Personally I think this has been blown way out of propoortion, it wasn't racist when it involved whites, but becuase it now involves blacks, everybody has brought this pathetic argument up. Your views?
I think this game looks amazing, can't wait for it.
http://blogs.pcworld.com/gameon/archives/006786.html
When I first read about Newsweek's N'Gai Croal reacting critically to what he calls "imagery that dovetails with classic racist imagery" in Capcom's Resident Evil 5 trailer, I wasn't sure what to think. When I saw the trailer for the first time myself last summer, I admit that part of me was a little shocked -- and I'll use that word, because it's personally accurate -- by at least some of the imagery. I take full responsibility for my reaction, of course. It's not necessarily the one you had, or should have had. And while I think Croal has some very salient points, I do take issue with his inability to at least acknowledge his own prejudices in the interview. When you make blanket statements like "clearly no one black worked on this game" to drive your point, you sound less like a journalist and more like a reactionary, and that's not where this dialogue, which is extremely important, should be occurring.
Incidentally, Croal's not the first to raise his hand over the trailer, in case any of this is news to you. Back in July 2007, a blog called "Black Looks" fingered the trailer as "problematic on so many levels," indicting things like "the depiction of Black people as inhuman savages, the killing of Black people by a white man in military clothing, and the fact that [the] video game is marketed to children and young adults." You'll have to make up your mind about the accuracy of that last point, since technically there's not a chance in the universe Resident Evil 5 won't be rated M for Mature. On the other hand, there's also not a chance in the universe it won't be purchased and played by millions of underage U.S. gamers.
Now while part of me recoils at the way racist innuendo is too often wielded as a sanctimonious hammer in media discourse, like Bonnie Ruberg writing last July for the Village Voice, I can't pretend I wasn't on some level "strangely disturbed" by the trailer, and I don't mean just because of the creepy glares and eyeball hemorrhaging and throngs of sickle-waving zombies. Sure, that's disturbing, for the same reasons any moldering dude in rotting button-up and slacks speed-shuffling across a room drooling blood and baring lipless teeth is liable to make someone jump.
When I say "disturbed," I'm not talking about the notion that Chris Redfield, who's been part of the series from the beginning, is a white guy fighting what appears to be African villagers in...well, you know, quite probably Africa, where it stands to reason the predominant ethnicity isn't going to be Slavic or Laotian. I'm not talking about superficial analyses that chastise the game for employing blacks as zombies, because the last however many Resident Evil games have focused predominantly on whites as zombies (and Spaniards in Resident Evil 4) and where was the outrage then?
I'm talking about something subtler. Take for instance a moment at 0:29 seconds into the trailer of a seated man -- not a zombie -- the whites of his eyes emerging from behind dark smoke as he turns toward the camera -- arguably and in the context of the shot editing -- glaring at us like a spiteful, "soulless corpse." Ruberg points out that "it's not just that these zombies are black, but that the uninfected black villagers are zombie-like too...it's as if race itself were a disease...the white protagonist has to fight back or be infected."
It's possible I'm reading too much into that moment. That Ruberg is too. It's possible, even probable, that the developers were just trying to create a hostile, hopeless atmosphere, the same sort of hostile ambiance that suffused Resident Evil 4, whether Leon was dealing with the occasional uninfected Spaniard acting psychotic, or the headless, tentacle-flailing, infected variety. Regardless, I think Croal's exactly right when he says:
This imagery has a history. It has a history and you can’t pretend otherwise. That imagery still has a history that has to be engaged, that has to be understood... If you’re going to engage imagery that has that potential, the onus is on the creator to be aware of that because there will be repercussions in the marketplace.
September 11, 2001 has a history. So does Pearl Harbor. Now it's okay, today, 67 years later, to make epic war movies in which all kinds of people get killed and ships blow up at a Hawaiian naval base. But Manhattan's twin towers were scrubbed from the first Spider-Man movie, the issue of 9/11-based imagery on TV and in film is still hotly debated, and to this day it's still impossible to crash a plane properly in Microsoft's post-9/11 versions of Flight Simulator. The point? Imagery with historical proximity to sensitive issues can't be trotted out carte blanche. It has complex cultural baggage. The attack on Pearl Harbor is long past. Racism and racial stereotypes aren't. Which, as far as I'm concerned, makes Croal's point about imagery and history relevant and worth bearing in mind when you see a trailer like this.
I'm as aware as any of you that Resident Evil 5 is intended to be a survival horror game, not some insidious racist credo, and intentions certainly matter. But it doesn't hurt anyone to at least take another look, pause, and reconsider what the images are going to mean -- how they'll resonate -- with a culture like America's, which has a unique history with them.
I think this game looks amazing, can't wait for it.
http://blogs.pcworld.com/gameon/archives/006786.html
When I first read about Newsweek's N'Gai Croal reacting critically to what he calls "imagery that dovetails with classic racist imagery" in Capcom's Resident Evil 5 trailer, I wasn't sure what to think. When I saw the trailer for the first time myself last summer, I admit that part of me was a little shocked -- and I'll use that word, because it's personally accurate -- by at least some of the imagery. I take full responsibility for my reaction, of course. It's not necessarily the one you had, or should have had. And while I think Croal has some very salient points, I do take issue with his inability to at least acknowledge his own prejudices in the interview. When you make blanket statements like "clearly no one black worked on this game" to drive your point, you sound less like a journalist and more like a reactionary, and that's not where this dialogue, which is extremely important, should be occurring.
Incidentally, Croal's not the first to raise his hand over the trailer, in case any of this is news to you. Back in July 2007, a blog called "Black Looks" fingered the trailer as "problematic on so many levels," indicting things like "the depiction of Black people as inhuman savages, the killing of Black people by a white man in military clothing, and the fact that [the] video game is marketed to children and young adults." You'll have to make up your mind about the accuracy of that last point, since technically there's not a chance in the universe Resident Evil 5 won't be rated M for Mature. On the other hand, there's also not a chance in the universe it won't be purchased and played by millions of underage U.S. gamers.
Now while part of me recoils at the way racist innuendo is too often wielded as a sanctimonious hammer in media discourse, like Bonnie Ruberg writing last July for the Village Voice, I can't pretend I wasn't on some level "strangely disturbed" by the trailer, and I don't mean just because of the creepy glares and eyeball hemorrhaging and throngs of sickle-waving zombies. Sure, that's disturbing, for the same reasons any moldering dude in rotting button-up and slacks speed-shuffling across a room drooling blood and baring lipless teeth is liable to make someone jump.
When I say "disturbed," I'm not talking about the notion that Chris Redfield, who's been part of the series from the beginning, is a white guy fighting what appears to be African villagers in...well, you know, quite probably Africa, where it stands to reason the predominant ethnicity isn't going to be Slavic or Laotian. I'm not talking about superficial analyses that chastise the game for employing blacks as zombies, because the last however many Resident Evil games have focused predominantly on whites as zombies (and Spaniards in Resident Evil 4) and where was the outrage then?
I'm talking about something subtler. Take for instance a moment at 0:29 seconds into the trailer of a seated man -- not a zombie -- the whites of his eyes emerging from behind dark smoke as he turns toward the camera -- arguably and in the context of the shot editing -- glaring at us like a spiteful, "soulless corpse." Ruberg points out that "it's not just that these zombies are black, but that the uninfected black villagers are zombie-like too...it's as if race itself were a disease...the white protagonist has to fight back or be infected."
It's possible I'm reading too much into that moment. That Ruberg is too. It's possible, even probable, that the developers were just trying to create a hostile, hopeless atmosphere, the same sort of hostile ambiance that suffused Resident Evil 4, whether Leon was dealing with the occasional uninfected Spaniard acting psychotic, or the headless, tentacle-flailing, infected variety. Regardless, I think Croal's exactly right when he says:
This imagery has a history. It has a history and you can’t pretend otherwise. That imagery still has a history that has to be engaged, that has to be understood... If you’re going to engage imagery that has that potential, the onus is on the creator to be aware of that because there will be repercussions in the marketplace.
September 11, 2001 has a history. So does Pearl Harbor. Now it's okay, today, 67 years later, to make epic war movies in which all kinds of people get killed and ships blow up at a Hawaiian naval base. But Manhattan's twin towers were scrubbed from the first Spider-Man movie, the issue of 9/11-based imagery on TV and in film is still hotly debated, and to this day it's still impossible to crash a plane properly in Microsoft's post-9/11 versions of Flight Simulator. The point? Imagery with historical proximity to sensitive issues can't be trotted out carte blanche. It has complex cultural baggage. The attack on Pearl Harbor is long past. Racism and racial stereotypes aren't. Which, as far as I'm concerned, makes Croal's point about imagery and history relevant and worth bearing in mind when you see a trailer like this.
I'm as aware as any of you that Resident Evil 5 is intended to be a survival horror game, not some insidious racist credo, and intentions certainly matter. But it doesn't hurt anyone to at least take another look, pause, and reconsider what the images are going to mean -- how they'll resonate -- with a culture like America's, which has a unique history with them.