A games writer for Newsweek, N'Gai Croal, recently showed his dismay over the recent Resident Evil 5 trailer.
"Wow, clearly no one black worked on this game." That was his reaction upon seeing the trailer for the first time.
"It's like when you engage that kind of imagery you have to be careful with
it," he went on to explain. "It would be like saying you were going to do some
sort of zombie movie that appeared to be set in Europe in the 1940's with
skinny, emaciated, Hasidic-looking people.
"If you put up that imagery people would be saying, 'Are you crazy?' Well,
that's what this stuff looks like. 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."
The fact that main RE protagonist, Chris Redfield, appears to be in a village, very commonly associated with third world countries, doesn't help the case either. He also happens to be the only white character in the trailer that has tons of black zombies, male and females. Croal isn't just concerned with the racial images, it's the general way the whole thing has been handled.
"The point isn't that you can't have black zombies. There was a lot of
imagery in that trailer that dovetailed with classic racist imagery," he said.
"That's the whole thing where only Chris Redfield appears to be human before
they turn into zombies; the humanity of other people is in question. It's like
you barely see their faces, he doesn't really interact with them, he sort of
walks through this thing and it's sort of, 'Is he there? Is he not?'
"It's a very strange thing, and it taps into sort of this very racist
iconography. I think that's the only way I'm describing it. I'm not saying that
was their intent. But it seems that a lot of people who were up in arms about
the trailer couldn't see that and didn't want to engage it.
"I think, again, the point is not that Capcom can't or shouldn't make a
zombie game set in what appears to be an impoverished country where the majority
of residents are black.
"I'm not saying that. But what I am saying is that if I was Capcom, I
wouldn't have suggested to put out that trailer. I would have said, 'You know
what, this has tremendous capacity for being misunderstood, and we want to
signal that this is not what you might think it is' - and they didn't do that."
Phew...talk about a furor and a half...