Zombies don’t care about the color of your skin. They only want to munch on your brains. And likewise, zombie killers, those poor unfortunate folks left behind to defend themselves in shopping malls and spooky old houses, really aren’t interested in racial profiling the living dead. Nope. All of humanity is a turkey shoot.
Which is why all the recent post-E3 hubbub over Resident Evil 5, the popular first-person shooter, is interesting. Rumored to be set in Haiti (the legendary home of the zombie myth) or perhaps an unnamed sub-Saharan African nation, Resident Evil 5 pits our hero against a hungry horde of zombies, all of which apparently are black. Of course, this makes sense; if the game is set in a country where the majority of the the local population is black, the zombies will be dark skinned too. That’s how it works. That said, charges that the game is racist were raised and the controversy has been examined.
Which brings me to a curious item I found on the shelf two days ago at a Wal-Mart, a Halloween themed Pez dispenser featuring a black skull with big white eyes and a toothy smile. Here it is:
Now, I’m sure it’s innocent enough. I doubt the good folks at Pez have anything but good intentions and good times in mind. That said, I am surprised this dispenser made it to supermarket shelves, you know since it bares something of a resemblance to black face caricatures and golliwogs.
On a related note, leave it up to Marilyn Manson to turn Mickey Mouse into a racist.
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