Resident Evil 5: African Genocide
Hello again,
I’m back and I’ve got a new social issue to contend with; Socially insensitive video games, no, uh, I mean stupid PC thugs who only see what they want to see, with half the picture, and of course it pisses them off. Yet again it seems the African American community is up in arms against zombies whose rights are being violated.
The zombies in question are featured in the latest chapter of the Resident Evil series, the fifth!
WTF?
Look it’s just a game. This link will explain it better than I can and with cooler images. But the basic jist of it is; Resident Evil 5, has an african setting where the hordes of zomies this time around are of course African in origin, as that is often the case in a zombie epidemic. The local population are the typically ones who become the zombies. It’s just not realistic to import white zombies or practical.
Which means this time around you’ll be killing dead people with slightly darker skin than usual.
Someone is taking offence to that?
And that someone doesn’t understand the concept of a game just being a game and there’s no underlining racial motive? Jeez, the game designer isn’t even a white racist redneck from Pennsylvania, he’s a Japanese dude from Tokyo.
Last time I checked, the Japanese didn’t have a beef with the Blacks in America. It’s a progression in the storyline, the first three took place in America, where we killed lots of WHITE zombies.
You’d think the same people who are up in arms about killing zombies who were once black would care about the white zombies, but they don’t. I bet they enjoyed shooting “whitey.” RE2 had a whole police station that had been infected, police zombies! Would it be racist of me to think that blacks don’t mind the thought of killing cops, and they like that idea in fact?
Just between you and me, I enjoy rubbing out some cops in a video game every now and then. Just as much as I like to shoot and kill terrorists, criminals, gangsters and space aliens.
What about the Spanish zombies in RE4 with their stereotypical clothing and appearance?
What? No, nothing? Could care less, since your outrage is not for the thought of killing pixel constructed in-animated corpses in a non-real environment, but the implication of such an act in a real world situation. You worry about the hordes of suburban kids who will come out of their homes itching to killing black people.
Just want to say:
Not going to happen in the same way Grand Theft Auto hasn’t created a horde of criminal wanabees.
If you visit the link and look to your right, a gentleman of African persuasion seems to have taken offence to RE5 and wrote an intelligent blog on the matter. Or it may seem so on the surface.
Allow me to pick it apart for my amusement and to educate.
Friday, June 20, 2008
Resident Evil 5: A Travesty On All Counts
A couple of weeks ago, a friend sent me a YouTube link. He described it as “African genocide.”
Great name there friend, totally bias and uneducated. The kind of thing I come to expect from Obama supporters, whom did you vote for my friend? I’m curious.
Not knowing what to expect, I clicked on it. What I witnessed for those next 3 minutes, was nerve-wrecking, painful, mind-numbing and heart-racing. It was a trailer for a Video Game called “Resident Evil.” This specific trailer was an eyeful in the most horrid sense. It wasted no time in capitalizing upon the long history of blatant depictions of Africans as savages and helpless imbeciles.
Actually it was a depiction of zombies as savages and helpless imbeciles. Where’s the outrage for the zombies? They’re people too, just dead people.
The trailer featured a Caucasian male mutilating African villages, along with Africans.
The main character Chris Redfield is white, yes and no he’s not mutilating Africans, he’s killing zombies who were once African in life.
With the not-so ancient history of colonialism and neo-colonialism in Africa, the issue of racial insensitivity and indifference must be brought to the centerfold. This patent-reality must be interrogated excruciatingly to expose the silliness of those who claim the 21st century marked the dawn of a post-racial world.
Hey man, I know that the world is not Star Trek color blind yet, but give me a break please. “The issue of racial insensitivity and indifference must be brought to the centerfold,” is code talk for let’s badger someone who’s innocent for our benefit and get our names and cause on CNN.
The Video Game industry is one which has profited immensely from the casualty of black on black hostility. Notable products of its faculty include, “50 Cent: Bulletproof,” “Def Jam: Icon” and “Grand Theft Auto.”
Yeah 50 Cent was dragged kicking and screaming to those meetings to make a video game about his thug life.
This $10 billion market owes the majority of its inspiration to the tragic decisions of young black and brown teenagers.
Excuse me, all those black gangsters and street thugs are not there because of video games. It’s the other way around actually, those video games are there because of those black thugs. A few of them like ICE-T or Tupac Shakur who live the life (or are surrounded by it) escape from the life, glorify it in their music and make themselves a fortune.
Others like 50 Cent are just following their lead and the path to the green. The whole East Coast-West Coast hip hop rivalry exists because of thugs and their belief that that sort of behavior is perfectly suited to solving problems in the real, or business, world.
Psychologists Craig A. Anderson, PhD., and Karen E. Dill, PhD, did some studies on the decipherable effects of harshly-toned video games on the minds of impressionable teenagers. They concluded that, “young men who are habitually aggressive may be especially vulnerable to the aggression-enhancing effects of repeated exposure to violent games,” and the fact that “Violent video games provide a forum for learning and practicing aggressive solutions to conflict situations… In the short run, playing a violent video game appears to affect aggression by priming aggressive thoughts. Longer-term effects are likely to be longer lasting as well, as the player learns and practices new aggression-related scripts that can become more and more accessible for use when real-life conflict situations arise.”
Sorry I don’t buy the blame it on the video game line again. I played games all my life, and yeah I have aggressive thoughts, but my very nature is to avoid conflict. So why should I punished for people with poor impulse control?
I say if we ban one thing we ban it all; the games, the alcohol, the cigarettes, candy, pro sports, NASCAR racing, rodeos (bull riding in particular, very dangerous) books, TV and movies, music, all art as well in fact (since it’s not fair to ban only some art) and just to be on the safe side - the guns, since you can’t shoot someone without a gun.
A 2005 survey suggests that Blacks constitute 2% of the demographic makeup of Game Developers, with Latinos making 2.5%. How ironic is it, that this reality does very little to punctuate the disproportionate consumption of video game products by Black and Brown teenagers.
What’s with this black - brown teenager s**t? He makes them sound like crayons.
The early release of the Resident Evil 5 trailer provoked certain journalists to voice their outrage over the transparently racist façade. Newsweek’s gaming journalist, N’Gai Croal, was one of a few of those who rose to occasion. In an interview, he eloquently stated, “I looked at the Resident Evil 5 trailer and I was like, ‘Wow, clearly no one black worked on this game’…
Does Mr. Croal know this for a fact? Oh, wait it was made in Japan so he’s most likely right.
The point isn’t that you can’t have black zombies.
Well that’s progress, we CAN have black zombies. We just need to restrict them to the back of the proverbial game bus. Zombies can only be black if they are not targets, menacing and stick to the background. That doesn’t seem fair to blacks out there. A black man can’t become a zombie? That seems racist a thought to me.
There was a lot of imagery in that trailer that dovetailed with classic racist imagery. What was not funny, but sort of interesting, was that there were so many gamers who could not at all see it.” To say the least, Resident Evil 5 producer, Jun Takeuchi, appears to be a card-carrying member of that classic club which pride themselves in being comfortably uninformed of the racial realities that engulf the societies in which they exist. He claimed to be bitterly misinformed of the racial conundrum he had created.
I guess Mr. Takeuchi didn’t talk to you before you decided he created a racial conundrum.
In an interview with Japan’s “Famitsu magazine,” he spoke unabashedly about the decision to use Africa as the setting for this installment of the video-game phenomena, saying, “We really wanted to show the origins of the virus, so for the setting we thought, how about using the place where humankind was born… We thought we would use Africa, which is now called the birthplace of humanity.”
What few people realize is; Africa as the birthplace of humanity means the people there are just as f**ked up as the rest of us. There’s a misinformed belief that Africa was untouched by the evils of the world and it was the Europeans (ie. White Man) who brought all the trouble.
Not true.
There were tribal conflicts long before the Europeans arrived, the American slave trade was perpetuated with the help of Africans, South Africa’s crime rate has rised expotentially since the White government left, blood diamonds come Africa, but no one hears that part of the story do they?
In response to those who labeled his “art-work” as racially-charged, Takeuchi responded, stating, “In terms of the reaction, we’re in the business of entertainment… We didn’t set out to make a racist game or a political statement. We did feel there was a misunderstanding about the initial trailer.”
This act of staged-ignorance is the birth child of a “neo-liberalized” atmosphere that champions Political Correctness as a substantive means of resolving America’s race problem.
Is this dude a conservative or a liberal? I mean he’s sounding very Liberal in the way he wants to ban this game, but at the same time he’s going after other liberals. Oh, wait! I forgot they do that sort of thing to each other.
Activist and, Rap group, “Public Enemy” front-man, “Chuck D”, in a song titled “Can you hear me now” from their latest release, “How you sell Soul to a Soulless People who sold their Soul,” rapped, “Damn if I be some slave again/ Got no fake ass friends and no timbs or rims/ Sure ‘nuff got no designer names/ And I never played no video games.”
This declaration of one’s independence also works as a countervailing voice in response to society’s norms.
Ah yes Chuck D, the brilliant entrepreneur who doesn’t want to be slave to a major corporation and so he incorporates himself to help perpetuate the system he so despises. Hypocrite and pretentious. If he really didn’t like the system then he’d walk away and become a schoolteacher.
Oh wait, not a schoolteacher, that’s dangerous he’s liable to brainwash our children with his leftist politics. He can follow Daniel Day-Lewis’ example and make shoes somewhere.
In addition, it hints at a strange relationship between the Hip-Hop Industry and the Video-Game Industry. Upon a moment’s reflection, it appears as though the record producers and video-game producers have co-authored a “3 step mode” to further the desecration of young Black/Brown imaginations.
The first being the, “Play it in your mind mode (The Envisioning).” The second as the “Play it with your hand mode (The Experiment).” And finally, the “Play it with your heart mode (The Execution).” I believe these steps have been successfully utilized, with precision and concision. It puts a new face on the old theory of Black/Brown kids being mysteriously attracted to violence and violently packaged materials, be it in the form of music, audio-visual, toys or actual weaponry.
Ah so he is going after Hip-Hop, good, it seems only fair. Once again not at fault, since you can just ignore that stuff or turn to PBS. I ignore Hip-Hop quite easily in fact.
It also raises the grim question of why there continues to be a shortage of positive Black/Brown role-models, on TV shows and News Channels.
There are no black role models because blacks are just as miserable as the whites. Actually there is one black role model that I can think of, David Palmer from 24. A real black president not that fake one this country has just elected.
Recent studies by Independent media groups reveal a troubling truth concerning the role of the media in distorting the imagery of communities of color. A progressive research and information center, “Media Matters,” did a study highlighting how grossly under-represented Blacks and Browns are in the Major media beltway. The study revealed how on an average, Blacks make up 7% of media guests, and Browns make up 1%. This not-so-startling detail also underlined the hypocrisy of media outlets in a time of racial controversies.
Sorry…I zoned out there for a second. Bulls**t facts and double talk does that to me.
The study documented the surge in Black/Brown guests after such unforgettable events as, “The Don Imus incident” and “Michael Richards’ racial tirade.”
Both are attention whores and not worth thinking about. Neither one of them convinced me to hate black people, I find them both ridiculous and pathetic. What really makes me think black people are idiots, is when they vote for Obama and his running mate Sarah Palin.
In moments like this, with an absence of impressive leadership and progressive follower-ship, it is valuable to pause for a moment and question ourselves; what would Marcus Garvey think, say and do?
I’m guessing he would enjoy the fact that the concept of zombies should be open to black people as well. That’s equality.
It is crucial that we take his many words into consideration, especially his warning that, “So many of us find excuses to get out of the Negro Race, because we are led to believe that the race is unworthy - that it has not accomplished anything. Cowards that we are! It is we who are unworthy, because we are not contributing to the uplift and upbuilding of this noble race,” and “Action, self-reliance, the vision of self and the future have been the only means by which the oppressed have seen and realized the light of their own freedom.”
Wise words! Someone who talks like that would see how far the “Negro race” has gone and be proud of their accomplishments. They are as nasty, hateful, mean-spirited and opportunistic as the rest of the world.
I say to you all now;
“Welcome to the human race.”
I bid adieu,
your Origami reporter,
L.Manly
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Topics: Politics, Internet, Kids, In the News, Celebrities, Gaming |
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