Just read the Herbert thread on WD, needless to say I’m incredibly disappointed with our community.
The amount of white people that add their input into the thread telling native people to “calm down”, that they’re “overreacting” and “finding a problem with an imaginary bear”, is absolutely shameful. You have no place to talk when you have never been depicted in a dehumanizing way as a joke. In fact, WHITE PEOPLE have been at the forefront of racist stereotypes in art and literature for a very very long time. If anything, you should be listening to the people that your ancestors actively suppressed and wiped out so you can be better and make up for their mistakes.
Herbert’s design IS racist. No hate to Xylax or the WD team in general, but from what I’ve seen they’re all white Europeans making games in predominantly POC areas, going off second-hand knowledge. Even in LD you can see hints of this, with unintentional stereotypes of the African culture in the writing and drawings. They should be way more careful with how they make things in the future after this, as even I feel that the brief staff “input” into the thread was tone deaf (esp with the “title is misleading” part — no, it’s completely correct, it just hits too close at home and makes several white people uncomfortable).
The reason why this stereotype of the NA people is racist is because it was the product of “months” of alleged research done by a foreigner with presumably very little prior knowledge about their culture. Sure, they’ve seen input by natives, and sure, they took it into account — but they ultimately made the same vast generalization that Americans make, which is that Natives only exist in a wise, but savage, plant-expert, land-worshipping state, just like overweight black women only can be in a perpetual Mammy limbo because they’re just more “motherly, asexual, and wise for a negro”. (Just gonna preface this with: yes, I AM black, don’t @ me).
The least the admins can do is take all this into account and make minor changes to the design. It isn’t very hard and it would please a good portion of the community and educate the other half.
Anyways, just needed to rant about that thread. It really upsets me that we have these kinds of people here. Racial stereotypes matter in art and games too, because people unfamiliar with them take that away as fact, and continue the trend. It also is not nice to see your history hastily combobulated into a character either, and to be made to feel ashamed when you find it offensive and belittling.
