[N'Gai Coral is my ****ing hero.]

Real Talk arrives late to internet discourse on Race in Video Games! Film at 11!


MTV Multiplayer, the music network's video game focused blog, has been running a series on "Black Professionals in Games", kicking off with a fantastic interview with Newsweek's N'Gai Coral. GO READ IT.

It's a belated return to the all to quickly ignored controversy sparked by Capcom's Resident Evil 5 trailer which premiered this past summer. It showcased upcoming sequel's setting the Caribbean, and portrayed the white protagonist killing black zombies, which was originally commented on by many game news blogs, and then these posts where drowned comments full of the usual defensive rhetoric downplaying the significance of racial aspect of the trailer, calling "political correctness" fouls on the bloggers who drew attention to it, questioning weather racism is that big of a deal anymore, ad (literally) nauseum. I'm even nauseated just a bit by thinking about it again.

N'Gai is able to articulate exactly how this is all problematic, and in a very short space gives a clear, reasonable, and very balanced take on it. Yes, its just the trailer, and we don't know how the actual game will handle these images, but none the less, given the depth of the history involved, the way in which the trailer presents these images is irresponsible, and calls attention to the serious need for deeper understanding and engagement with this societies problems with race.

“It’s like when you engage that kind of imagery you have to be careful with it. 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.”

OF COURSE - this fantastic article is itself a blog post, and quickly draws the exact same swarm of very carefully argued and even-toned comments that muted the impact of the original story. They calmly tell N'Gai he's overreacting. That's when my man draws his sword:

...As to your opinions on political correctness, and over-sensitivity, I’ll leave you to them. However, I will say that I find it interesting that in your world view, what’s required in order for us all to get along–to avoid “engender[ing] more resentment–is that I refrain from expressing my opinion in case you or others might consider it a “little trivial thing.” Or that I should somehow substitute your opinion of what are “egregious instances of racism or bigotry” for my own. That’s not going to happen. Ever.

Cheers,

N’Gai

Yeah! YEAAAH!



It's hard to think of a more cathartic blog reading moment, I can't even tell you.

I stopped reading the comments after that point, cause I'm sure the trolls will always have their last words. If you're still arguing with him after that, the hopes of a real discussion taking place will probably have to be deferred for a time.

The entire series on Black Professionals in Games is proving to be very interesting, and is definitely worth keeping an eye on all week. One post, an interview with "Tomb Raider" producer Morgan Gray, who is mixed, is lots of fun to read for his take on how the faceless, voiceless main character in many games is only an effective proxy for white male players. He also uses a fantastic phrase which nails the uniquely modern form of this disease that has sickened our culture for so long, the one I grew up surrounded in, the one I see online and at work and in public, which has touched literally everyone my age and younger more times than we can count: "Casual Racism"

It goes to the heart of what's really insidious about this new racism. It's not cross-burning, its not hate crime racism. It's the subtle, self propagating, the things we hear and don't react to as strongly as we used to, the jokes we're ok with we guess, the movies we don't question quite hard enough, the nightly news stories we've been trained to expect, the ways we have of closing our eyes to our own thoughts and actions when we should instead be examining them. Casual Racism.

Enough talk!
Anyone who read this far, thanks, and good luck. We all need it.

[ekundayo]