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Notes -
Representation in the Last of Us
Because this show is highly popular and ongoing, I’m just going to coat everything in spoiler tags.
If I had to steel man the idea of making all villains white, it would go something like this:
Before the vast majority of Western history, minorities, especially blacks Hispanics and to some degree Asians have been caricatured. When mass media first came about this was accelerated to an unprecedented degree.
After decades and decades of this harmful depiction, negative stereotypes have been baked in. In order to reverse the already baked in trends, we will need at least a few decades of vilifying white people. Then maybe we could have equal representation and declare that the war against whites is over.
To be clear I don’t exactly advocate for this position, but I do think it has a sort of insidious logic around balancing the scales so to speak. And I would agree that minorities still deal with more racism than white people when it comes to day to day interactions, in America. Institutional bias is a different animal, and conflating the two muddies the water in my opinion.
This never makes sense to me. Who is weighing the cosmic scales? Who is omniscient enough to know the true baseline for each group, how far away from that baseline each group is, and how much each interaction will nudge toward the baseline? This is of course rhetorical because no one (or group of ones) can possibly do this. So maybe…just don’t do evil hoping it comes out good?
The answer is of course a resounding chorus of:
"I am!"
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