AdumbroDeus said:
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The fact that this portrayal isn't racist doesn't change the fact that racism in america is still alive and well today. All you need to do is look at media, how often do you see an asian-american lead? Now add to that, how often do you see an asian-american lead that isn't playing a martial artist or a comedic character of some variety?
And if you think that RE5's portrayal of tribals was anything but a racist caricature, you have about as much knowledge of African tribesmen as Capcom seems to.
Racism is dead in the USA as a mainstream phenomena, there ARE a few racists on the fringe of society, but that is by definition not mainstream. What your talking about is what in sociology they call "invisible knapsack" theory which is a huge joke, but forms the backbone of liberal idealogy that otherwise can't justify itself, and acts as an excuse for minorities to justify anti-societal behavior and their own failings, as opposed to doing the actual hard work of trying to fit in.
"Invisible Knapsack" theory refers to the idea of there being a knapsack full of all these things white people take for granted, that non-whites cannot in the US. A sort of metaphor for unintentional racism, based on things like "well, can you rely on it being more likely than not if you ask for the person in charge, will it be someone of your own ethnicity?".
The theory is garbage and has been laughed out of most serious discourse on the USA because by definition most of the things this winds up being applied to are simply reflections of minority vs. majority status. In a country with the majority of people being white, of course your most likely to find white people running the businesses for example. Likewise just a programs made in China or Japan have mostly Chinese or Japanese actors, programs in nations like the USA are going to involve mostly white actors. We do see minorities represented in things like the cinema, and fairly accuratly numerically compared to their numbers in society for the most part. If you start making arguements that "equality means 50-50 with white people" it becomes a joke because you can't have a memory of every minority present in a melting pot in the US for every white actor in a given film. It's unworkable not to mention totally counter productive to the stated purpose.
The very fact that you need to qualify your comments on asian actors by saying "accept for these kinds of roles" is likewise evidence that racism is dead in mainstream society. To be racist you'd have to have people saying these people are inherantly inferior and thus unable to be on the screem. Even in being typecast people are pointing towards advantages and things people of that sort are "good at" which undermines the whole arguement... assuming you had one to begin with.
I'd point to the careers of Daniel Dae Kim and Grace Park as examples of a couple of Asian/Asianesque actors that have played roles that had nothing to do with martial arts or being comedy relief. Daniel Dae Kim played on "Lost" for years, and previous to that he played a Lawyer on "Angel", and currently he plays alongside Grace Park who played a fighter pilot on "Battlestar Galactica" in "Hawaii 5-O". None of these roles have involved much comedy or the usage of martial arts, even in the action scenes when and where they have occured, and even so fisticuffs haven't been the big parts of the characters.
You can say "meh, exceptions" but see the thing is we're talking about a minority group here, you aren't going to find as many asians in the media as whites in the US cinema simply due to the population breakdown, if you did it would be very, very wierd. Given the population breakdown.
All told though if you want to deal with real racism though, try going to China and campaigning for more acceptance of whites as equals and in their media. I'll warn you, you will probably wind up not coming to a happy end though. See, racism does exist on the globe still despite the best interests of the USA to eliminate it, but the problem is that liberals feel it's too much work to deal with the real problems. It's easy to bellyache about it in the US where they know nothing bad is going to happen to them (freedom of speech) and the actual battle has already been one. It makes one feel important, and they can hold to their anti-war sentiments right alongside it. Dealing with the real racists left however is both hard, dangerous, and is probably going to involve a lot of war and violence... as a result people will sit in front of their computers and talk about evil white America... which happens because white america allows it and even has no objections to ceasing to be the majority (Hispanics will soon outnumber whites), as opposed to say going to a country where such freedoms don't exist and REALLY campaigning for civil liberties where it might matter.
