Playing the race card is cheap

Bloggers resort to a myriad of cheap tricks in order to get an audience. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t use some of those myself. I have some big hopes for this web site, but it’ll be a long way off before I’ll really see any money from this. Right now, my goals are pretty modest: maybe pay for a couple of coffees per month.

As a blogger, there’s a line I won’t cross. And one of them is using the racism card. Racism you see is a big seller. It draws an audience to see what all the fuss is all about and it draws another audience who uses the material as further proof that racism is pandemic. Make no mistake, I’m not belittling the issues caused by racism. Discrimination is real, and if you have any doubt of that, I’ll let you talk to a number of friends of mine who cannot get taxis late at night or are subtly discouraged by real estate agents from looking at certain housing developments. However, I think accusations of racism should be used carefully to point out real injustices.

It’s why that when I see posts like this by The Atlantic, I just cringe. The main point of Mr. Coates’ entry is that Resident Evil 5 has strong racial overtones. Despite the fact that Resident Evil 4 used Spanish zombies without a hue and cry from the Latin communities and that Resident Evil 1 - 3 used white zombies, Mr. Coates points out that this time it’s different. Africans, he points out, have a long had a history of being stereotyped as subhuman animals, something that apparently doesn’t exist for other ethnic groups.

Huh? I think many Mexican migrants, Chinese and Native Americans would seriously beg to differ. Anyone who’s heard of Cesar Chavez and his efforts to unionize migrants can quickly get a sense how Mexican migrants were treated by white farmers. The Chinese weren’t treated much better when they worked for railroad companies in the Old West. Native Americans were routinely demonized as savages when fighting against white settlers.  It’s a simple fact of history that many ethnic groups were dehumanized and thought as savages by Europeans.

What’s even more ironic is that the African and Spanish zombies are considerably smarter than the white zombies of the first three games. The dumb savages in the Resident Evil franchise are actually the white zombies. But of course Mr. Coates never lets you in on that fact.

Spanish zombies in Resident Evil 4 didn't produce this kind of outcry.

The other point raised by Mr. Coates is that Resident Evil 5 is full of racial imagery. The scenes he takes most issue with are ones where a group of Africans are beating up something in a sack, where another African group is dragging off a blond white woman and even with the fact that the main female protagonist, while African, is lighter skinned. Apparently, when Spanish and white zombies did practically the same things in Resident Evil 1 through 4, there just wasn’t the same impact. You see, only Africans can be stereotyped as savages. And though Capcom includes an African female protagonist, Mr. Coates simply dismisses it as mere tokenism and disregards the fact that Africans, from what I’ve seen, come in all wide range of skin tones.

What bothers me most about Mr. Coates’ post is how quickly the race card is used. It’s pretty apparent that he didn’t do even the modicum of research on the game, researched the Resident Evil franchise or asked someone who knew something about the game. No instead, he bases his entire opinion on a game trailer which supposedly has all this racial imagery and one review in Eurogamer.  I think that’s pretty embarrassing.

So what’s the outcome of this hue and cry? Well, for one thing, don’t expect Capcom to make another game set in Africa. Why should they given that they’re in the business of making money? You don’t do that by offending people. No, for Resident Evil 6, expect them to play it safe. Screw adding diversity or an African based setting. It’s not worth it.  Further, expect something like this to have a chilling effect on the entire game industry. Game developers will take note and will feature ethnic minorities who are more tolerant. As a gamer, that’s disappointing. Future games based on an African setting could have been a real interesting change of pace and an easy way to convey things about African culture to an audience which is largely ignorant of it. Also, expect people to pay less attention when the next racism charge is levied again. They’ll think its much ado about nothing just like this time.

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