Race-ident Evil 5

So RE5's producer is claiming that RE5 isn't racist, and isn't backing down. If you're not familiar with this story, here's the piece from Kotaku:

When Capcom first showed Resident Evil 5 at E3 2007, there was a collective sense that what we'd just seen was going to stir the pot, as a big brawny white guy had just done his share of laying waste to an angry mob of Africans. Sure enough, Capcom of Japan received more than its share of criticism from those inside and outside of the gaming press. The first to lobby a notable complaint was blog Black Looks, writing that RE5 was "problematic on so many levels, including the depiction of Black people as inhuman savages."
Newsweek's general editor of tech N'Gai Croal later levied a similar but more measured assessment, saying that much of what was shown in the initial trailer "dovetailed with classic racist imagery," leaving him with the impression that "Clearly no one black worked on this game."
We were curious, in light of new media that seems to show a more racially diverse set of enemies and a noticeably less WASP-y new partner for Chris Redfield, if the team had taken that criticism to heart and altered some of their design decisions
Resident Evil 5 producer Jun Takeuchi told us "No, not really." He said via his translator that cries of racism "didn't have any effect on the game design."
On the subject of Chris Redfield's new sidekick, one who appears to lean toward ethnically ambiguous, Takeuchi said "We wanted Chris to have a partner who was familiar with the environment. She's been in there since pretty much the beginning."
"In terms of the reaction, we're in the business of entertainment," Takeuchi said. "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."
The Resident Evil 5 producer said they'd sent a team of Capcom staffers to Africa to do research in the area, stressing that they had decided to include Arab and Caucasian peoples based on what they'd seen while on location. We found it odd that there was virtually no non-Black representation in RE5's debut trailer, but Takeuchi was adamant that the current product is in line with their experiences.

Frankly, I'm not quite sure what to think of the issue. It's great that the industry's at a point where gaming's a serious enough medium that the racism within them is actually an issue. And sure, they've garnered their share of controversy. Remember the Native-American-shootin' frenzy Gun? How about the Vice City controversy over "Kill all the Haitians"? Certain games have never been about taking themselves seriously, and Resident Evil has always been a franchise all about killing zombies with sweet guns. Sure, this doesn't make RE exempt from offending people, and I agree that changing a game's geographic setting requires diligent research and special sensitivities towards the people who live in those settings. The people who made this trailer didn't seem to catch on.
However, once again, this isn't the first time a Resident Evil game has been inaccurate or offensively stereotypical about its inhabitants. Remember Luis from RE4? I don't know what kind of Spanish-suave look they were going for with him, but they used pretty much every stereotype in creating his character - from the vest, to the long hair, to the boots, to the overdone jewelry, to that awesomely-bad Antonio Banderas accent.

And what about the little villages in that game? Their inhabitants were called Los Ganados, which means "The cattle", or "The mob". The church was the village's center, and its residents were, what, farmers with pitchforks and chickens that just roamed the dirt roads? I doubt Capcom went to Europe to research this before making the game. Do you think any of the people on Capcom's team were Hispanic or from a similar area? Did this offend anybody?
Nobody thought about these things when playing RE4 because they were too busy shooting up zombies, which is pretty much the only purpose the villagers served. I'd be willing to bet that Capcom isn't asking to be taken seriously with RE5. It's a chance to shoot up zombies in a different place from RE4 with better weapons, new characters, and the next-gen treatment.
This is what Newsweek's N'Gai Croal has to say about the issue:

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. And given the history, given the not so distant post-colonial history, you would say to yourself, why would you uncritically put up those images? It’s not as simple as saying, “Oh, they shot Spanish zombies in ‘Resident Evil 4,’ and now ‘black zombies and that’s why people are getting upset.” The imagery is not the same. It doesn’t carry the same history, it doesn’t carry the same weight. I don’t know how to explain it more clearly than that.
I think the audience isn’t demanding much change. They like the games they’re playing. They’re by and large comfortable with the amounts of stereotypes in their games. You know because another thing that you sort of have gamers run into in situations like this is that, “Oh it’s just a game.” [laughs] You know, if it’s just a game, then why do we care about how culturally relevant they are? I care about how culturally relevant they are. I take games as seriously as other art forms.

Ultimately, I think Croal makes a valid argument. In this day and age, there are boundaries and people need to be careful when they put things out that might perpetuate ignorance and/or racism. And sure, the original RE5 teaser wasn't sensitive to that. However, if that's the stance we're going to take on the games industry, then this issue should have shown its ugly face a long time ago, before Resident Evil 5, before Resident Evil 4, even before Mai Ling's cartoonishly-Asian accent in Metal Gear Solid.
If this racism in games issue hasn't exploded until now, then we've been playing games in blissful ignorance toward them for years. It's not just unfair to lay the consequences of this on RE5, but it's also hypocritical. The fact that Resident Evil had to move to Africa in order for gamers to realize that  Capcom doesn't make the most politically correct games just seems contradictory to me.
But hey, I guess it had to happen sometime, and I'm glad that we're holding games to standards of social justice. I just hope that we're consistent, and that when other franchises hit similar nerves, we stick to our guns and hold them to the standards we're holding RE5 to - not for Capcom, not for sales, but for the sake of the industry and its evolution into a medium where every developer and publisher is sensitive and aware of social issues.

And yes, Croal, I'm especially holding you to this.
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Check out the old trailer and the new trailer, and make your own decisions.