Shoot Spaniards, Shoot Black People... Shoot Them All!!

I have lately heard about the upcoming release of the latest Resident Evil game, which is scheduled for the early next year. Its trailer can be found in many websites and, as far as I am concerned, this game will get over the previous one. However, the game is still 9 months away but has already raised huge controversy. The reason, yet, does not lie among the usual suspects (violence, "strong" language or sex) but stems from a quite big foolishness, racism.

People from around the world, Americans specially, have stated that such game is offensive against Africans because the protagonist, a White sturdy guy, fights his way out of mobs of Black people. Detractors have stated that Capcom (the producer company) has insulted the dignity and integrity of all Africans in the whole world by displaying Black people who attempt out of the blue to lynch the main character and then are killed by him as well. These guys are not obviously familiar with the Resident Evil series, thence those lame arguments and silly interpretations. If they really wanted to base their judgments on more solid grounds they should go to the earlier games. Only one Black appeared as an enemy in them, the rest are White Americans who turned into zombies. In Resident Evil 4, nevertheless, game developers decided to make radical changes to their standards, effacing any undead creature from the plot and using a Spanish village as the scenery. Leon Scott Kennedy (the protagonist in this game) finds himself fighting--obviously--White Spaniards. I never heard of any protest or complaint by Spanish players. I found neither racist connotations nor offending concepts of Spaniards nor felt myself hurt, even though I am son to a Spaniard--I found it quite amazing, indeed. If the new plot takes place in an African country, therefore the local population will be the enemies. If you go to Africa, you will find Black people. Did those detractors expect to find Swedes or Irish in an African country? Many relevant things are unfortunately quite obvious, thence they go unnoticed. Or maybe such extremist tendencies of finding evil and racism in every thing they see have drained their brains.

Ethnic minorities are quite good in finding and pointing out offending traits where there are none: movies, literature, music, images, etc. The more majorities try to respect them, the touchier minorities become. However, they mostly have no solid reasons to defend arguments such as the so-called connotative racism in this videogame. They often go to the extremism level and stigmatize everything they see or hear. It happens the same in the case of other groups: Feminists, Jews, Muslims, Christians, LBGT community, etc. They can certainly express their thoughts, but they should be more careful before throwing such accusations. They should also learn to make more careful interpretations indeed. Otherwise they will ridicule themselves as the childish, bitchy pack they could occasionally be.


Resident Evil 5, a screen-shot