Much to the dismay of Resident Evil fans, the Resident Evil 5 racism debate is still continuing. This time, Tolu Olarunda at the Your Black Writers blog, recently watched the Resident Evil 5 trailer and wrote a rather scathing report on it, calling the video "nerve-wrecking, painful, mind-numbing and heart-racing".

In the span of just a few hours, the blogger has recieved almost 200 comments on the issue both agreeing and disagreeing with the article. Read them here - some are quite interesting.

A couple weeks ago, a friend sent me a A couple of weeks ago, a friend sent me a YouTube link. He described it as “African genocide.” Not knowing what to expect, I clicked on it. What I witnessed for those next 3 minutes, was nerve-wrecking, painful, mind-numbing and heart-racing. It was a trailer for a Video Game called “Resident Evil.”

This specific trailer was an eyeful in the most horrid sense. 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. This patent-reality must be interrogated excruciatingly to expose the silliness of those who claim the 21st century marked the dawn of a post-racial world.

What was not funny, but sort of interesting, was that there were so many gamers who could not at all see it.” To say the least, Resident Evil 5 producer, Jun Takeuchi, appears to be a card-carrying member of that classic club which pride themselves in being comfortably uninformed of the racial realities that engulf the societies in which they exist. He claimed to be bitterly misinformed of the racial conundrum he had created. In an interview with Japan's “Famitsu magazine,” he spoke unabashedly about the decision to use Africa as the setting for this installment of the video-game phenomena, saying, "We really wanted to show the origins of the virus, so for the setting we thought, how about using the place where humankind was born... We thought we would use Africa, which is now called the birthplace of humanity." In response to those who labeled his “art-work” as racially-charged, Takeuchi responded, stating, “In terms of the reaction, we're in the business of entertainment… We didn't set out to make a racist game or a political statement. We did feel there was a misunderstanding about the initial trailer.” This act of staged-ignorance is the birth child of a “neo-liberalized” atmosphere that champions Political Correctness as a substantive means of resolving America’s race problem.

Miss Razz via yourblackwriters.blogspot.com »