…from every “creepy” slaughtered animal to every collection of skulls and candles in a shack (”It must be some kind of ritual,” Chris advises us), Capcom’s intentions are transparent… Stop and think, why is it “scary.” What’s being coded as horrifying and alarming in this game are poor, “West African,” people who froth at the mouth and cannot be trusted due to their violent natures.

actually what’s being coded as horrifying and alarming are things that would likely horrify and/or alarm anyone who found themselves confronted by the same imagery in real life.   remember, Chris didn’t come to Kijuju as part of some group tour, only to find it a very different place than what was advertised in the brochure - he’s been dispatched to a “bioterrorist hotspot” to restore safety and stability. and it’s not unsafe and unstable because the people are poor, or violent, or African. it’s unsafe and unstable because terrorists have taken over, using the remnants of Umbrella Corporation’s bio-weapons. it really couldn’t be more clear, it’s spoken (and captioned) in the first 3 minutes of the game. as for why it’s “scary”, we’re talking about the confluence of various strains of mutagens, parasites, and viruses in THE BIRTHPLACE OF VOODOO. that’s why it’s “scary”.

Early in the game, you are treated to a scene where a white woman is dragged off kicking and screaming, only to be found infected with the virus, and thus, no longer pure.

this type of language is better suited to a renaissance fair than a critique of RE5 - at what point in the scene is there any implication that this white woman was “pure” in the first place??? unless of course by “pure” the author means “not yet a zombie”.

another misrepresentation follows, with the author’s comparison of Chris & Sheva’s encounter with the black villager vs. their encounter with the white woman. Chris DOES approach the black villager carefully - after all, he’s just seen the man restrained on the ground by two other villagers. he holsters his gun and places a hand on the man’s shoulder, asking “Are you OK?” - but when he withdraws, it’s not because the man merely “screams out”, it’s because the man lashes out at him. in the case of the white woman, they lose sight of her after she’s “dragged off” - then when Chris rushes into a room in the building, she’s standing just inside and appears to faint, so he catches her. the main difference between these two encounters is that Chris & Sheva witnessed the black villager being accosted by two other suspicious villagers. they did not witness the same thing being done to the white woman, and thus had less reason to suspect her of being infected.

the Majini of the marshlands, who’ve apparently begun dressing like their ancestors, wear outfits that the author claims have “no basis in any regional traditions but is instead pulled from the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull roster of “primitive” clothing” - these particular zombies seem like an amalgam of several different cultures - they carry shields reminiscent of the Zulu (not West African, but African nonetheless), their faces and bodies are painted white as befitting practitioners of voodoo (the same voodoo that is still widely practiced in West Africa), and the ornamental headpieces seem like evil renditions of the masks used by the Dogon, of Mali (West Africa). evil renditions, because this time they’ve been made by ZOMBIES. to assert that this style of dress has no basis in any regional traditions is, at best, disingenuous.

the author takes issue with the presentation of Sheva because she’s black, but the wrong kind of black. or rather, not black enough. because she’s light-skinned, clean(?) and respectful(??) - i can’t imagine how this critique could be any more insulting.. Josh, the NPC who’s Sheva’s mentor and a frequent contributor to the gameplay, is also clean, respects the military hierarchy, and has darker skin than Sheva. i wonder if Mr. Cross considers him to be a “safe” black person, or is he also “the worst kind”? it’s vital to note that the dirtiness and hostility of the locals has absolutely nothing to do with their skin color, and EVERYTHING to do with the fact that their country has been taken over by bio-terrorists, and that THEY ARE FREAKING ZOMBIES.

when Chris first arrives in Kijuju, Sheva mentions that “Tensions are running high ever since the change in government” - i instantly thought back to the violence that erupted in Kenya following the 2007 elections, in which nearly a thousand people were killed. sure, Kenya’s not in West Africa - but the point is that recent events in real-life Africa give a precedent to the staging of this game. the portrayal of this fictional African town may be viewed by the author as “regressively, unthinkingly stereotypical”, or as “a dangerous, primitive, scary place, where good, nice white people really don’t want to be caught hanging out around.” - Capcom has chosen Africa as the setting for this survival-horror episode, so it seems likely they’d borrow imagery from the entire continent to give Kijuju the scariest vibe possible.

but let’s not pretend that there isn’t a deep dark history of violence in Africa from which to draw these images. where else on the planet, in the last 20 years, have rape and amputation been institutionalized as weapons of war? where else but Central Africa have armies been populated by over 100,000 child soldiers, some younger than 10? where else but Rwanda were nearly a million people killed over the course of just three months (primarily by being hacked to death with machetes) at a rate of nearly 9000 a day, EVERY DAY? Liberia, Cote d’Ivoire, and Sierra Leone are all still recovering from their own recent conflicts. concentrate all that violent history into a single, fictional, West African country and you’ve got quite a “scary place” indeed, to serve as the setting for Resident Evil 5.
on this note, however, Jason of microscopiq has a valid point - given all the positive news coming out of Africa these days (especially the West African countries listed above, with Truth & Reconciliation Committees paving the way for free(er) and fair(er) elections), it’s unfortunate that Capcom has chosen NOW to dredge up all that recent violent history just for the sake of providing a creepy setting for their videogame.

incidentally, the author’s gratuitous use of “quotes” throughout the article where none are required (except to include direct quotations) seems kind of smarmy. the misrepresentations of RE5’s content in this article seem aimed at people who haven’t yet played the game… those of us who HAVE played it know (or should know) that we’re being treated to a false narrative.

and to anyone who HASN’T played it yet, for fear of somehow being turned into a racist: all of these cutscenes are available on youtube, many in HD quality – i would encourage you to view the scenes for yourselves and draw your own conclusions.