Barret and the BBC Problem

March 3, 2024, 9:43 PM EST on the video game forum GameFAQs, a user by the ID Xclaim created a thread with the following assertion as the title, “Barret deserves proper beachwear.” Barret, from the Square Enix RPG Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, is the only humanoid character in the party who does not get a swimsuit during the beach scenes at Costa Del Sol. While everyone is in trunks and bikinis, Barret’s only alternative to his weathered cargo pants, industrial boots, and sleeveless military vest is a full sailor outfit (A throwback to a gag costume from the original Final Fantasy VII). The other human characters have three alternate costumes to his one. The character with the same number of different costumes as Barret is Red XIII, a mutated sabre-tooth tiger. Barret is the only Black party member in the game.

March 3, 2024, 9:47 PM EST (four minutes later), Xclaim received two responses to their thread. User Flozzzer defended the sailor suit as “top notch” without elaboration. The other, from user Bardan, commented, “Square couldn’t figure out how to hid [sic] Barret’s gigantic dong in shorts or similar models.” A day later, user Hard2kill_turk chimed in, “This. Mommy? Why has that man 3 legs?” Their forum signature is “Don’t be a dick.”

This is racist. The myth of Black endowment is a spectre that follows all Black, masculine-presenting Assigned Male at Birth (AMAB) people. Tracing its roots back to chattel slavery, white scientists, themselves plantation owners, would lean fully into their cognitive biases to devise malicious experiments. Black slaves had their skins peeled to see if Black skin really was thicker. It is not. Black women experimented on, in the name of advancing gynaecology, before the widespread use of anaesthesia with the belief that Black people had higher pain tolerance. We do not. Black people had their skulls and genitalia measured with the findings used to declare that Black people were less intelligent and more promiscuous. Nonsense.

Versions of this have propagated through popular culture and science, only lightly scrubbed of the direct associations with slavery. Square Enix’s refusal to depict Barret in even the most conservative swimwear belies a belief that outside of exposed biceps or a peeking chiselled chest, exposed Black skin communicates the black eroticism which only exists in one mode — hypersexual. To counteract that, fiction, and mainly fiction by nonblack creatives, lean into another extreme, the impossibly chaste clown. The clown plays on the collective racist expectations of a primarily nonblack audience. Here the Black man is neutered. His physicality is undermined by costume. The expected stereotypes of brutish strength subverted into ludicrous neo-types of buffoonery. Here it’s Barret, with a gravelly voice doing his best Mr. T, with Black muscles forever taut, with a life-mission to strike back at the company raping the planet, comically out of place and wrong-footed in his sailor costume.

The hypersexualisation of Black males is most rampant in the porn industry. Prominent genre “interracial,” exclusively refers to a video starring at least one Black actor and at least one white actor. The porn industry established the “interracial” genre, with the first such scene appearing in 1972 — between a Black man and white woman. In a 2021 article for Wired, Noelle Perdue noted that there were, at the time of writing, 42 different labels to describe Blackness on popular porn site xHamster. For comparison, there were only four labels denoting whiteness.

While porn’s objectifying lens is persistent across racial lines, the genre “Big Black Cock” is nevertheless exceptional. Talking to Vice in 2018, Jessica Stoya, then-porn actress (now columnist and intimacy coach) and white, explained how she refused to participate in any “interracial” videos. “[The company] presented the other performer more as a demographic than a human, and I feel dirty for having been complicit in it. It was all comparatively subtle, but the box cover featured me in a passive position with him looming over me…”

The proliferation of online pornography poses an added risk to children. Across studies done both in the United States of America and Australia found that the average age for first viewing pornography was around 13 years old. In the 2022 report titled ‘Teens and Pornography,’ by common sense, researchers found that 55% of polled teenagers regularly encountered pornography that they deemed as stereotypical portrayals of Black people. There’s understandable growing concern around teenagers using online pornography as supplemental sex education, but to extrapolate that concern in another direction, how many white children’s first encounter with Black bodies and even Black people is through the lens of porn?

The fear-mongering and stereotypes these studio productions tap into are present in life outside of porn. In a study titled ‘Racial Bias in Judgements of Physical Size and Formidability: From Size to Threat,’ lead author John Paul Wilson conducted experiments where over 950 participants were shown photographs of white and Black males of equal height and weight. “We found that these estimates were consistently biased,” Wilson explained. “Participants judged the Black men to be larger, stronger and more muscular than the white males, even though they were actually the same size. Participants also believed that the Black men were more capable of causing harm in a hypothetical altercation and, troublingly, that police would be more justified in using force to subdue them, even if the men were unarmed.” Black in fashion is slimming, but Black skin is evidently everything but.

Another finding from the same study was that males with darker skin and more “stereotypically Black” facial features (think bigger lips, broader and flatter noses) were identified as more dangerous. So while some see endowment as sexually desirable with a negative blowback to Black males of all penis sizes, other stereotypical Black features are seen as explicitly negative. This form of anti blackness is among the most subtle, but is frequent across all visual media. In live-action it materialises as colorism. Darker skinned actors passed up for lighter skinned counterparts even when a role demands a darker complexion. In video games and animation, the problem compounds. There the characters are completely constructed. Noses, lips, etc. are deliberate choices or, generously, examples of the invisible biases that creep into an artist when as they themselves undergo an incessant bombardment of racist art; a racism Ouroboros.

Anime has long graduated from niche programming in the West as imported cassettes, bootleg DVDs, and late night blocks on cartoon networks. Today almost every major streamer has a section devoted to anime. Netflix in particular has been particularly aggressive, with over 130 shows in its “Netflix Original” stable. Crunchyroll alone, a streaming site exclusively for anime, boasts over 120 million users. Alongside video games, anime is the influential art-form for artists and animators.

However, anime has its baggage. In as early as the year 2000, Carole Boston Weatherford wrote on ’Japan’s bigoted export for kids.” In the piece she notes, in horror, the characters of Jynx from Pokémon and Mr. Popo from Dragon Ball Z. “When I first glimpsed Jynx on the ‘Pokémon’ cartoon, I thought surely the character was an aberration.” She continued,“Then I saw Mr. Popo, a cosmic character from ‘Dragonball Z.’ Mr. Popo is a rotund, turban-clad genie with pointy ears, jet-black skin, shiny white eyes, and, yes, big red lips.” More modern, or at least still contemporary, is the character of Usopp from Eiichiro Oda’s One Piece who prolongs the same design language as Jynx and Mr. Popo.

These are overt examples of anti blackness but anime as an export has given birth to unfortunate knock-on effects through the blind adoption of codified techniques. For example, there’s the ‘My Adventures With Superman’ (MAWS) animated series, worked on by Korean animation outfit Studio Mir. The series portrays a young Clark Kent (Superman) working at the Daily Planet with his paramour Lois Lane and best friend Jimmy Olsen. In the source material, these characters are white, but in MAWS Lois Lane is Asian and Jimmy is Black. Perry White, another originally white character, has also been race-swapped to an older Black man. The problem lies in the depiction of the younger Jimmy Olsen and the older Perry White. With the caveat that more detailed faces are commonly used to communicate a character as older, Jimmy’s nose and lips (or lack thereof) are identical to most, if not all, of the cast except for Perry who has a wide nose and thick lips. There are no canonical black features, but this choice belies a value structure. We’re to read Jimmy, like Clark, and Lois, as young, cute, desirable with the noses and lips to match. and we’re to read Perry as the exact opposite.

The proliferation of anime as instruction and tutor has given rise to separate and often individual initiatives where black artists provide instructionals on how to render Black skin, stereotypical Black features, and kinky curly hair.

So putting that all together: an international racist entertainment complex that echoes the plantation politics of the past has codified a binary in which Black males are only seen as animals or clowns. These polar extremes produce the heroes and characters across diverse media, but neatly pack them into buckets — a gun-toting hulk with a massive cock, real or implied, or a neutered clown that is harmless and pathetic.  Often a character will shuffle between both extremes, sometimes impressively existing as both at once. Gears of Wars’ Augustus “Cole Train” Cole is at once a large Black killing machine, and a never-serious clown who can only speak in yells and refers to himself in the third person. Barret is no Cole. He has purpose, he pushes the plot in Final Fantasy VII: Remake, he is the eco-terrorist soul at the centre of a plot that is, at least nominally, about climate change. But he cannot stand on a beach shirtless. Where pale[r] bodies are allowed to exist in comfort or framed as attractive, he stands in the background beside the cat, fully clothed—because there is no middle ground, a nigga cannot just be cute.

Responses

  1. “However, anime has its baggage. In as early as the year 2000”

    Anime’s contentious relationship with black people goes back even further than this. What’s more, while Japan’s relationship with America does play a significant factor in shaping depictions of black people within Japanese media (where else could artists have gotten the rubberhose lip trope?), said depictions are by no means reducible to that relationship.

    https://www.tokyoweekender.com/japan-life/news-and-opinion/racism-in-japan-professor-john-russell/

    This shouldn’t be read as me contradicting what you’re saying, but developing on it.

    1. Hey Vincent,
      Thanks for the link. That’s an informative bit of writing. You’re correct to emphasise that these are old conversations and that the relationship of anime to minstrel art dates back further than the example I provided. I’m admittedly under-read on the plight of black people in Japan apart from anecdotes from interview subjects, so thank you for putting ‘Japanese Views of Blacks: The Problem is Not Just Little Black Sambo (1991)’ on my radar. An aside, rubber-hose lip is a shockingly useful and vivid descriptor that I will be using in the future.

  2. […] Barret and the BBC Problem | No Escape Nicanor Gordon uses FF7 Rebirth as a springboard to unravel the dehumanizing, hypersexualizing, and neutering antiblack stereotypes that permeate popular media. […]

  3. […] Light Enough Skin and White Enough Voices: The Problems and Contradictions of Racial Diversity in Final Fantasy XVI | Zweiteturm Leanne situates Final Fantasy XVI‘s problems of race in Square Enix’s longer-term push for greater verisimilitude in its character rendering without being willing to mark its games with anything that could be traced back to real-world cultures (Further Reading – Nicanor Gordon on antiblack stereotypes in FFVII Rebirth and beyond). […]

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