Links about Bioshock Infinite and Racism

“Bioshock Infinite and the Terrible Case for Banning All White People from Games Journalism”

We never really hear the very human stories of the oppressed in popular media, especially Bioshock: Infinite. Or when we do, they’re so twisted and portrayed in a light that makes them seem as bad as an oppressor like Comstock. This is really one of those times where hiring a non-white writer, or someone with the slightest hint of empathy would have been a tremendous help, as clearly Levine and the gang couldn’t figure out how to deal with the issue of race in Infinite without sidelining it for a rather intricate, in-depth science fiction/time-travel story centered around a white man’s guilt. 

Here’s another post by a different person…

you think because you throw in daisy fitzroy as the leader of the vox populi (and then subsequently kill her in one plotline so you can make some statement about reverse racism and crazy violent blacks going off the deep end or something, idek) that you’ve covered the scope of black resistance, that you’ve captured the spirit of civil rights struggle (even though you nested it within an ineffectual and just as evil as everybody else popular humanist resistance because it would probably be reverse racist to allow black people to have our own movement, which is, as i said, what happened in actual reality)

seriously? you make racism against blacks germaine to the plot of your storyline, but you don’t even do any research to find out what else blacks were up to in 1912, and then you bury our ACTUAL struggle against racism in a hippie dippy “we’re all human” resistance movement turned sour. seriously?


Bioshock Infinite and Criticisms of Racism

I’ve been hearing a lot of white people defend Bioshock Infinite’s depiction of racism after people of color decry its depictions. If you are a white player who does not see the racism that people of color try to point out, it’s time to take a step back before you start claiming that people of color and “social justice warriors” just have major butthurts over a silly video game.

If people of color play a video game and say that’s it’s racist and explain why, everyone should give the benefit of the doubt to them because people of color are far far far FAR more likely to point out what is racist than white people are. That is simply a fact. This idea is particularly important when analyzing media and entertainment because it is often viewed through a lens of “harmlessness” when media presentation is a great indicator of cultural viewpoints of race, gender, class, etc. by the people who create those media, and, by extension, the greater population of people who consume such media.

The Western gaming world and game creation is more than saturated with white players and white creators, so when a POC says that a game is racist, it’s time to take a moment and take a breath before we go huffing and puffing by proclaiming something is “accurate” because players of color will automatically be able to see nuances of race relations that white players and even white creators did not see or intend.

And let’s also all remember that the two main characters in Infinite are white, and that having white protagonists in a media form in which racism plays a huge part is generally written from a white perspective that glosses over the actual atrocities of POC, because the audience, and in this case, the player, is not allowed to experience the racism in the Infinite world as a POC. So we should keep that in mind when we play this game, judging on whether the “accuracies” of racism might simply be used as props for the white character’s growth and POV, not as an actual depiction of the manifestations of racism for the people actually oppressed by it.

Now I, who is POC and a gamer who has yet to play Infinite, will of course judge the game fully whenever I play it. However, I know that for the POC who have played it and say that it’s racist and have written why it is racist, I will trust their instincts and their commentary because POC more often than not have experienced enough racist bullshit to identify racist bullshit.