Race and Gender in Video Games

The Department of Sociology I am a student of is filled with people who talk a lot about race and gender. In fact, I would go so far as to call the department specialized in Race, Gender, and Stratification. This is a generalization, but for the most part it fits. A professor that teaches here, an amazing teacher, wrote a book called Silent Racism: How Well Meaning White People Perpetuate the Racial Divide. It is an excellent book and really serves to educate on an idea of growing importance in discussion of race, how racism is and why we are still racist despite any amount of "equal rights".

You'll see this argument in a lot of places. White Privilege, White Power, Majority Rule, all of these things serve as a synonymn for the ideas of silent racism. This term is also synonymous with feminism in that all feminist studies have to be done using white male's rules for study and white male's journals for publication. Majority rule, the completely invisible but all encompassing white male culture, and the super-saturation of these things all serve as a means through which discussion of race and gender are rendered impossible. But we just have to keep trying.

Over at the well-intended but ill thought out Critical Distance Blog, a statement ignited a flurry of anger that has been mostly misunderstood by the editors there for the same reasons that I listed above. It's difficult to talk about the things the frustrated commenters from theirisnetwork tried to discuss over there. Further, it's even more difficult when the anger and frustration of not being able to talk about these things explodes as a defensive flame driven comment on the viability of any poster's ability to discuss things as they see fit, privilege talks be damned. The unfortunate thing is that even after calming down the discussion is still confused and mangled in that those causing the issue through their privilege still do not seem to understand what is going on. This discussion takes a bit of education and a lot more reflexivity before deciding where discussion needs to be headed. I can only hope that it manages to head a little in that direction despite any amount of feet in mouth.

Tangent to this is the newest Brainy Gamer article that really brings the same subject to the floor. This was what prompted me to try and write a bit about these ideas. I didn't want to post these opinions there as I did not want the same arguments to begin. I use this blog to monitor my own interests, needs, and ability to create arguments so, if I were to create a horrid discussion here, it wouldn't really be a big deal. The discussion needs to happen but too often opinionated or frustrated conversation erupts into flames on the net and the discussion is quashed as irredeemable.

In fact, discussion of race online is typically met with "Let's just ignore it." You can even see arguments from scholarly articles as far back as the late ninties that have talked about killing race discussion as a topic (Race in Cyberspace - Lisa Nakamura, et al)

First things first, definitions. I'm just going to post the silent racism faq:

• Race awareness in well-meaning white people—including racial progressives—is both sorely lacking and a crucial piece of the racism puzzle.
• Well-meaning white people who are passive around others’ racism encourage it, whether or not they intend to.
• Slavery and segregation have been transformed into a less obvious structure: institutional racism.
• Race awareness entails understanding three facets of racism: the history of racism in the U.S., how institutional racism operates, and insight into one’s own silent racism and passivity.
• Both silent racism and passivity in well-meaning white people are instrumental in producing institutional racism.
• Throughout U.S. history a small group of white Americans has stood against the racist institutions of their day.

So, silent racism is the unintended creation of racist ideology that carries over into the institutions that govern the country. An example here is a simple one, poor people are poor because they are lazy. If a majority of black people are poor, therefore black people are lazy. It's also on the other end. Rich people are caniving money hungry horrible people, Most Jews are rich, therefore all jews are caniving money hungry people.

Now, it's called silent because we don't talk about it and that makes it worse. Think about how you feel right now. It's uncomfortable, it's accusational, it's difficult to accept. It is all of these things simply because we are comfortable in thinking we do not have these tendencies; however, we do have these tendencies. We just do not recognize them, or accept them because we are told that we do not have them. This is the most difficult portion of this argument for 95% of the time, it never gets past this point. The tendency is that people write this argument off because it is easy to just say "well this is just reverse racism, i don't want to hear it."

That argument is from a place of privilege and is exactly why this discussion is very very necessary. If the people on top refuse to acknowledge the disparity that exists between different colors of people within the same social classes, then we cannot talk about it and th resulting anger about this discussion will simply result in similar fashion of the Critical Distance blog. Fury is inevitable by minority groups who cannot talk about their shitty position simply because the majority group doesn't recognize it.

Now, this was created by the same stuff that we saw after Obama was elected. Because a Black man was elected president, therefore racism is over. The interesting thing here is that because a black man was elected president, we need to be discussing race more and fortunately, we haven't entirely closed up the discussion again. It is just unfortuante that there are so many issues with the economy right now. We'll see what happens once the economy is back on its feet or finishes its transformation.

Ok, back on topic. Damali Ayo over at fixracism.com really gets at this in an 'in your face' kind of way. I really suggest reading over her stuff, it is quite amazing. Now, let's move from race to discussion of race about video games, vis-a-vis, Brainy Gamer's topic on Sports Video Games.

Do a search for race and video games in google. The most reliable thing you'll find is a quote from gameology.org:

I am working on a paper dealing with the commodification of Blackness in video games and I am finding the subject horribly ignored.

Does anyone have some good sources for racial representation in video games and digital media? Please feel free to comment and form a mini-bibliography for myself and anyone else interested in the subject.

Here is where I try to tie in Brainy Gamer's article on sports games. I believe that we don't really talk about sports games in that it's not something a video gamer would do because we're all mostly white, privileged, nerdy boys and sports games are reserved for old men and minorities. Discussion of gender and sports is well known in academia about sports, but will not even be touched on past that female softball team you can play against in Bad News Baseball on the NES.

It just isn't really talked about. I tried looking for what I wanted to talk about but I can't really find a good dataset to look at. There is a further problem that most survey data is middle class older white people who still have land lines. Until we can find a better data gathering method that randomly samples the actual population instead of those people who have phones or can actually be bothered with returning a survey in the mail, we may actually never have accurate and reliable numbers that show just how many people from different races and ethnicities are playing video games.

Here is what I was able to find (and i'm sure I could find more if I looked harder, I just wanted to do a cursory glance right now):

This is from the Essential Facts on Video Games - Demographics:

Breakdown of sales: Family Entertainment Games: 22.3%, Action Games: 22.3%, Sports Games: 14.1%.

In the ESSENTIAL FACTS ABOUT VIDEO GAMES, race isn't even taken into account. However, I would predict that most minority video game players make up that 14.1% of sports games sales. Even in the nielson reports race is not really considered. Nothing i could find would even serve up whether or not any minority group is looked at in video gaming.

The only mention I could really find about race inside of video game (portrayal of race in video games), was this:

Among games for older kids racial representation was poor and stereotypes were only reinforced. Out of 1,716 characters, not a single Latina woman existed. Black women (for the most part) were not active participants. There were only three Native Americans and one of them had an active role while the other two were props. Meanwhile, Asian, Pacific Islander, and African American men were portrayed mainly in sports as vicious or superhuman competitors. In terms of victimization, Latinos were shown exhibiting the most pain even though they were portrayed almost exclusively in sports where injuries should not be as devastating as in more violent games. While 43% of white characters showed pain and physical harm when injured, only 15% of African Americans did. Black women were much more likely than anyone else to be the victims of violence. © Center on Media and Child Health

So, race isn't discussed in video games. I have one last point and then i'm done.

Discussion of race from a racism standpoint about video games is something that should happen. However, discussion about race need not be from a racist point of view and should never be. We need to recognize this. If I were to begin a discussion saying, "everyone like you is so lazy." Would you get immediately defensive or engage in scholarly conversation about the liklihood of a stereotype being thrusted about people like me?

The next thing I wanted to do about race was to take one of the most fantastic representations of race in video games and discuss its finer points: Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. That will come later.