For those of you not familiar with the series, Resident Evil is a game that’s about the purest of pastimes - fucking up zombies and other nasties with an ever-expanding lineup of weapons.
Resident Evil 5 takes the series to Africa…and then there’s controversy.
On Your Black Writers today, Tolu Olorunda takes exception to the RE5 trailer:
What I witnessed [in the RE5 trailer] was nerve-wrecking, painful, mind-numbing and heart-racing… It wasted no time in capitalizing upon the long history of blatant depictions of Africans as savages and helpless imbeciles. The trailer featured a Caucasian male mutilating African villages, along with Africans. With the not-so ancient history of colonialism and neo-colonialism in Africa, the issue of racial insensitivity and indifference must be brought to the centerfold…
My opinion? The trailer above shows a disturbing insensitivity to the rather loaded images of a heavily armed white guy mowing down rabid Africans. But I don’t think the game is intentionally racist, simply totally tone deaf to what’s implied by the previous sentence.
But there’s something more disturbing than the trailer. It’s the dumbasses who watched it and couldn’t see anything even potentially wrong with it.