DEUS EX: HUMAN REVOLUTION Unlocks “Racist Minstrel Character” Achievement

I haven’t played Deus Ex: Human Evolution yet, but the last thing I expected to hear about the game was that it contained an unbearably racist character. But it does!

What’s amazing is the kind of racism that’s on display here; Letitia the Trash Lady speaks in some kind of Stepin Fetchit black dialect, something right out of the Jim Crow era. It’s almost tempting to think that the people who made the game are so ignorant of history that they didn’t understand that this sort of dialect is grotesquely broad and racist, and represents a depiction of black people that was used as a tool of oppression, to diminish human beings. Honestly, the minstrel-like aspect of Letitia is so broad that I have to assume the folks who made the game really had no fucking clue what they were doing. That’s not an excuse - at some point in the process this should have been caught and fixed - but it speaks to the way that certain racist images remain in the consciousness without being recognized as racist.

Here’s video of the character in question.

Thanks to @MrMattRobinson for tweeting this. Video from Time’s Techland.