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July 27, 2007
Zombies in Africa
Radosh is right. The trailer for the new Resident Evil -- though totally beautiful -- is about the most racist thing I've ever seen.
July 27, 2007 | Permalink
Comments
Have you seen the trailer for the new Rambo movie? I haven't clicked on your link yet, but I can't see how it could possibly be worse than that.
Posted by: Brian Cook | Jul 27, 2007 3:49:41 PM
So... killing black zombies is racist. Hmmm... interesting theory. Stupid, but interesting.
Posted by: mcsey | Jul 27, 2007 4:09:08 PM
Hmm. There is such a thing as reading too much into something. Does it help that those zombies are clearly far more badass than your run-of-the-mill Resident Evil zombies?
Posted by: James F. Elliott | Jul 27, 2007 4:14:07 PM
So... killing black zombies is racist. Hmmm... interesting theory.
If that's all it was, that would be a discussion in itself. The worse part is that many, if not most, of the targets do not appear to be zombies at all.
Posted by: Grumpy | Jul 27, 2007 4:18:54 PM
Grumpy, can you really say that? Have you ever seen a zombie before?
Posted by: Matt Zeitlin | Jul 27, 2007 4:25:20 PM
mcsey: Don't be retarded. If every zombie in the game is black and the heroes are all white and the object of the game is to blow away every black zombie that stands between you and your next cutscene... yeah, that's racist. It may or may not be KKK-grade 'killin' me sum niggahs' racist, but it's a common dodge of the See No Evil faction of US race politics to pretend that if it's not full blown race hatred, it's not really racism.
Posted by: NBarnes | Jul 27, 2007 4:30:35 PM
Grumpy, can you really say that? Have you ever seen a zombie before?
The scarier question is, How would you really know if you had seen a zombie before?
Posted by: Brian Cook | Jul 27, 2007 4:52:35 PM
I just wanted to say, as someone who has played the rest of the series, that in the previous Resident Evil, the "zombies" were people with a weird alien parasite and thus did not look or act like traditional zombies. It was set in a backward European village, and the most of the people looked like villagers (some had been infected for longer and so had begun to look less human). But these villagers were being controlled by a Queen and so would attack on site. In that game, every zombie was from the region, and so all were white. Since this games is in Africa, it may well be that the "zombies" are all black, but I really don't think this has anything to do with crypto expressions of the white man's burden. After all, this is a Japanese game.
Posted by: JJONES | Jul 27, 2007 5:21:24 PM
One last thing, about that "job" the white character wants to see through. It's the complete destruction of a US bio-weapons developer which presumably has been intentionally infecting Africans with the alien parasite they've been experimenting on....
Posted by: JJONES | Jul 27, 2007 5:35:45 PM
After all, this is a Japanese game.
Maybe we missed the crypto-racism in the version with the all-white zombies.
Posted by: Sanpete | Jul 27, 2007 6:04:07 PM
Those knees jerked so hard Ezra and Radosh must both have black eyes.
Posted by: slickdpdx | Jul 27, 2007 6:07:18 PM
Yeegh.
Posted by: Erin | Jul 27, 2007 6:19:30 PM
So I assume if the protagonist was black and all the zombies were white that, of course, would be racist as well. Kill whitey!
And ya, I'm sure the gigantic Japanese corporation Capcom set out to make the most racist game ever. That's always /great/ for marketing. It's called a setting people. Sometimes I see why the wingnuts call us libtards.
Grumpy: You played any of the R.E. series before? Just about everything you kill has been infected by "something". For the first few it was a virus that made ppl zombies, for the fourth game it was some sort of brain controlling parasite, for this one the developer has said it will be neither, so you are correct they are not zombies. But being Resident Evil, I guarantee you that they are not "human".
Of course there's one other possibility... Developers Jun Takeuchi and Keiji Inafune hate black people. I suppose that could be.
Posted by: mcsey | Jul 27, 2007 6:42:06 PM
"After all, this is a Japanese game."
I think that may be a big part of this. I think natives of Japan are a bit less aware of the subtext of a small group of white people gunning down throngs of black people.
Okay, black people who've been turned into zombies. It doesn't change the content of the panoramic shots much, though.
Posted by: Kylroy | Jul 27, 2007 6:43:28 PM
-- though totally beautiful -- is about the most racist thing I've ever seen.
"Though"?
Racism is beautiful!
Posted by: Charles Murray | Jul 27, 2007 6:44:30 PM
Oddly enough, the Radosh link is blocked by my firm's hate site filtering. Apparently the trailer is so racist that I can't even read about it.
Posted by: Tom Hilton | Jul 27, 2007 7:26:55 PM
No, it's radosh.net that's filtered.
Posted by: Klug | Jul 27, 2007 8:09:14 PM
I think that may be a big part of this. I think natives of Japan are a bit less aware of the subtext of a small group of white people gunning down throngs of black people.
Maybe we're just too politically correct? Why was it okay in the other games to be set in Europe, but not okay for this game to be set in Africa?
Though I am a diehard yellow dog Democrat, I myself have met many more zombies in the Democratic blogosphere than I would have thought possible.
Posted by: jerry | Jul 27, 2007 9:05:12 PM
Normally I'm pretty insensitive to these sorts of claims but... whoah. Did anyone ever stand up during the design phase with the storyboards and say, "guys, this looks really offensive." ?
Posted by: Tyro | Jul 27, 2007 9:32:41 PM
See, this game can't actually be about killing zombies, because zombies don't exist. Same reason vampire novels can't be about vampires -- vampires don't exist either.
This means games about killing zombies and books about vampires invading England and stealing the upperclass/middleclass white women away from the upperclass/middleclass Englishmen (the basic plot of Dracula) must actually be about something else.
Translation: it's metaphor.
What that means, is it carries meaning: it carries freight. This, of course, is why we love these games and movies and books: they carry a charge. It's also why they're risky.
So, racist? No shit.
Among other things.
Posted by: delagar | Jul 27, 2007 10:33:16 PM
Pac-man doesn't exist in the real world either. It doesn't make his game a metaphor for our mortality, or a cautionary tale about yellow people and differently colored ghosts. It's a game about eating colored dots while running around a maze. You could write a college essay about it if you had to, but maybe you ought not to.
Resident Evil spoilers ahead:
I've only played the most recent of the Resident Evil games (it's fanastic!), but I think it they involve a corporation which unleashed a manmade virus on a (fictional) town called Raccoon City. Raccoon City is destroyed, supercops shoot a bunch of virus-made zombies, and the "evil corporation" is thwarted. At least one of the major corporation-affiliated antagonists survives, though, and in Resident Evil 4 (it's fantastic!) he obtains a virus-surrogate parasite. Suppose he wanted to test that, or some new zombie virus weapon? He'd probably want to move operations internationally. There are a lot of different places he could set up shop, but the Caribbean seems as natural as anywhere.
Resident Evil 4 has you shooting a lot of monster Spaniards, but the game makes it clear at the end that the villagers were a happy, pastoral bunch before being infected, and it makes everything that came before more than a little sad.
Posted by: Zack | Jul 27, 2007 11:06:30 PM
After all, this is a Japanese game.
Oh, of course! You'd never find overt racism against blacks in Japan, that's for sure!
Posted by: Steve | Jul 27, 2007 11:22:47 PM
Oh, of course! You'd never find overt racism against blacks in Japan, that's for sure!
Who can forget this classic ?
Posted by: Tyro | Jul 27, 2007 11:43:18 PM
I can see delagar did well in his women's studies deconstruction 101 courses.
Or maybe it was in he participated as group mentor at 1965 Cultural Revolution Camp.
Posted by: anon | Jul 28, 2007 12:25:39 AM
Yeah, I dunno. One could read this as racist and that would seem valid, but one could also read it as not racist and that would seem pretty valid too. I'm certainly not comfortable with it, but I am interested in my discomfort.
What's interesting to me about this is that it provokes one to examine to what extent one is afraid of the zombies, and to what extent one is afraid of black people.
I can't really get behind a ban on zombie games set in Africa, though. Seems a bit much.
It's true, though, that the fact that a Japanese company made this has no real bearing on whether or not it's racist. Japan tends to be less aggressive about their racism, but they totally have their share -- which isn't surprising, because, amazingly enough, most people don't define themselves mainly by their lack of whiteness. They have their own identities to be bigoted about.
Posted by: Mike Meginnis | Jul 28, 2007 12:41:38 AM
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