Sixth Post: Complicity in Stereotyping

I was walking to the library today when I heard/saw a black guy leaving Kerr yelling out the lyrics to a hip-hop song. I paused to listen, and in a few seconds heard the words Fu--, Bi---, Cu--, Pu---, A--, Sh--, and of course Ni----. Some of them I heard repeatedly, and I stopped to listen for no longer than ten seconds. My thoughts ran somewhere along these lines:

For more than a hundred and forty years blacks have been fighting to be taken seriously, to be thought of as equals, and to eliminate all racial slurs from the vernacular of the allegedly oppressive white majority. Members of the black civil rights movement have rallied; they've boycotted; they've brought a million men to the steps of the National Mall. They've adapted to our system of government and lobby for a cornucopia of legislative agendas. They've made real progress and have had to fight tooth and nail for much of it. And in the early years, when the old guard of the deep south was still in power, where they fought they often paid dearly for it. They were beaten, raped, or both. They had lye thrown in their eyes, been attacked by dogs and been firehosed, tear-gassed, and tasered. They've been lynched.

And then there's this kid, walking down the sidewalk, with many people in earshot, literally yelling out rhyming couplets of vitriol and ignorance. Completely unaware of the suffering and the resiliency of all who had come before. He was acting like an attention-starved child, who resorts to yelling out bad words because negative attention is better than none at all. Or like a coward with low self-esteem who uses shocking and provocative behavior to say, "look at me, pay attention to me!"

The more I thought about it, the sadder I became. I felt sad for the wasted sacrifice of everyone who died, or suffered, or knew someone who did, so that this guy could own property or vote or attend college (not to mention not be a slave). I felt sad for his parents, who most likely have memories from the civil rights movement, and who see what their son has reduced it to. But most of all, I pity him, for being completely oblivious to all of it.

Fifth Post: Video Game Imagery

Speaking as a person who dabbles in the occasional video game, I can speak from some experience. It has been my opinion that video games, being primarily marketed to guys from the early teens and up, sometimes reflect some of the same imagery as music videos. Or at least, their creation stems from the same set of fantasies. However, the rules regarding sex in video games are very strict. The ESRB, the governing body for the video game rating system has, for better or worse, all but enacted a zero-tolerance policy when it comes to showing sex onscreen. Interesting to note, the most infamous violations of this policy, in the highly publicized Grand Theft Auto games, involve no actual onscreen sex, only some deliberately cartoonish moaning and a car bouncing up and down for a few seconds. With graphics advancing rapidly, it has become possible to faithfully recreate actual naked bodies, but this too is exceedingly rare.

As to stereotypical portrayals of women, I would say that the industry as a whole has a long way to go. If there is ever an unattractive woman in a video game, it is as a joke. And every character designer knows that when women are in video games, from martial artist ninjas to special ops commandos, the clothing credo is always "less is more." However, I don't think there's a causal link between violence in a video game and disrespectful attitudes towards women. Just the opposite, in fact. When I see a violent video game that features a female character (often of unlikely proportions) slicing and dicing or shooting her way through a legion of bad guys in little more than lingerie, it only reminds me that the whole thing is fantasy.