Resident Evil 5 Capcom racist?

[jalsonmi]

Majin-Tenshinhan said:

I think it's funny how people are going crazy over this, but nobody cared that you were blowing heads off of Latinos in RE4.

You weren't blowing the head off Latinos in RE4. You were blowing the head off of Spaniards, i.e. from Spain, and thus white Europeans. Latinos are not all Spanish speaking people, but rather people from Latin America with a mixed heritage and bloodline of Spaniards, native Latin American peoples and (depending on where in Latin America) black people descended from slaves (which, as you probably know, existed widely outside the borders of the U.S.--the U.S. was just the last place to ban such behavior).

OT: This has been an issue ever since the RE5 trailer first came out. I won't necessarily say it is the correct viewpoint (that's something that cannot be said for certain until we can experience the whole game ourselves, which is not for another year), but the issues of race, representation and otherness are a lot more nuanced than most video gamers are going into. You can' waive off such things with "they're zombies/monsters, of course you'd kill them. It doesn't matter what they look like." If the world did not exist the way it does, where issues of race and privilege are as insidiously ingrained as it is, it could be that simple. But those that create culture need to be aware of the images they are bringing into the collective consiousness and offer masses of people for consumption. And the image of a lone white man killing masses of nearly identical looking, unpersonified black people is an incredibly loaded image. The exotified and objectified other has existed throughout human history, and is a way peoples have been able to remove the humanity from other human beings, thus allowing things like genocide and slavery. This is of course not to say there's a direct causation, and thus not to say RE5 is an evil game aimed at bringing back slavery or anything like that (which would of course be beyond insane)--rather I'm just trying to explain the way images of peoples and races can have power byond simply the image. And creating such an image is thus a deeply problematic endeavor. Those that create culture and art have a certain responsibility when it comes to what they are saying or what the implications behind what they're creating are, and ignorance is not a valid excuse for shirking that reponsibility. And I say that as both an artist (I'm at film school) and a virulent opponent to censorship of any kind (and also as a big RE fan). But the model of the one white guy there to save the day against the faceless hoards of black people (or even black zombies) has all sorts of implications and history, and thus contains problematics that cannot simply be brushed off.

To truly understand the issues of representation and the objectified other that underly this whole debate, you (you being any and everyone) should read Edward Said's book Orientalism.