Grand Theft Auto, Minstrel Shows, and the Societal Impact on Black Representation
Kameron Mitchell
Communications 404
Amanda Cote
December 3, 2016
“Grand Theft Auto” and similar violent video games have become increasingly popular in the gaming industry since the turn of the 21st century. Yet, despite the immense economic success that these games have received, they have also faced harsh condemnation from critics. Among these critics is concerned parent, Joe Morgan, who argues that games such as “Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas” “are nothing more than pixilated minstrel shows (Marriott).” Though Morgan makes a large claim, it’s important to understand the societal impact that minstrel shows had in the early 19th century. Minstrel shows are infamous for their racist rhetoric, harmful impact on public perceptions of Black Americans, public policy decisions, and the preservation of the White hegemony in America. Thus, while Morgan’s claims may seem outlandish or trivializing to the harmful extent of minstrel shows, his comparisons ultimately hold merit as these games too alter public perception and profit off of the negative representations of Black Americans.
There are many comparisons to make between these video games and minstrel shows that strengthen Joe Morgan’s argument. For instance, both forms of media have the potential to damage public perceptions of Black Americans through their negative representations. Also, the owners of these media – both the minstrel hosts and video game company owners – are largely White and profiting off of the negative portrayals of Black Americans. Lastly, characters of color in both forms of media are pigeonholed into certain character portrayals.
In order to further understand Morgan’s claim, it’s essential to understand the history of minstrelsy in America. According to The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, the father of American minstrelsy was Thomas D. Rice (45). A struggling comedian, Rice originally found success amongst “lower caste Whites” in the South by characterizing Black Americans as illiterate, foolish, content, and subordinate. Rice’s primary joke, in which he dressed in blackface and exaggerated the already discriminatory “Black Sambo”, was characterized as “sarcasm and wit reserved for the White man (The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education 45)”. Though many imitators helped contribute to the rise of American minstrelsy as a subculture of this time, Rice’s support was unparalleled as his characterization of popular character, “Jim Crow”, was so adored that his shows “knitted together publics who were normally separated or opposed outside the theatre’s fantasy space (Lhamon 2).” Eventually, Jim Crow would become the face of “America’s first original form of mass-produced, nationally distributed popular culture, [who’s] popularity is difficult to exaggerate (Leahy 3)” and “emerged as the nation’s most popular entertainment form, until at least the turn of the twentieth century (Taylor xiii).”
Still, minstrel shows were largely opposed by White elites involved in the Atlantic slave-trade for they believed that minstrelsy was effectively the translation of Black “experiences” for White audiences. Not believing that the representations of Blacks in minstrelsy were “racist enough”, these elites feared that the charisma of Jim Crow and similar characters would ultimately integrate the races and challenge the social power structure. As a result, the elites would use these shows to push a pro-slavery agenda by “emphasizing Black inferiority and positing situations in which freed slaves were actually nostalgic for plantation life (Leahy 20).” Their propaganda efforts would prove to have considerable success.
As a result, minstrel shows became so widely accepted as reality that even scientific findings were discredited since they didn’t maintain the ideals represented in the performances. As slavery was nearing its end, new scientific research was released and discredited the possibility of different races having fundamentally different biological breakdowns (Leahy 8). Ultimately, this discovery would bring into question the entire institution of slavery, which was in part built on the idea that Black Americans were biologically inferior to White Americans (Leahy 12). Accordingly, there were large efforts to anthropomorphize minstrel characters. For instance, newspapers of the time routinely “failed to make any distinction at all between minstrels and the people they parodied (Leahy 26).”
The results of this propaganda was extremely harmful for public perception of Black Americans as White audiences largely took these shows as documentary and the material ultimately became evidence in scientific discourse of race (Leahy 24). Furthermore, despite the abolishment of slavery, these shows continued to influence American legislation as segregation laws would later become personified by the Jim Crow character. Nonetheless, considering the large popularity of these shows and their integration into American social and political discourse, Morgan’s argument becomes clearer as the similarities between these shows and violent video games sharpen.
In addition to the necessity of understanding the history of minstrel shows, it’s also imperative to understand the procedurality of video games such as “Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas” to break down Morgan’s argument. In “Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas”, users inhabit the character of CJ, whom is a poor African-American man that returns to his crime-ridden neighborhood in order to become a kingpin. Players inhabit his experience through interactions with “a digital cast of African-American and Hispanic men, some wearing braided hair and scarves over their faces and aiming Uzis from low-riding cars (Marriott).”
In order to achieve success for CJ, players are bound by the game’s procedurality and led to perform criminal acts in order to advance in the game. For example, although working as a taxi driver is a way to make money in the game, it’s clear that this job isn’t a substantial method to achieve the desired kingpin status. Instead, players are encouraged to murder other characters for money, perform large heists, or seize rival gangs’ territories. In fact, a player’s “respect” increases as they recruit more gang members to join their gang. Similarly, players gain points towards their criminal rating based on the amount of players they kill in the game. Considering that video games depicting social worlds are powerful mediums of representation, critics find it troubling that “Grand Theft Auto” solely represents minority characters in criminal ways (Marriott).
Based on these depictions, critics argue that the game’s stigmatizations of minorities and their neighborhoods “both reifies discriminatory stereotypes and provides young adolescents with negative role models (Marriott).” Professor Oliver Pérez Latorre of Universitat Pompeu Fabra reiterates that the game’s message of “poverty and debt in contemporary North America [including] crime” leads gamers to infer that these urban neighborhoods are innately criminal (432). Since the “Grand Theft Auto” promotes these ideas of urban neighborhoods and of minorities being content with violent lifestyles, critics argue that these pigeonholed attributes are no different than minstrel shows endorsing the idea that Blacks are content with their societal inferiority and thankful for the institution of slavery. As stated by Eileen Espejo, a Californian social advocate, “it’s not just the kinds of stereotyping people generally think of…it is the kind of limiting what characters of color can and cannot do in the games that sends a message (Marriott).” Thus, it’s easy to understand why critics criticize that these games solely reinforce negative stereotypes about minorities while failing to represent them in any endearing manners.
Based on these harmful representations, critics also fear that these depictions have the potential to eventually alter public perceptions in the same way minstrel shows once did. Drawing on the concept of priming, which refers to “the process by which recently activated information about a group is used in making subsequent judgments (Dixon 1556)”, critics argue that the representations present in these video games will subtly influence public perceptions of minority groups. Findings by researchers Dixon and Maddox support the basis of this claim. The researchers found that heavy television viewers, who were consistently exposed to overrepresentations of Blacks as criminals in the news, expressed the most emotional concern after watching a crime story that contained a Black perpetrator and were more likely to sympathize with a victim when the perpetrator was Black (Dixon 1566). Considering the lasting effect minstrel shows had on public perceptions and the cultivating effects that exposure to harmful media representation can trigger, the fear that negative representations of minorities in video games may similarly influence perceptions holds legitimacy.
In addition to the harmful representations of people of color and their potential long-term consequences, critics also condemn the monetization of these representations. Based on the fact that the “Grand Theft Auto” series has sold over 220 million units, critics denounce the fact that negative representations of minorities are the fabric to their success. While the monetization of negative minority representations is certainly bad, critics further argue that this practice is worse bearing in mind that White Americans are the ones ultimately profiting from these games. Since the gaming industry thrives on the concept of cognitive capitalism, meaning that companies seek employees with the “largest intellectual property”, it’s become a growing problem that companies value the intellectualism of White male developers more than any other demographic (Dyer-Witheford 34). This shows that the homogenous developers of games such as “Grand Theft Auto” are displaying their fantasies of urban communities through the ludic design and procedurality of the games. This parallels with White minstrel performers drawing in sold-out crowds while dressing in blackface and imitating their fantasies of “blackness”. Therefore, as an overwhelming amount of White males profit off of the negative representations of minorities in the “Grand Theft Auto” series, it’s clear why critics such as Joe Morgan consider these video games as damaging as minstrel shows.
Ultimately, the connection between video games such as “Grand Theft Auto” and minstrelsy may seem slim considering the fundamentally different intentions of the media. However, scholars have been comparing minstrelsy to other representations of Black Americans in the media for many years. For instance, The Journal of American Culture contends that “spinning car rims, ‘pimps and hoes’, and ‘bling-bling’ jewelry have replaced the chicken and watermelon…[but] the result is the same: the degradation of black culture and black self-esteem, and the further fracturing of black-white, male-female, gay-straight relationships (Gosa 356).” This journal makes the argument that common self-representations in hip-hop music ultimately serve as divisive for race relations and represent a modern form of minstrelsy for White audiences. Considering that video game developer John Vignocchi considers the representations in these games to be a reflection of the fact that “hip-hop culture has kind of crossed over…look at what everyone is wearing, at that everyone is listening (Marriott),” it’s evident that similarities even between hip-hop music and these video games exist.
If video game developers argue that these representations of Black Americans are solely satisfying America’s cultural obsession with hip-hop music, their strategy makes sense as hip-hop contributes over $5 billion to the U.S. economy (Xie 452). However, the strategy of selling hip-hop to the masses isn’t limited to video games. Phillip Xie and fellow researchers contend that similar “fetishized commodities” have been sold on television advertisements and other forms of commerce using the hip-hop style for some time now (452). They further suggest that “the ghetto or the hood, which were once a source of sublime terror and fear, have been transformed by Hip-Hop into an enticing landscape for tourism: an image, a sound, graffiti mural waiting at a distance for visual and sensory consumption by those who come from farther afield (456).”Nevertheless, if hip-hop is the underlying reason for the outputting of negative representations of Black Americans by video game companies, there is still research that contends that hip-hop in itself serves as a new form of minstrelsy in modern America.
Clearly, with its close ties to satisfying to the desire to experience the hip-hop culture, “Grand Theft Auto” and similar games may serve as a platform for gamers to experience identity tourism. According to Adam Clayton Powell III, son of Adam Clayton Powell Jr., the representations of Black Americans in these games are “high-tech black face” that allow “participants to try on the other, the taboo, the dangerous, the forbidden, and the otherwise unacceptable (Dunlop 105).” This clearly parallels the identity tourism that White audiences in the South enjoyed when watching Thomas D. Rice and other minstrel performers on stage. Nonetheless, the similarities of identity tourism between the two media further reinforce the comparison between these video games and minstrel shows.
As video games continue to explode in popularity, the risk of harmful representations of minorities in games such as “Grand Theft Auto” will likely increase. From limiting characters of color to criminality to constantly exposing players to gangs of Black men toting semi-automatic weapons, it’s unsurprising that critics such as Joe Morgan consider these representations as damaging minstrel shows. Like minstrel shows, these depictions also have the potential to damage public perceptions of minorities. Furthermore, it’s especially troubling that White Americans are the primary beneficiaries of portraying minorities in this negative light. Even with the claim that these games are intended to cater to the booming hip-hop industry, the representations are still problematic as many scholars consider the self-representations in hip-hop to also serve as a modern minstrelsy. Thus, since games such as “Grand Theft Auto” are creating a space that allows players to tour White ideals of blackness, which are ultimately negative depictions of this culture, Joe Morgan’s claim holds merit that these games are “nothing more than pixelated minstrel shows.”