EER wrote:* Apparently, it's about her speech? Note that I haven't actually heard her English voice/text, if she uses words like 'crackers', 'chicken wings', 'bling bling' then I could understand a little controversy.
The way she's talking (its more than grammar and intonation and pronunciation and the overwrought deference and so on, it's
everything) is most definitely harvested directly from the platonic ideal of a stereotype perpetuated by American racists to this day. (It doesn't have any of those buzz words. Those are associated with a different stereotype entirely.)
That said, perhaps there are real people who actually talk exactly like that. As far as I know there are not, but I do live in the whitest state in the US. So, if there really are the thick racial mannerisms Eidos Montreal implies presently exist and will persist into the not so distant future, I would never have encountered them simply due to my location.
I can't say.
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If you want to market a movie to hardcore racists in the US, and we still have our share, you'll definitely want to have a black woman in the movie who sounds
exactly like that. But that doesn't make anything containing such a character racist. Especially if it should turn out that there are people who speak exactly like that in real life.
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I suppose I should add one more thing about racism in the United States for those who don't already know. There are neo Nazis and white supremacist groups who constantly remind us that freedom of speech is not all ice cream and lollipops, but for the most part people recognize that overt racism is no longer socially acceptable and hasn't been for a while so racists have switched to using what are commonly called dog whistles.
You blow on a dog whistle and people don't hear anything but your intended audience, dogs, hears it clear as can be. The same idea applies to the metaphorical dog whistles of racists. They'll say something and to most people it won't seem racial at all, but to their intended audience (other racists) the racial message is clear. (It isn't just racism that this applies to, for example I know that at least one religious group has developed a confusing doublespeak which allows politicans to tell them, "I agree with X, Y, and Z," while the vast majority of onlookers have no idea they said that.) If this goes on for long enough than non-racists will figure out the code. That's when things can get very confusing.
Once both sides realize what's being said the fight becomes racial even though someone who is just looking at the plain text has no idea how race is even involved. Once the fight is over things quiet down, new dog whistles might be developed, but things continue and life goes on.
And then there's a shitstorm if someone who has no idea about any of this starts using the dogwhistle in complete honesty.
One historical example of this is the idea of "States' Rights" to make sure that the federal government didn't tap-dance on the heads of states, they have rights. So talking about states rights wouldn't seem too controversial. There might be disagreement about what those rights are, but the phrase itself wouldn't seem like a problem. But 50 or 60 years ago it took on a different meaning because, though there was a candidate who said, "Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever," a lot of time they didn't come out and say, "We need to preserve institutional racism to keep black people in their place," instead they talked about states rights. States rights came to mean all sorts of racist things of which segregation was but one. Racial segregation? States Rights. Preventing black people from voting? States Rights. Making sure discrimination in the workplace stayed legal? States Rights. Want to keep inter racial marriage illegal? States Rights are the thing for you. So on, so forth. So nowadays if you utter that phrase you can expect the conversation to become very racial very fast.
Another would be welfare, although I'm not sure it's as widely known.
Anyway, there are all of these things where a history of double speak and trying to be racist without being visibly racist has twisted things in ways that are hard enough to understand if you live here. For an outsider it will probably seem completely arbitrary. Someone says or does something innocuous and then the knives come out.
A lot of the time when you'll see people the US react explosively to something in an eruption of cries of racism for what seems like no reason at all, it will probably be because there's a history you don't know about. We've still got a lot of racists, and the fight is far from over. (In one state a policy was recently proposed, though I'm not sure if it was enacted, which would effectively resegregate their schools.) As a result people can get pretty emotional pretty fast.
I really have no idea if that applies here. The character would fit right in in an explicitly racist game and as such people could absolutely be seeing it as a dog whistle. On the other hand, for all I know the mannerisms are accurate and it just happens to have been in racist things for the same reason bilateral symmetry is, in which case it wouldn't make sense to call it a dogwhistle.
"One more thing" turned out to be longer than I thought. The general point here is that sometimes there's something that that might not seem racist to you or me, which has a long racist history we simply don't know about. The person who uses it might not know about it either, but the racists see it, nod along, and think, "One of us! One of us!" and those who have been on the receiving end of racism get stung by it. I don't know if this is such a case, but it happens more often than you'd think.
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Do other countries with similar racial tensions have the same sort of thing going on with dogwhistles and whatnot, or does it work differently there?
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tl;dr version:
It's complicated. Very, very complicated. All the more so because it has absolutely nothing to do with EM's intent.