AdumbroDeus, both of your arguments seem to hinge on the issue of realism. Latisha is not a racial caricature because some people sound just like her, and because homeless people really do hustle for money, is what you seem to be saying.
Thing is, whatever Edios et al intended when they put Latisha in the game, I really don't think that what they were going for was realism. This isn't
The Wire. The idea is not for an actual homeless person to see the character and say "Yeah, that's just what it's like." Quite the opposite, the company's reaction seems to indicate that the world of DX:HR is supposed to be, in some sense, post-racial--quite unlike our own.
Latisha is not
supposed to sound like a real person. It's a stylized performance, which is totally fine in and of itself. What's interesting, again, is that for whatever reason, the specific style they've chosen is pretty closely aligned to minstrel dialogue (which is why I provided a YouTube link in my previous post, to show that that connection is real).
It is also interesting that people see that very mannered characterization and think "That's exactly how homeless black people really are!" or worse yet, "If you're reading racial stereotypes into that totally harmless dialect, then
you're the racist one!" The fact that such an historically-situated archetype can just read as generically "poor" or "uneducated" or whatever else people have said in this thread? That proves my point, not yours.
AdumbroDeus said:
1. The accent and speech style is common today (ebonics, look it up).
Latisha's speech patterns sound much more like minstrelsy than like modern-day Ebonics. And yes, there is a difference. Snoop Dogg doesn't sound anything like the Kingfish, and Latisha sounds much closer to the latter.
And look, even if you're right, and if there are a whole bunch of people saying "I bees right here waitin' for you, Cap'n" in casual conversation (which I frankly doubt), characters in books and games and movies aren't real people. In media, subservient black characters who talk like Latisha have a very long and odious history, and it's that tradition (not that of the real black people whom you or I happen to know) to which Latisha belongs.
AdumbroDeus said:
2. The reality of homeless people is most want to SURVIVE, so they will perform services. Try going to a subway in NYC, homeless people will very commonly perform or do some other type of service to make ends meet in addition to simply begging.
The mere fact that Latisha is a homeless black person "performing services" is not in any way what's at issue here. What's at issue is the specific ways in which this minor black character relates to the white protagonist--the specific way that she genuflects to him, and how she's willing to help him out a whole bunch whether she gets paid or not, and yes, the fact that she sounds more than a little mammyish while doing so.
And again, I think it would be really hard to argue that Latisha is supposed to closely resemble a
real homeless person. Edios certainly isn't making that argument, and there's not much in the text to support it, so I'm honestly not sure why you're making it.
AdumbroDeus said:
Furthermore, the implications that people are drawing from her dialect (namely that they imply lack of education and sub-subservience) extremely ignorant of black urban culture or openly racist. The message is this, if you want to be judged as an equal, you need to talk like a white person, a different speech pattern automatically identifies you as inferior. On the other hand, other unusual ways of speaking english are nowhere near as looked down upon.
First, the representation of black people
is a different matter than the depiction of white southerners, or of Asians, or of whoever it is you're thinking of when you talk about "unusual ways of speaking." Slavery, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow segregation all relied on systematically representing black people as less than human, or incapable of caring for themselves, or irredeemably violent and/or stupid. While there have certainly been horrific racial caricatures of Asians, Irish, Italians, Jews, and others throughout American history, and while those are real histories that should be remembered and addressed, they are
not automatically equal to the tradition of dehumanizing or infantilizing black people.
Put simply: There was no period of American history when any of those other groups was considered property, nor were Irish Americans ever joyously and publicly lynched, in large numbers, by white mobs with de facto legal impunity.
Second, you're not arguing honestly when you talk about people "automatically" ascribing inferiority to Latisha because of her shuck-and-jive dialect. She reads as inferior because the text marks her as inferior. Her dialect doesn't exist in isolation; it appears along with her low social status and her subservience to the gravel-voiced white hero. A lot of people seem to think that it lines up
naturally, in fact, which is exactly what makes it a problem: Of course she looks and sounds like that! That's just how poor people look and sound!
If Jensen's boss sounded like Latisha, for example, then we would have something to talk about.
Finally, you didn't say that this was a censorship issue, but you're sort of inching toward that argument when you talk about how we "can't" depict homeless people "performing services." So I just want to be clear: I'm not saying Edios shouldn't be
allowed to but a minstrel show sort of a character in their game, or any of that sort of alarmist, "PC Police" nonsense. I'm just saying that they wrote the character badly, and I think they did so because they didn't have a handle on the history of the trope they'd chosen.
That Latisha exists is not surprising, or shouldn't be. That people want to talk about Latisha is potentially constructive. There is absolutely no need to get angry at those who want to talk about Latisha, as though racism would suddenly disappear if only we would stop talking about race. That's defensive, unproductive, and tedious.
