At least twice on Kotaku this week, the racial implications have caused a commenting explosion, instigated chiefly by an African-American weblogger voicing her concerns about the game.

Here's the full trailer, the one I downloaded on my PS3...

I don't think Capcom, a Japanese developer, intended to make a political statement, but here in America, it seems impossible not to see it as such when taken, and I'll italicize this, taken out of context of the actual game. Racism is alive and well in America (as it is everywhere, including Japan), and although we hope that black and white relations have greatly improved, there is still quite a ways to go. In my hometown, I can't drive far without seeing a Confederate flag of some sort. But I also see a growing number of biracial couples, which tells me that the younger generations have happily shattered that taboo.

Resident Evil is a game series about killing zombies. End of synopsis. There is no reason why STARS's crusade against Umbrella and its various zombie-making parasites shouldn't travel to Africa (or Haiti, given the historic zombie/voodoo connection that Kotaku points out). We spent so much time stuck in the predominantly white Raccoon City, working out light puzzles just to get into the damn shopping mall, and now editions 4 and 5 seem to be taking gamers on a world tour of zombie hotspots.

As a gamer, I look at that video and think "I hope we get to toast the bastards that corrupted this town," just as I did in RE4. Early in RE4, when you first meet a Ganados and Leon begins by asking the guy if he has seen the girl in the photograph, I was one of those players who hesitated to see what would happen. Maybe this villager is fine? No, I got bit. And the game made it clear that there was no way to save the people from the monsters within. So from then on, these Spanish-speaking villagers were the New Zombie Standard. I'm sure something similar will happen in RE5.

But if you walk into that trailer cold, holy shit, it looks like Dick Cheney's dream Katrina evac footage. The first problem is that the villagers are not especially zombie-like. The attacking throng is clearly demented and hungry to kill, but the people lack the usual bloody threadbare arms, gaping midsections of entrails, dangling eyeballs or flip-top skulls. Plus, they move really fast. So you don't really get a B-movie zombie feel from the trailer, you see mobs of Africans acting murderously aggressive against one white guy. And then they get killed.

Despite what you may know about the RE franchise, the depiction of black people as ignorant, mumbling savages and getting slaughtered by a white cop is a complete pile of cultural ickiness. And that's what this poor woman is seeing when she views that trailer. I don't think we should ignore that, we should be discussing that. Instead, her lack of context about video games is met with the dull roar of a thousand angry keyboards, some attempting reason but most resorting to slurs, half-baked justifications, and pathetic cries of "no, you're the racist!"

Here's the most common retorts:

"It takes place in Africa, so of course there's zombie Africans!"
Misses the point entirely. It's not about the game's setting at all, it's about the shared history of black oppression. Nobody is suggesting that Capcom should set the game in Kenya and then fill the streets with white zombies. Without the grounding of the series' fight against zombies (which the trailer does a poor job of explaining), it becomes a KKK porn film. Watch the trailer again and pretend that you never heard of Resident Evil. There is NOTHING in there to suggest zombies... particularly if all you know about zombies comes from old movies. It is outright racist when viewed from that angle.

"You can just not play it if you don't like it!"
Absolutely. And if somebody starts up the Let's Kill Kittens show on basic cable, I can also just flip right past it. Or, I can complain loudly about how I don't think people should kill kittens and I definitely don't think it should be on television. But if I watch an episode of LKK and find out that it's just a sitcom with a stupid Adult Swim style non-sequitur name, then I will have learned the context and will likely stop complaining about it.

Our African-American weblogger needs to learn the context of RE5 (and I can't blame her for not being aware of it), but that doesn't mean she shouldn't stand up against footage that, to her view, shows black people being grotesquely stereotyped and viciously slaughtered by a heroic white male action movie star.

"Spanish people didn't complain about Resident Evil 4!"
First of all, some may have. But more importantly, the Ganados are pretty much white in appearance. I actually thought they looked more Eastern European and was surprised to hear them speaking garbled monster-Spanish. Additionally, although white America certainly has racist attitudes towards Spanish-speaking peoples (just put up a bi-lingual sign anywhere in the midwest and wait), the history of white America and black America is far more dogeared.

Here's the thing about race relations: the majority race does NOT get to decide what shouldn't offend the minority race(s). That is just crazy talk.

One of my most regretted lunchtime conversations at work revolved around the use of an American Indian for a college mascot. The proponent in the argument, an alum, hated the idea that the Native American movement was making colleges change their mascots... and I, trying to get out of the conversation, lamely agreed, stating that "as long as the word is treated with respect, why shouldn't they use it" (IE, not attached to ghoulish "red man" caricatures, not associated with insulting stereotypical "ugh" language, etc).

No. What I should have said was "Look, you white folks don't get to decide what shouldn't offend Native Americans. That is their word. That is their image. That is their tribe name. They get to decide who uses it. Go call yourselves the bulldogs or something." I didn't, and I feel like I aided and abetted a hate crime.

"White people didn't complain about any other Resident Evil game!"
My smartass answer is, because white people don't think about other races, so white zombies in a white city are fine because everybody's white.

But the problem here is that this claim thinks that "white (majority) cop killing white (majority) zombies" is somehow equivalent to "white (majority) cop killing black (minority) zombies." Since white people didn't complain, black people shouldn't! Things are quite a bit more complex than that simple role reversal. RE5 futzes it up further by making the zombies (to our view) poverty-stricken. So now it's "well-dressed white (majority) cop killing poor black (minority) zombies that don't look like zombies." Taken out of context, that is wholly indefensible.

I wonder if there would have been any argument at all if Capcom had introduced a black character as the heroic lead in this trailer. Or if the villager zombies looked like gory, pus-filled Fangoria zombies. I'll bet not.

"It's just a game."
Jesus, on one hand we're all pissed that Roger Ebert says video games can't be art and now we want an activist viewpoint to cool off because "it's just a game"?! We are not having this both ways.

It's likely that the unspoken explanation behind "it's just a game" is "and I can tell fantasy from reality, and in this fantasy I am killing zombies, not people." Again, yes, it's fine because you know the story of Resident Evil, but anybody who doesn't should rightfully twitch at the visuals in that trailer.

Those who know the game know the storyline, and they are outraged that somebody should be outraged about killing zombies (the Manhunt 2 ban is still too close to our hearts). To those who don't know Resident Evil, it is most certainly not "just a game," it's not even "just a movie," it's playing off of fears and hates that still need generations to work out. And it's coming out clearly in favor of the white guy.

..

I think the key point is that the our African-American weblogger probably had no idea that Resident Evil 4 had Spanish-speaking "zombies," or that the game will ultimately be about liberating the villagers from Umbrella or whoever is controlling them. Her phrase "the Black people are supposed to be zombies" indicates to me that she sees the zombie concept as being loosely applied, perhaps to hide the game's motive of letting white gamers blow through villages of poor black people. She doesn't know that the game will eventually reveal sick little alien mindslugs inside those villagers, and that they are no longer human. (If RE5 follows the path of RE4, that is.)

I also think that, as the gaming media swooped down on this story, everybody neglected to realize that it's just this woman's weblog entry. She saw a disturbing game trailer (mentioned in rather thoughtful Village Voice article) and commented on it. She's not calling her Congressman, she's not campaigning to shut down all video games.

Although, as the little-reported follow-up entry suggests, the terrible behavior found in most of the comments has led this particular website to think just that: "given the response from gamers… I think we should all be very afraid. Many of these folks seem like the type who would try to reenact scenes from Resident Evil 5. Can you say Columbine?"

Oh great. Nice work, dumbasses.

It's a shame, because it's a sweet trailer. The harsh lighting adds a slick style to the realistic figures. One of the series' original characters returns. The over-the-shoulder shooting style of RE4 looks intact. There's tons of character models. The environments looks amazing. But nobody is paying attention to any of that.

I wonder if Capcom Japan feels totally blindsided by this. I hope that they issue an official company statement soon. Maybe explain a little more about the game's setting, assert that they had no racist intentions, and hope that everyone shows up for the full story when the game is released. This situation reads to me like a classic cultural misunderstanding on the Japanese' part. Team RE travelled to Africa, shot lots of source photography, then went back and made an awesome game without fully realizing how the imagery might be perceived by a country only fifteen years past its last full-on race riot.