Laatste oordeel over racisme in Resident Evil 5

Vorige week hadden we bericht van de mening van BBFC over Resident Evil 5. De game was volgens Sue Clark niet racistisch. VideoGamer.com heeft één van UK's experts op het gebied van racisme gevraagd om een definitief oordeel te vellen over het racisme in Resident Evil 5. Glenn Bowman, een hoogleraar Anthropologie aan de universiteit in Kent, heeft de eerste paar levels mogen spelen en vindt de game niet racistisch. Hieronder staat zijn uitleg.

"It is about using Africa as threat, but they've got to use somewhere as threat, and as far as I know from what you've told me the last game used rural Spain as threat. Basically if you want to make a frightening scene you take whatever characteristics of that scene are salient and turn them align. So you get viscous Spaniards who I suspect are running around with knives or whatever. Here you get infected Africans. Maybe they'll make the next game happen in Finland and you'll have a whole series of Inuits and the like being really scary and running around with Walrus heads on. I think it's silly to call it racist.

There's a familiarity to what we call mythemes in anthropology. One of the mythemes in anthropology is clearly the legacy of colonialism which is that darkest Africa is full of weird masks and witch doctors and all sorts of things. So if you want to take Africa and you want to make Africa frightening, what you do is you bring that stuff up. In fact, my sense is that probably, although I can see why they're doing it, there's more racism in the scene of the guys beating the person in the sack, which is very much contemporary modern black Africans. More racism in there than there is in this funny kind of mythological stuff where you've suddenly got everybody running around dressed like witch doctors and the like.

The blacks here are clearly being set up as victims, alterity, frightening. Yes there are themes you can say might be somewhat racist but you know that's also about making you scared."

Wij kunnen vanaf 13 maart dus gerust onze Playstation 3 en Xbox 360 aanzetten om Resident Evil 5 te spelen.