So basically, animal crossing added hairdos from black culture, and white people put them on their character in game, and people are genuinely going nuts about it.
So basically, animal crossing added hairdos from black culture, and white people put them on their character in game, and people are genuinely going nuts about it.
Imagine growing up being told your hair is ugly and messy. You have to constantly work to make sure it's "presentable" for a culture that's overwhelming white making it harder to get a job because you are worried it's not professional. Imagine having a hairstyle which people will reach out and try to touch without asking permission. This is a constant in your life because it's your hair and it's another mark of how you are treated differently in society.
Then some white people decide it's cool to dress up some characters with it, and just swap it out whenever.
Worst part is how fallacious the framing of the argument is. Black and other PoC are either saying "don't do that, that's insensitive" or making fun of yts being yts while it's being exported as basically "SJW outrage culture over HAIR!?!?!" in the other corners of the internet.
You can't win with these people smh
But who do I listen to? There's as many POC saying they don't give a shit as there are people saying it's insensitive. (I mean I don't have stats to back that, but in the twitter threads that's how it looks)
Black people have been struggling to make space in gamer/nerd spaces for decades. It's not even acceptance from white people, just a space where they can exist without being attacked or appropriated. Nintendo going out of their way to include both darker skin tones and textured hair is basically throwing black people a bone, but the response from non-black gamers has been either complete indifference or outright hostility at the notion that black people are being acknowledged and respected enough to have their features included in-game. This manifested in the whole scramble that's being alluded to in OP.
Obviously, listen to black people on this and remember that there's a whole lot of bad faith going around, especially when race is the discussion. It's not "just about AC hair xDDD", it's about the wider discussion of black people in gaming spaces, the general cultural power imbalances between them and non-black gamers, and whether they should exist in them.
If one side says they don't care and the other says it bothers them, then you should er on the side of not doing the thing that's bothering people.
Yeah, that's true.
Is it though?
There will almost always be at least a small group that finds something offensive, should we really be listening to them 100% of the time? I'm sure there are at least a couple people out there who think that white people shouldn't listen to hip-hop, should we 'err on the side of caution' in that case too?
Just because a very small amount of people find something offensive, that doesn't necessarily mean that there's anything wrong with the thing, it just means that a few people are offended by it.
But hip hop also isn't inherent to someone's appearance. You can listen or not listen to hip hop and literally no one would know unless you told them, but the way that someone's hair grows or the color of their skin is immutable and shouldn't be treated like some sort of costume or aesthetic choice that can be discarded at will.
That was just an example, the point is that if you want to 'err on the side of caution' then you can always find a few people who are offended by something. If 99% of people (within a certain minority group) say "yeah this is fine it's really not a big deal" and less than 1% are offended, it's not necessarily a good idea to act like it's offensive just because some people say it is.
And what if by acting like it's a big deal you're actually weirding out the 99% of people who don't think it's offensive?
It's not like it's always better to view every controversial thing as offensive.
It's a very, "this issue doesn't affect me and I don't want to make the effort to understand it" attitude.
But this issue does not actually affect me, and I actually don't want to make the effort to understand it.
An injury to one is an injury to all.
Yeah but this is a online avatar for a video game, and there's probably at most like 2 people actually talking about it. With one side being a polite black person telling people to stop using that hair, and the other being an epic gamer telling them to go die in a tire fire, and six million people talking about that discourse. It is so far beyond my point of reference that I cannot meaningfully engage. Like how would I engage? Try to scold people for using black hair, when I myself am not black and can't meaningfully contribute to that discourse? Join the people hollering on twitter about the discourse?
Edit: I mean I guess I could say gamers are bad, but that's really just not engaging either way.
You don't have to engage the twitter discourse, and I wouldn't. Working to have an understand why it's a thing and being able to correct the record if it comes up in personal conversations (i.e. on chapo.chat) is what makes someone a good ally.
Think of it like understanding the woman suing McDonald's for hot coffee. The popular narrative of that case is very different to the actual facts.
Twitter isn't real life.
I'm not on twitter lol, I just don't buy the narrative
The silliest part is the actual "outrage culture" is these clowns getting fed "they said WHAT!???" clickbait nonsense of intentionally misquoted arguments from conversations they aren't a part of.
IDK, I am African and have exactly the kind of hair that you can make into those hairstyles (but I don't because I don't care enough about my appearance), and I don't think it's that big of an issue to apply it to a video game character and swap it out.
Everyone has a different experience, are you African in a predominately black culture or a white one?
Right now, I live in the West.
Like I said everyone has a different experience, and how racism exists within a culture and becomes internalized depends on how and where people grew up and who they interacted with. As I said in a different comment, I imagine this was someone trying to give some education about systemic racism to gamers, which then got blown up because, well gamers.
I understand that argument, that being said structurally it could be applied to almost anything. I kind of understand the other argument about having to fight for black hairstyles to be accepted in white spaces, but I just can't see that it does a sufficient amount of harm for it to be worth fighting about.
I think that the US context for these things is very important. I also think that fights for acceptance and understanding are ones we should have.
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Interesting. I'd never considered that it would extend to video games.