Hot, Spicy Racism

N’Gai Croal opened his gob to talk about the Resident Evil 5 trailer recently. He spoke at length about how Africa is portrayed as a dark and dangerous place, how the trailer is reminiscient of racist imagery from the past, and how blowing holes in shambling, infected, murderous black Africans is different from blowing holes in shambling, infected, murderous white Spaniards. This may have been a specific dig at Yahtzee Croshaw of Zero Punctuation fame, as he (the Aussie) pointed out several months ago that little has actually changed since the fourth numbered installment of the series. Arrive in country X, pick up the inane but roller-coaster plot as you go, and blow away an astonishing number of zombified locals en route to whatever MacGuffin you’re dealing with this time.

The quote that stood out for me above all else was this: “… the perspective of the trailer is not even someone who’s coming to help the people. It’s like they’re all dangerous; they all need to be killed. It’s not even like one cute African — or Haitian or Caribbean — child could be saved. They’re all dangerous men, women and children. They all have to be killed.” I could see how taking the trailer and the situation at face value, without any culture or context, could leave someone horrified - but you have to remember that this is a horror game. Pitting the player against evil children is at least as old as Ultima V, and within the survival horror genre it’s a well-worn set piece. The first scene in the original Silent Hill, released on the Playstation all of nine years ago, features an attack on the player by a dozen knife-wielding babies. The uproar over that particular moral quandary must’ve been lost in the shrill cry of thousands sloshing about in pants-wetting terror.

More to the point, I don’t expect the game to feature any cute Africans or islanders devoid of invincible plot armor. If the lead character meets any women, children, or backbone-challenged men who are not shambling mockeries of life, it will be in a cutscene, and their uneasy friendship will either end in a totally predictable and yet unavoidable death or immortalization as a recurring secondary character. All the infected natives featured in the trailer are creepy as hell, not so much because of the creative use of selective shadowing as for the virus that turned them into flesh-eating monstrosities. In my mind, the fact that Mr. Croal can look at that lurching mob of silent, axe-throwing antagonists and describe them as potentially requiring assistance removes nearly all gravity from his statements about friends ‘just not seeing’ the racist undertones of the game.

As I know N’Gai Croal’s very recognizable if questionably pronouncable name primarily through his articles about video games and my usually small disagreements with his opinions, I won’t outright insult him by saying he doesn’t know what a survival horror game is. I will instead implicitly insult him by explaining what zombies are. A zombie is a corpse - a dead body, an ex-person - that suddenly decides it’s had enough laying about motionless and wants nothing more than a brisk walk and a mouthful of warm human gray matter. In the Resident Evil universe, this post-mortem hobby is inspired by any of a number of designer virii manufactured by the omnipresent Umbrella Corporation. The suggested treatment is usually a dozen CCs of lead administered at speed, as anyone infected becomes as aggressively in-your-face as missionaries with rabies and may sprout a Lovecraftian doom tentacle if they feel they’ve been treated unfairly.

I don’t mean to say that this fictional condition excuses the game from even considerations of racism, since the concept of just-so excuses for allegorical stories is hardly new, but zombies are a well-established trope. The name and concept are cribbed from Carribean hoodoo culture, and the main character of the most iconic and defining zombie picture to date was black. Rather, I think we can say after no fewer than fourteen games over the course of twelve years that this series is primarily about zombies and the wholesale slaughter thereof, and that a hardened zombie fighter like Chris is well past the point of asking any blood-stained, stiff-jointed, quietly groaning individuals mobbing toward him if they’d like a lie-down and perhaps some hot tea. I would go so far as to say that after Chris Redfield’s name is displayed in the three-minute teaser trailer, we see only two human beings before the very end: Chris Redfield himself, and the villager who gets infected and attacks him moments later. Every other body between go time and the crumbling logo looks evil and dangerous because they are dangerous and coincidentally quite evil. As stone-faced badasses have had to explain to weepy blondes in countless books, movies and games before with varying degrees of success, whatever a person was like before the plot device du jour turned them into a rubber-legged neckbiter matters about as much as their shoe size before sudden onset quadraplegia. That goes double for the color of their skin, which by the way would be peeling off if Chris hadn’t chanced to arrive at zero hour and catch them while they were still fresh.

I know N’Gai specifically dismissed the attitude of “oh, they’re just black zombies,” but that’s kind of the entire point: it’s a zombie game set in a black country. I feel it would have been far more prejudiced to introduce a new non-white character for the sole purpose of deflecting accusations, or to contrive a world where a recurring white character travels to a 90% black nation and finds the one village for a hundred miles in any direction that’s balanced out with races it’s acceptable for a white man to cull. Dr. King almost certainly didn’t have ultraviolent interactive fiction in mind when - well, ever, really, but what he was on about was a vision of a world where the color of a person’s skin mattered for fashion sense, sunblock selection, and not a whole lot else. Isn’t it better that Capcom has finally seen fit to make a Resident Evil game without a cast demographically representative of northern Utah? The jump from undead Aryan Brotherhood convention to undead Black Panthers swap meet is admittedly feast or famine, but if you think Capcom cares about fairness and balance you’ve clearly never played any of the Mega Man X series. In the end I, as a suburbanite, white-bread gamer, am a lot less worried about the derogatory and stereotypical implications of shambling murder hordes that just happen to be black for the first time in a dozen years than I am about such wonderful pieces of character design as Superfly Johnson and Cole Train.

This entry was posted on 14. April 2008 at 06:24 and is filed under Games, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.