During a recent interview with MTV Multiplayer (concerning the depiction of blacks in games), N'Gai Croal of Newsweek gave an enlightening talk about the controversy behind the Resident Evil 5 trailer, and how Capcom could have done things to avoid the unnecessary fuss.
According to Croal, it was just a few moments in, when he realized that there were some things about the trailer that had the potential to inflame members of the black community, however unintentional it might have been. While the majority of us were fawning over the detailed images and dynamic lighting -- not to mention getting all antsy about the debut of a new Resident Evil game on next-generation hardware since RE4 righted the series again -- others were seeing something starkly different. To them the trailer contained just over three minutes of classic racist imagery that many Caucasians (including myself) never even noticed:
More on this, after the jump:
"There was stuff like even before the point in the trailer where the crowd turned into zombies. There sort of being, in sort of post-modern parlance, they're sort of "othered." They're hidden in shadows, you can barely see their eyes, and the perspective of the trailer is not even someone who's coming to help the people. It's like they're all dangerous; they all need to be killed. It's not even like one cute African - or Haitian or Caribbean - child could be saved. They're all dangerous men, women and children. They all have to be killed."
Croal then goes on to touch upon Resident Evil 4, and that even though the zombies (yes, I know they were supposedly not zombies in that game) were obviously non-white, a fair comparison cannot be made, considering the historical American race relations of the past...
