Race in a post-Resident Evil 4 World

When the website known as ign.com thinks that it is qualified to tackle a real issue, it's a good idea to not pay much attention. They are not intelligent people.

That being said, I will briefly explain the conundrum that "the gaming world" now finds itself in. Capcom is set to release Resident Evil 5, the newest in the immensely popular Resident Evil series of survival-horror games (Akaash is currently slogging through number 4, the one set in Spain.) The game's premise is simple: there are zombies, and you must kill them, because zombies are bad. I'm sure the writers at Capcom will throw in a devious plot and shadowy corporation as well, but they relaly are peripheral. Zombies are shot, a game is played, the end.

Here's the catch: RE5 is set in Africa. This means that the majority (I will not say all, because I haven't played it) of antagonists are African, and not the kind with Dutch blood in them except possibly through flesh-consumption. The protagonist, on the other hand, is the almost-Bohemianly-white Chris Redfield. This means that for most if not all of the game, you control a white man with large guns (both firearms and biceps) who shoots many, many black people, I mean zombies. As (sigh) GuitarAtomik, a half-black blogger for destructoid.com, puts it, "the images of a white guy shooting up a village full of crazy black people could be a little jarring."

So, is RE5, and therefore Capcom, racist? Well, I will defer to the burden of proof principle. If you want to claim that this game is evidence that everyone at Capcom, or at least the ones making the decisions, are horrible racists themselves, I believe the burden of proof is on you, and I would like to see an internal memo or two before I take that accusation whole-heartedly.

However, certain aspects of the game - reported scenes such as the one in which non-infected (i.e. regular) Africans beat the shit out of a man on the ground for no reason or a black zombie drags a healthy white woman into a shed - must have been chosen for a reason. I don't think it's such a stretch to suppose that the reason was to play to classic racist stereotypes and fears - the presumed archetypal white male gamer will find the game scarier if the black man drags a white woman away because, even if they "are not racist," they're familiar with that scene from the trial in To Kill a Mockingbird or what have you, and therefore will respond to it with fear. So, in that sense, Capcom is certainly using race and racist imagery to make their game "better," and yes, I would call that unequivocally racist.