Racism charges against the newly released Resident Evil 5 were predicted long ago and now it has pretty much swept across the mainstream press. People have a problem with African zombies for some reason and believe it must be racist on the part of the designers. This is all nonsense, of course, so I’m happy to see the New York Times tackle the issue in their review of the game by defusing it with a simple paragraph:

So Resident Evil 5 exposes the perhaps uncomfortable truth that blacks and Arabs can become zombies too, just like anyone else. Blacks and Arabs do not have a secret anti-zombie gene. And just like all the thousands of white, Asian and Hispanic zombies that have been dispatched in innumerable other games before them, the African zombies must also be destroyed, or at least neutralized.