Is this Video Game Portraying Racist Stereotypes? You Decide…

“If you walk around Detroit, you’ll find this person.”

This was the description of the user submitted video in the clip above.

It has been some time since I have visited the fine city of Detroit, so long that it now has a new baseball stadium and has since handed its most valuable companies over to the government. But I do not recall the majority, or even a minority of the many people I encountered, being similar to the character “Latisha” depicted in the newly released video game, Deus X: Human Revolution.

Latisha is digging around in the trash and dropping dayyummms like it’s going out of style. The event in the video game was seemingly overlooked by only the game’s developers, but many of the fans who have played the game, or have seen the above clip, are up in arms about it.

Have you EVER met a black person who actually spoke like this?

“I BEES RIGHT HERE WAITIN’FOR YOU CAP’N!!”

For the most part, slang like this arguably hasn’t been used for roughly two centuries, i.e. when slavery justified its use as a means of creating a language barrier between slaves and their masters. As described by the scholar Clarence Major in the more modern sense:

This so-called private vocabulary of black people serves the users as a powerful medium of self-defense against a world demanding participation while at the same time laying a boobytrap-network of rejection and exploitation. AfroAmerican slang is created out of the will to survive on black terms. Black slang stems more precisely from a somewhat disseminated rejection of the life-styles, social patterns, and thinking in general of the Euro-American sensibility. The subculture always has a proportionately larger impact upon a dominant culture, rather than vice versa.

An example of “The Character”:

A video of “The Person”:

Thomas’ thesis on why slang exists is striking and it points out that there were seemingly very few black people on the Deus Ex team–if there were, would they honestly recognize this as current slang?

If it’s true that the development team was lacking black people, and that certainly seems to be the case given the clip, what does this say about the white perception of “black inner city females?” Is this an accurate depiction of who they are, or worse, were the developers poking fun at the idea of what it means to be a poor african american female?

Game developers are not dumb people, in fact they are some of the most intelligent and creative minds on the face of the planet–you’d think they’d hold every character to the highest standard–either they simply missed the boat on this one, which is a major goof, or they need to start hanging out with a more diverse crowd…

But here’s the most astonishing part of all of this…for those of you unfamiliar with Deus Ex, the game, it is set in the future. The developers at Eidos ostensibly have as much creative capital as they want, and they choose to create a character based on stereotypes that couldn’t be any more ingrained in the past. That’s like making a sci-fi film in the year 2200, giving everyone a fancy hovercraft to patrol around in, but still filling the thing up with gasoline.

It’s certainly disappointing to see this stereotype still exist in mainstream society, especially from a game developer that is one of the most successful on the planet. Perhaps this is an honest interpretation of how they feel inner city people communicate, if that is the case, how many of you can say that you have ever met someone in your life that communicates like Latisha in Deus Ex? Do you think the developer rationally wanted to create an accurate character portrayal? Would it bother you if that answer was no?

Did you catch this while you were playing the game? If you haven’t played the game yet, does this affect your decision on whether or not to buy it?

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