Then as teenagers it is common for us to go through a rebellious phase – not necessarily acting outside of any established moral or ethical framework, but daring to venture out on our own, to establish our identities as individuals, and to explore for ourselves what constitutes “truth”. Sometimes we act like raving lunatics just to be contrary.

Then we enter adulthood, and invariably become more “grounded”, learning to temper our youthful passions, to focus that energy towards more “practical” pursuits.  We learn balance, objectivity, humility.  We are able – in most cases – to reconcile our personal views with the fact that others have different views.

We grow up.

It occurred to me recently that there may be a parallel between this maturation from childhood to adulthood, and people’s progression through different phases of belief and disbelief.  Of course not everyone has the journey through belief and/or disbelief, just as we don’t all mature at the same pace or experience the same things at any given point in our lives.  So the parallel I am drawing is meant to be generic and abstract, rather than a precise comparison.

For those of us who grow up in religious households, we are taught our parents’ beliefs, go to their church, temple, or mosque if they have one, and are saddled with our parents morals, ethics, and any baggage that might come with it.  We take what we are given at face value, accept it as truth, due to the trust we place in those that have proven themselves by caring for us.  But unlike our natural inevitable journey into adolescence, many people never push beyond the beliefs instilled in them during childhood, they do not dare to venture out on their own, to establish their own personal religious identity.

More often than not, those who do not “progress” beyond this stage are the fundamentalists of any given theology, the hardliners, the literalists.  These are people who retain their childhood stories but never learned to look at it with grown-up eyes, to appreciate things like subtlety, nuance, multiple interpretations – like only appreciating poetry where it rhymes, rather than being able to read between the lines.

For those that do move to the next phase, however,  some rebel violently against their former beliefs and institutions – or at least the most vile version or perception of those institutions.  Perhaps they rebel due to a falling out with a parent or preacher or other authority figure.  Perhaps because of some major discrepancy between what we’ve been told to think and what we’ve reasoned for ourselves or even directly experienced.  This discrepancy usually has some noteworthy psychological impact, forcing a person not just to let go of their beliefs, but to run away from them screaming and yelling.

These are people like the militant atheists and agnostics – those for whom it is not enough to simply disbelieve, but who feel compelled to attack those who do believe. Not all atheists fit this description as I’ll explain in the third phase below. Far from simply establishing themselves as individuals “free” of religion, they feel some pressing need to return to their old beliefs and institutions with venom and fire, to criticize and belittle them.  In this way they are just as tethered to those old institutions as they always were, their identities as atheists dependent upon there being a religion against which to rebel.

Just as angry teenagers do not listen to their parents’ reasoning, their attempts to defend their choices, militant atheists do not listen to the more rational believers, the liberal theologians.  They are too busy screaming and yelling.  They need to cast religion and religious people as villains against whom they must stand in opposition.  The ironic thing is that they become the very thing that they are trying to rebel against, like the worst nightmare of any rebellious teenager – to become just like their parents.

The new atheists, who attack a repugnant version of religion, use it to condemn all religion. They use it to deny the reality and importance of the religious impulse. They are curiously unable to comprehend those who found through their religious convictions the strength to stand up against injustice…The new atheists, like all fundamentalists, flee from complexity. They can cope with religion in its most primitive and abusive form. They are helpless when confronted by a faith that challenges their caricatures.

America’s New Fundamentalists pp. 33-34

My experience with this involved some evangelicals and their implication that my mother, for her experimenting with Buddhism and other religions, would be condemned to Hell.  Another example can be seen in the movie The God Who Wasn’t There, which presented itself as a critique of religion and the Jesus myth, but by the end revealed itself to be one man’s personal vendetta against his religious upbringing and parochial school.  Much like a teenager finally getting to tell her parents all the things they did wrong in raising her.

Finally, though, the incendiary passions of militant atheism, like adolescence, are tempered through a sort of rational – rather than physical – maturity.  We learn to read religion like poetry – to understand subtlety, nuance, interpretation.  We learn that no one interpretation is necessarily right or wrong, but that they simply are.  This is not to say that we become believers again, but we no longer categorically deny the possibility – or legitimacy – of believing again.  And should we choose not to believe, we are able to make peace with religion, to reconcile our disbelief with others’ belief, to accept that disbelief is merely another interpretation of our experience.

To clarify, I do not mean to imply any qualitative difference between people at the different stages of belief or disbelief.  I do not think that people at any given stage are better than any other, no more than adults are better people than teenagers, or teenagers better people than young children.  They all simply have different ways of viewing and interpreting the world and their experiences within it.  I do contend, however, that just as adults tend to be better educated, better adjusted, and to possess greater wisdom for their length of experience, those who have progressed to the “third phase” are also wiser and better adjusted.  They are more capable of higher order thinking, more rational, more objective, and more established and comfortable within their identities.

They are independent enough to think for themselves, to make their own choices, and wise enough to look deeper into things rather than taking them at face value.  They are secure enough that they no longer need to prove themselves against the standards or norms of another.  They are grounded enough to no longer need to fly to the attack on others’ beliefs, or the defense of their own.

In short, they have grown up.

In a New York Times Op-Ed, Ishmael Reed discusses the movie Precious, and how it was offensive to the African-American audiences to whom he spoke, while being more widely accepted by white audiences.

He writes:

Among black men and women, there is widespread revulsion and anger over the Oscar-nominated film about an illiterate, obese black teenager who has two children by her father. The author Jill Nelson wrote: “I don’t eat at the table of self-hatred, inferiority or victimization. I haven’t bought into notions of rampant black pathology or embraced the overwrought, dishonest and black-people-hating pseudo-analysis too often passing as post-racial cold hard truths.” One black radio broadcaster said that he felt under psychological assault for two hours. So did I.¹

It seems to be Reed’s contention that the heart-wrenching portrayal of an African-American woman living in a terrible situation is palatable to white Americans because they already think very little of how African-Americans live.  On the other hand, African-Americans whose lives do not in any way resemble that of Precious should be offended for how that story misrepresents them.

And here is where Mr. Reed and – everyone else who feels this way – makes a critical mistake.  Like so many others, he treats the example of one individual who happens to be African-American necessarily as a representation of all African-Americans.  This kind of presumption is one that bubbles up from the cracks of institutionalized racism.  It is an irony and a travesty where African-Americans themselves – like Mr. Reed – are instilled with racist presumptions by way of this institution.

One of the many dimensions of racism is that people of color are seen first for their race and second – if at all – for their individual merits.  Along with this also comes the idea that the actions or experiences of one African-American somehow represents all African-Americans.  For example, the more salacious behavior of some African-American celebrities – like rappers or athletes – are taken as evidence of some moral depravity inherent to their race.

It is this way of thinking that gives rise to stereotypes.  Every stereotype has some basis in reality.  But where the actions, thoughts, or experiences of an individual or even a small group of people are taken to represent the larger group to which they belong, it becomes racism.

Where an African-American watches Precious and feels some personal shame or awkwardness, especially where they are in the company of white people, it suggests that they have internalized this idea that every African-American by default represents their entire race.  Where a white person watches Precious and somehow feels more “informed” about the black experience or feels some remorse for African-Americans as a whole, only shows just how ill-informed they are for assuming that all African-American experiences are the same.

I cannot pretend as though I am unaffected by this experience.  When watching Tyler Perry’s latest movie I Do Bad All By Myself, I was acutely aware of the fact that there were white people in the audience.  Part of my anxiety stemmed from the thought that while African-American audiences were laughing “along with” the movie, white audiences were laughing at the movie, in a finger-pointing sort of way.  Somewhere in my mind I assumed that white people would walk away from this movie with the idea that they obtained some glimpse into African-American life.   And found it hilarious. Which of course, in turn, must mean that they are laughing at me. The pathology of the black experience and institutionalized racism are deeply rooted.

Tyler Perry doesn’t claim to represent all African-Americans in his films.  Rather he is crafting stories that represent particular experiences that otherwise would not be shown in predominantly white Hollywood.  Because I have had this discussion about representation and institutionalized racism – both internally and with others – I am able to assuage any feelings of anxiety after the fact. But it would seem that this conversation is not taking place nearly enough.

No one watches a movie like 8-Mile and presumes that it represents all young white men, or even all young white men who grew up in Detroit.  No one presumes that American History X reveals the typical everyday experience of white people.  No one listens to a news story about a white mother murdering her child and assumes that such a thing is commonplace amongst white families.  So why should anyone take Precious to be a representation of African-Americans in general, simply because the main character and most of the cast happen to be African-American?

Precious is only one story – an extreme case, yet a case that undoubtedly reflects or touches on the real experiences of particular individuals in this country.  At no point did Sapphire – author of the original book, or Lee Daniels – director of the film (both of whom are African-American) – state that Precious was a “black story” or representative of the African-American experience in general.

Looking at the bigger picture, the existence of this paradigm of one-represents-all suggests something even more critical.  That “blackness” – in how it purports to categorize and define a large number of diverse people – and “individuality” are mutually exclusive. It highlights the shame inherent to the black experience, instilled by the history and present reality of racism, such that one feels an automatic need to distinguish themselves and their experiences from other African-Americans who are quite unlike them.

It suggests that we – as a nation – are past due for a revolution in our way of thinking, that is one that lies outside of race, yet not without serious consideration for how race has affected and continues to influence our social dynamics.

Part of the reason for this is that a large number of games come out of Japan, which being nearly homogeneous in terms of ethnicity, and insulated – both physically and culturally – may lack a strong frame of reference for depicting a diverse cast of characters.  Where the games are made in the Europe or the United States, where ethnic variety is more common, stereotypes may instead emerge as a consequence of one-dimensional writing.  Perhaps a developer cannot be bothered to do the research into all of the nuance and idiosyncrasies that rise from a character’s ethnic experiences.

While those developers who have at least made the attempt to be more inclusive should be acknowledged, it is more important to point out where more work needs to be done.  I am almost six years late in discussing the case of Jade from Beyond Good & Evil, but an interesting post by Jason over at Microscopiq brought the issue to my attention.  The post discusses the “first 11 black video game stars”, specifically those characters of visible African descent who were not only featured in games, but were the main character.  Jade was amongst those mentioned.  For those of you who have not played the game, here is an in-game screen of the character.

Jade of Beyond Good and Evil

At a glance, some – if not most – people would question whether or not Jade qualifies as “black” in any sense.  Arguments could be made for virtually any ethnicity as her appearance is quite ambiguous.  The only solid support for Jade being a “black” heroine is in looking at the original concept art, which featured some earlier renditions of Jade with either locks or braids in her hair, and features more commonly associated with certain peoples of Africa.  From the concept stage to the final version, much was changed, and we have a character who could pass for virtually anything.

There are many possible reasons for the change, such as wider market appeal, as an ethnically ambiguous character alienates no one.  It is also a truism that the mainstream beauty standard – set mostly by Americans and Europeans – is not inclusive of distinctively “non-white” features, particularly Africanesque features.  For marketing’s sake – and this literally could’ve been a decision made by marketing against the wishes of the original designer – Jade could have been altered to resonate more with the mainstream.  Looking at the final version, is it enough to say that Jade was intended to be “black” by the designer, or even that she is so in his/her mind, in order to claim her as such?  I would say that it isn’t.

Jade’s ethnic ambiguity alone, however, is not enough to dismiss her from the ranks of black heroines.  After all, blackness is subjective, varying from place to place and culture to culture.  If we take it to be synonymous with “African”, then the ethnic diversity of that continent means that Jade could look like anything.  But here’s where we get to another important point.

Jade is most certainly not African.  Because she is not even from this planet.  Beyond Good & Evil takes place on the fictional world of Hillys, where people like Jade are classified as “homo sapiens”, distinguished from other humanoid races such as “Capra Sapiens” (goat people), “Sus Sapiens” (pig people), and “Felis Sapiens” (cat people).  The concept of race that divides human populations on Earth simply does not exist on Hillys.  For that matter, there are no social divisions between any of the “Sapiens” – they are subclassified solely for the sake of compiling a photographic catalogue of all of the planet’s species.  That is to say, these distinctions are biological, and do not manifest at all in the culture of Hillys.

This is an important point, because the meaning of “blackness” on planet Earth is defined mostly in a social context.  There are some vague overlaps into a biological context – some valid, particularly with regards to medicine, and some not – where genetics is cited incorrectly to support a social or political argument.  Without getting too much into the meaning of blackness, there is the experience of so-called “black people” to be considered, which historically, and with few exceptions, tends to be one of hardship, oppression, social inequality, prejudice, and even dehumanization.  This is particularly true of those peoples of Africa who were sold into slavery, and who even in the aftermath, have been forced to face social and economic handicaps.

Coming back to video games, what would be required for a character to be considered “black”?  Appearance could be one qualifier, but as we see in the case of Jade, this can become dubious due to the wide variety of physical characteristics that can be classified as “black”, a reflection of the extreme diversity to be found within such a vague and subjective category.

The “black experience” could be another qualifier, as in a situation where a character is forced to face certain indignities, in spite of her ethnic ambiguity.  There are undoubtedly women who resemble Jade and who have been forced to endure such conditions.  In the United States, by way of the one-drop rule, it is common for a woman of fair skin to be deemed a “black” woman by virtue of her other features, and therefore share in the black experience.  Jade as she appears in Beyond Good and Evil, however, fails to meet either of these qualifiers.

The only remaining qualifier brings us back to the designer’s intent.  Without speaking to Michel Ancel or his art team, we cannot know which ethnicities inspired Jade’s appearance from original concept to final incarnation.  Perhaps then, we could derive clues from the voice actors chosen to play Jade.  We have to take this with a grain of salt, however, because the ethnicity of voice actors do not necessarily match those of their characters.  Cree Summer, who is African-American, is one of the most prolific voice actors in the field, and because her voice does not invoke any particular ethnicity, she has been tapped to play a wide range of characters – most of which are not African-American or “black” in any sense.  She got her start playing Penny from Inspector Gadget.

Cree Summer

Penny

What this suggests about the willingness of game producers to cast black actors for their voices versus their willingness to craft black roles may be another subject worth exploring.  As for Jade, since the game was released in different languages, she was played by several different voice actors.  But with respect to how Jade’s voice corresponds to her ethnicity in the mind of the developer, we should take a look at the actor closest to the developers  – Ubisoft Montreal – which would be the one cast for Jade’s French voice.  Her name is Emma de Caunes, and thanks to the artist John Karp, we can see her picture below modified to resemble Jade.

Emma de Caunes as Jade

Even had Jade’s voice actress been of any French-African ethnicity, it would’ve been a stretch to therefore consider the character as being of any African ethnicity.  The example of Cree Summer demonstrates the distance between the identities of voice actors and their characters.  In any case, Emma de Caunes is not of any visible African descent, and therefore we cannot use her ethnicity as a case for Jade’s “blackness”.

This brings me to my final point about Jade, which is that in spite of the developer’s original intent, any ethnic inspiration for the character, how Jade is perceived by her audience may be even more important.  By looking at a few random samples of fan-created art for Jade, we can gain some insight into how others perceive her ethnicity.

Jade by Enchantma

Jade by Scott Rogers

Jade by Mista Jonz

Because an artist’s work will necessarily be based in part on their personal experiences, and probably in some way reflect the artist him or herself, it stands to reason that the artist’s own ethnicity may factor into how they depict a character. The artists of the pictures above are “Asian”, “White”, and “Black”, respectively. The quotes are to acknowledge that those ethnic/racial terms are weak classifications, and that I have no deeper insight into the artists’ backgrounds.

What we see here is that in spite of the varied ethnicities of the artists, not one of them depicted Jade with features any more distinctively Africanesque than what we see in the official Ubisoft rendition. Had these artists had even an inkling that the developer intended Jade to be “black”, then it may have been more likely that we would have seen that understanding reflected in their work.  The renditions by Enchantma and Scott Rogers seem to suggest that Jade may be Asian – based on her eye shape, while the version by Mista Jonz is ambiguous.

While we cannot discount the possibility that Jade’s features would’ve been “de-ethnicized” even had she been more clearly Africanesque – as is common amongst fan artists of Storm from Marvel Comics – we can at least say that nothing about Jade seems to encourage fans to depict her as “black”.  An extensive spread of Jade fan art can be seen at the deviantART Beyond Good & Evil Fan Club, where not one rendition depicts Jade with Africanesque features.

So in the end, based on overwhelming evidence, we are forced to conclude that Jade from Beyond Good & Evil is not “black” in any sense of the word.  For the reasons discussed above about how races are defined, and how they do not correspond to any human categorization on the planet Hillys, she cannot accurately be considered “white”, “Asian” or any other race/ethnicity from Earth.  She can only barely be classified as human, being a “homo sapien”, but those who have played the game also know that she is a little something more.  I’d like to count Jade amongst “black” female protagonists in video games, due to the fact that there are otherwise none, but doing so actually sets a weak precedent.

It is not enough to be inspired by Africanesque features, only to see that inspiration disappear for the sake of market appeal.  And it is regressive, if not plain insulting, to create a character of color – in terms of background and appearance – only to completely undo it in a future incarnation, as in the deplorable example of Vanessa Lewis from Virtua Fighter.  Note the lighter skin, thinner lips, altered facial structure, and reduced hips from the Virtua Fighter 4 version (background) to the Virtua Fighter 5 version (foreground).

Vanessa Lewis
(Background: VF4 Foreground: VF5)

As technology improves, and as the content of games expands in terms of breadth and depth, opportunities only increase for representing diversity.  In the future, it will not be enough for a character to have darker skin, thicker lips, or a different eye shape.  We will have to see different cultures and experiences represented as well.  This wouldn’t have to be a limitation with regards to restricting the game setting to Earth.

After all, there is always interstellar or cross-dimensional travel.  There is also alternative history.  And already, plenty of creators have told stories of other worlds, only to draw inspiration from the experiences of the peoples of Earth, because doing so adds a certain richness and believability.

As I discussed in Ethnic Depictions in Video Games, there has been a want for protagonists of color with which gamers of color can identify.  If gamers cannot identify on a superficial level – i.e. by appearance, if they cannot identify on the basis of a common social experience, and if they cannot identify by way of voice, then there is little remaining to connect them to the character.  For most gamers this probably will not taint their experience with a game, as the lack of inclusive ethnic representation has become the norm.

But there is certainly a call, albeit muted and scattered amongst the more thoughtful pockets of the gamer population, for game developers to be more inclusive in their thinking.

So do not think – even for a nanosecond that because I say I’m “not black” that I won’t still punch you in the throat for calling me – or anyone in my presence – a nigger. Don’t think for an instant that I have abandoned “black people”, that I do not wish in the depths of my heart to see true equality, and do not ever think that I will be on the wrong side in any conflict where so-called black people are being mistreated. I choose mostly to fight my battles with ideology, to mark as my enemy the status quo which continues to allow racism and stupidity and divisiveness to prevail throughout the human condition. But please – please – do not ever mistake where my loyalties lie, and do not ever underestimate the methods I am willing to employ to see justice done.

On each side there’s an absolute color, black or white, but embedded in each area is a small dot of the opposite color. So on one side you’ve got me – let’s say the black dot in the white area – being the only sane person. But the complement to that, on the other side – the white dot in the black area – is me being the insane one in a sane world. Which is reality? Perhaps both, perhaps neither. And maybe, much like yin and yang, the opposites are not in conflict, but complementary, and the border between sanity and insanity is not so stark, but rather fluid and transitional.