Culture

<cite>Resident Evil 5</cite> is Not Racist, Says Anthropologist

"I think people are looking too quickly to be able to jam that label onto it," said Glenn Bowman, Senior Lecturer at the Department of Anthropology at the University of Kent when asked about the alleged racism in Resident Evil 5. Videogamer.com recently sat down with Bowman and played through the first three levels of […]

Re5villager

"I think people are looking too quickly to be able to jam that label onto it," said Glenn Bowman, Senior Lecturer at the Department of Anthropology at the University of Kent when asked about the alleged racism in Resident Evil 5.

Videogamer.com recently sat down with Bowman and played through the first three levels of the game to ascertain his expert opinion on whether Capcom's game exploits stereotypical racist images of African villagers.

"I don't find this very racist," Bowman says of the game. "I think what they're trying to do is make a setting of terror, of anxiety."

Bowman also tackles the claims of detractors who cite one particular scene as the basis for their argument:

We could go back to the mention of that one scene you claim that people were using as a sign of racism, where supposedly a blonde white woman is being dragged into a second floor house to be raped - it looked like to be raped. Well there's a couple of problems there. One is she wasn't being dragged in to be raped, she was being dragged in to be infected.
And secondly the person who dragged her in is not black. Maybe there is an awareness by the makers of the game that there is a problem with a threat of racism and therefore they've diluted that problem by bringing in a number of white characters. Maybe they're simply working on the threat scenario. Certainly the presence of a lot of white characters, one) diffuses the idea that it's explicitly racist, but it also suggests they know it might be accused of being racist and possibly that's why they're doing it.

Instead of racism, Bowman goes so far as to argue that the game is full of anti-colonial themes in which the villagers are the true victims.

I would like to set up as a counter-thematic, there's a very interesting anti-colonial thematic running through it. This whole idea of the victimisation of Africa by pharmaceutical companies, by terrorist groups, all of whom seem to be run by white characters who are coming in and exploiting people. There's the diary left behind by the kid who's eventually infected (found on a table in the Native
Village section), which points out very clearly that in the past the colonials came in and exploited the local people, ripped them off of stuff, damaged them. He says that maybe they came back to give us this immunisation because they felt guilty. There's something quite interesting going on with that. The fact that they actually came back to screw them up once again and infect them with this virus or disease, seems to me to be far more damning of the colonial powers towards
Africa than it says anything about whether or not blacks are some sort of savages. The blacks here are clearly being set up as victims, alterity, frightening.

As for the African backdrop -- the single element of the game that seemingly sparked the entire racism debate -- Bowman believes it's merely a setting in which Capcom is telling a story, nothing more.

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 vicious
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.

Image courtesy Capcom

Expert delivers verdict on Resi 5 racism row [Videogamer.com]

See Also: