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.
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.
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.
