Thought/Process: More on Resident Evil 5 and Uncomfortable Echoes
The discussion on race and RE5 continues, but are journalists missing the point?
3/16/2009 9:25 PM | 43 Comments | Page 2 of 3
If you agree with Capcom's assertion that the game actually aims to deliver an anti-colonialist message, then how do you reconcile the Tarzan-movie natives that some Majini revert to later in the game? The ancestral habits into which the Majini devolve line up exactly with the kinds of ooga-booga Africans that the prevailing logic of colonialism said it was okay to kill and displace.
It's clearly not the main text of the game, but the subtext feeds on awful, previously understood notions about not just Africans on the continent, but black people everywhere. There's no sense of scale, in terms of humanity, in
RE5. You don't see daily life before it's destroyed by the infection. No bustling market. No kids playing. It opens on guys with machetes. As a result, the fictional country of Kijuju looks like a place that's just ripe for evil to manifest.
Some reviews acknowledge that there's been a storm regarding the racial portrayals brewing around the game, but sidestep addressing those portrayals.
As this debate's carried on, the apologists' retort has taken the form of "What about
Resident Evil 4? Huh? Huh? Huh?" Read this quote from commenter
ado_rimbo in the thread following
Scott Jones' review: "But the point is that Spaniards are whites with an imperialist history, not a racially oppressed minority, so there are not loaded images here that one could be irresponsible with." Read my answer during the Takeuchi interview: "And because there's a history of demonization and subhuman portrayals with regard to people of African descent, there's a certain sensitivity around that."
Spaniards don't have a long, loud history of being portrayed as scary, subhuman savages. The average American citizen that previous Resident Evil games have used as enemies don't have a long, loud history of being portrayed as scary, subhuman savages.
This black videogame journalist has never said that black people aren't fair game for being enemy antagonists in videogames. What's problematic is, the way that
RE5 chooses to make them antagonists pounces on fears that were promulgated about black people in the not-so-distant past. Sure, we're all susceptible to zombie virus, as Schiesel's
NYT write-up blithely notes, but the subtext of the game seems to whisper: "Yeah, but those Africans don't have as far to go to become savages." This subtext feeds on awful, previously understood notions about black people.
Jim Sterling from Destructoid comes to a nihilistic conclusion: "If anything, Capcom's latest in the Resident Evil series proves only one thing -- that we can
never have something involving black people that
won't cause a race debate. That's pretty fucking sad if you ask me. If we lived in a world that these anti-racist folks claim to want, then we would be working towards having a game like
Resident Evil 5 that could be released
without the controversy. If only we were mature enough and capable of seeing a game set in Africa without clicking our heels together and hoping to find some juicy racism to be upset about."
