It’s silly to call Resident Evil 5 racist, says expert
The release of Resident Evil 5 is looming, but the issue of the game being racist has yet to die down. Stepping into the scene is Glenn Bowman, Senior Lecturer at the Department of Anthropology at the University of Kent, who says that the game isn’t racist at all. Always good to have a professional third-party opinion.
Details after the link.
The release of Resident Evil 5 (PS3, 360) is looming, but the issue of the game being racist has yet to die down. Stepping into the scene is Glenn Bowman, Senior Lecturer at the Department of Anthropology at the University of Kent, who says that the game isn’t racist at all. Always good to have a professional third-party opinion.
Bowman says that “I think people are looking too quickly to be able to jam that label onto it. […] I don’t find this very racist. I think what they’re trying to do is make a setting of terror, of anxiety.” That’s his opinion in a nutshell, one that a lot of gamers made as well. But unlike most gamers, he has years of study in the area, and he doesn’t cuss in comments.
He also addresses the issue of the most recent Resident Evil 5 scene that went under fire, portraying a white blonde woman being dragged along, supposedly to be infected:
We could go back to the mention of that one scene you claim that people were using as a sign of racism, where supposedly a blonde white woman is being dragged into a second floor house to be raped – it looked like to be raped.
Well there’s a couple of problems there. One is she wasn’t being dragged in to be raped, she was being dragged in to be infected. And secondly the person who dragged her in is not black.
Maybe there is an awareness by the makers of the game that there is a problem with a threat of racism and therefore they’ve diluted that problem by bringing in a number of white characters. Maybe they’re simply working on the threat scenario. Certainly the presence of a lot of white characters, one) diffuses the idea that it’s explicitly racist, but it also suggests they know it might be accused of being racist and possibly that’s why they’re doing it.
He adds that the game is actually full of anti-colonial themes, which is really quite contrary to the claims of the game being racist. He says that
There’s the diary left behind by the kid who’s eventually infected (found on a table in the Native Village section), which points out very clearly that in the past the colonials came in and exploited the local people, ripped them off of stuff, damaged them. He says that maybe they came back to give us this immunisation because they felt guilty.
There’s something quite interesting going on with that. The fact that they actually came back to screw them up once again and infect them with this virus or disease, seems to me to be far more damning of the colonial powers towards Africa than it says anything about whether or not blacks are some sort of savages. The blacks here are clearly being set up as victims, alterity, frightening.
And finally, he also addresses the setting of the game, stating the same argument that a lot of gamers have already made:
They’ve got to use somewhere as threat, and as far as I know from what you’ve told me the last game used rural Spain as threat. Basically if you want to make a frightening scene you take whatever characteristics of that scene are salient and turn them align.
So you get vicious Spaniards who I suspect are running around with knives or whatever. Here you get infected Africans. Maybe they’ll make the next game happen in Finland and you’ll have a whole series of Inuits and the like being really scary and running around with Walrus heads on. I think it’s silly to call it racist.
Related Articles:
- Resident Evil 5 trailer stirs criticism over race portrayal
- Another day, another bill: this time to protect kids from racist games
- RE5 producer speaks out against allegations of racism
- Takeuchi: black people are working on RE5
Via VideoGamer
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