This made me laugh so hard. This self-proclaiming racist is shocked that other racists are "mean-spirited."
What the actual fuck.
People think that being a "race realist" actually makes you a "nice" racist?
There's no such thing as a nice racist.
Because it's not right to be racist. It's very, very wrong.
I remember some years back, I talked about how Ashley from Mass Effect considered herself a "realist" and not a "pessimist" but she was actually just a fucking racist.
Or a space racist, if you will. Which made it really ironic that she would hate a group of human nationalists like Cerberus, whose moto is to put humanity first, even at the cost of non-human lives.
I always loved Ashley because she was a very realistic character. And, yes, she was racist. In the first game, it was done so well, and her character was given so much thought. But after the first game when her writer left . . . she became something of a cardboard cut out. She was Flanderized, and being a racist hypocrite just took over her entire personality instead of just being one part of it.
I pointed out in an older post here that Ashley was right about the council. They did ultimately toss Shepard to the wolves and treat her like a tool, a distraction that allowed them escape to safety while she took all the blows.
But then . . . so did the Alliance. So did Cerberus.
Pay attention to Mass Effect.
The entire reason Shepard was put forward as a spectre was so that humans could make a grab for more power. Humans had been in contact with aliens for barely thirty years (or something) and yet were already pushing for power and playing skeevy politics, and Shepard was just a tool in all that.
Humans needed council power because they were asshole wannabe-imperialists who brutally shoved the bartarians off their own land, then got confused when the batarians didn't just lay down and take it. Instead, the batarains fought back by trying to wipe out human colonies.
I really don't blame the council for not giving a fuck. Humans caused their own problems, couldn't solve them, and then cried to the council, demanding help. (The council also refused to help the batarians survive against human brutality, likely because they believed humans could be useful down the line and didn’t want to make an enemy.) Humans really were the weakest aliens in the galaxy precisely because they were so young. Even the damn vorlus didn't let themselves get in such a situation.
The only reason the humans have Shepard is because there is a two out of three chance that fighting the batarians made Shepard the soldier they are. Given that sort of playthrough, the galaxy has batarians to thank for Shepard.
My first Sheperd was Akuze/Mindoir because I thought it would be intersting to have such a fucked up background. It proved to be the most interesting playthrough I ever did, as it gave me the most chances to roleplay given the Thresher Maw lore and the batarian dlcs for the first game.
So yeah. The Alliance tried to use Shepard to get humans out of their pickle.
Cerberus did the same thing, resurrecting Shepard and trying to use her like a puppet to ensure humanity's survival against the Collectors and the Reapers (because they sure as hell didn't care if any other races survived).
This is not a race thing. All people have the ability to be equally shitty when it comes to their survival. But Ashley could only see it in terms of racism because she's a fucking racist.
So to Ashley, the council will toss Shepard to the wolves because they're asari, turian, and salarian -- not because they're frightened people who act shitty when fearing for their lives.
Racism is racism. "Race realism" is something cowards claim so that they can cling to the idea of being good people who just see it like it is. In reality, they see nothing.
People who are racist do not live in reality. As I've often said before, they see what they want to see, through the filter of their emotions and how some races made them feel once. They see what they want to see based solely on what society told them and not anything they discovered for themselves. Which more than proves that humans are irrational fools guided purely by emotion (we always remember how people made us feel more than anything else and this is one way prejudice happens -- most misogynists are just mad at their mother or some girlfriend who cheated on them once).
Shepard immediately points out that Ashley has never been exposed to aliens, which is an apt observation: this is part of why she is racist. Ashley grew up in a human world, surrounded by other humans who were bitter against the turian after the war. Her family's entire life was ruined by something she perceives as the turians' fault, as if the overarching war were so simple, as if both sides had not committed atrocity.
Ashley's life experiences, topped with the fact that she was sheltered growing up, are what made her become a racist. It was great to see her slowly changing in the first game and also learning better, but by the last game, she's back at square 1, with zero personal growth at all.
Bottomline, racism is racism. It's all shitty. Maybe you're not Hitler, but that time you locked your door because a black person walked by your car was still a pretty shitty thing to do. And black people notice when you behave that way and it HURTS.
(I can't cound the times non-black people have been afraid of me over thier stupid idea that black people are violent and dangerous and then treated me like some scary monster.)
Just because you think you're a nice person doesn't mean your shitty views are incapable of hurting people of color. Your actions and atttitudes affect people negatively, no matter how good you think you are.
There's no such thing as "race realist." Because racism requires you to step outside of reality.
Sorry for explaining everything in terms of video games, but this WAS originally a video game blog. Also, I just suck at explaining things.
But this is a place where I can talk about whatever I want, however I want.
So deal with it.
