To summarise the blog post, posted by an educated white, male gamer, which is a more significant point than you might think, responded to this article, which in turn was a response to this article, and outlined why RE5 is not racist in any way shape or form, oddly contradicting a much more rational post he made on the subject last year. He essentially accuses RE5's detractors of making something out of nothing, going so far as to say that N'Gai Croal's comments on the trailer, which opened my eyes when I read it, were 'over the top'.
I have to ask Mr. Peckham, for 'twas he who wrote the offending blog post, what the fuck are you doing?
As an white, male gamer myself, I find discrimination hard to spot sometimes, unless it's really overt. Just like Mr. Peckham, I stand in what is probably the ultimate position of privelege, no one discriminates against me, unless I bring it on myself. This means that I can't necessarily trust my initial instincts when it comes to discrimination, and I have to take a step back and think about the situation. Recently I made an complete ass of myself commenting on a blog post that talked about the progressive nature of Portal and Mirror's Edge. My first reaction to the reply my comment received was one of anger. I got defensive, which is a pretty common reaction for a person of privilege to have, but then I realised what I'd done and apologised. Basically, I didn't know what I was talking about and got called up on it, which is how it should be.
The point hidden in that very long diversion is that dismissing accusations of discrimination from a position of privilige is a dangerous thing at best, and to do it in such a cavalier manner as Mr Peckham does is down right lunacy. I'm not saying I'm perfect, hell I'm clearly patting myself on the back for being man enough to apologise, but at least I'm aware that as a white person, I might not be best qualified to judge whether something is racist or not.
For the record, I don't think that Capcom are being intentionally racist and I never have, but I think that they were unaware of the effect the imagery in RE5 might have. As I said in my earlier post on the subject, setting a Resident Evil game in Africa makes perfect sense, but it has to be handled with immense care. All the arguments against the accusations of racism are either incredibly hollow, ("It's only a game!" Oh really? I suppose this is just a picture?) or miss the point entirely. ("What about RE4? It was ok when it was Spaniards!" or "All the zombies in the previous games were white, why isn't that racist?") I don't want to address these arguments here, although I may assault a few threads where I've seen them and try and inject some sense into the proceedings, besides, Kieron Gillen summed it up better than I ever could when he said:
"Gamers want games to be taken seriously until they're taken seriously, and then they don't want them taken seriously".
