Anthropologist says Resident Evil 5 racism claims are "silly"

There's an interesting interview with a leading expert on racism, Glenn Bowman, posted on Videogamer, discussing whether or not Resident Evil 5 is a racist game.

The senior lecturer at the department of anthropology at the University of Kent said he thought it was "silly to call it racist."

"It is about using Africa as threat, but they've got to use somewhere as threat", he said.

"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."

He did say, however, that it has the potential to be much more racist. But isn't.

"I don't think it actually is racist. I think what they're trying to do is say this is a s**t scary space that you're in and it's full of anger and furthermore also people hate Americans".

The rest of the interview is through here, and it's well worth the read.