I watched a video about it a while ago, a guy who speaks both English and Japanese fluently went through and played it in Japanese and went (more or less) line by line to explain the differences.

He was extremely sympathetic to the guy you mentioned giving him the benefit of the doubt, and pointing out the massive amount of work Square gave him. He surmised the translator wanted to make Barret more "relatable" to Americans by making him an "angry black man" using the only context he had for black men. (Mr. T)

In the Japanese texts they really hammer home that his anger is fueled by sadness and his worldview is even more explicitly leftist (I'm pretty sure he says most certainly Barret is a communist).