First of all, let's watch it with the word "racist". A lot of you are using that word and clearly don't understand what it means. Racism is about asserting there is superiority or inferiority based on one's race. Doing a poor Asian accent is hardly racist. Doing a poor African-American accent isn't racist. Now, perpetuating certain absurd stereotypes based on race is often labeled as "racist" and depending on how a stereotype is used, I would probably agree that it has potential to be racist, itself the same way that using slurs to put down someone because of their skin color is racist (because of the implied inferiority/superiority that usage of the slur connotes).
Seriously, are you telling me that if someone is not very good at doing accents, they're racist? So how good does your fake accent have to be, before you're no longer a racist? When I mimic someone with a southern drawl, am I suddenly racist? When I say "eh?" or "aboot" or "hoser" in reference to Canada or something Canadian - even though it's done in all good nature and with intended warmth - am I being racist? Of course not. When all of these games put out by Ubisoft and other developers that rely heavily on Canadian voice acting (which is typically awful it seems . . . but maybe I'm just being racist?) and I hear a poorly done American accent - should I be crying "racist! they're all racist!"? Or should I just be dropping my head into my hands over how bad the acting is?
Let's take this a step further. What about the Canadian voice actors in Deus Ex doing a bad Chinese accent doing a bad imitation of an American? Is that double-super racist? (I refer to, for example, all the Chinese guys in the game who say "Hey, American! I like baseball!" in a mocking American accent).
Again, all of these things are demonstrations of poor voice acting and perhaps poor written dialogue. Not racism. The black woman digging through the garbage strikes me as the worst offense I've found in the game of poor voice acting, and it touches on some really insensitive stereotyping of the use of language. We think it's racist, because it sounds like something that would come out of the mouth of a white actor in black-face doing a routine in the 1920s. Of course, I would say it also sounds like something that would have come out of the mouths of a lot of southerners, regardless of ethnicity, many decades ago.
So, while it's popular to throw the word "racism!" around to just about every fucking thing you can imagine, I think it's far more appropriate to say that this is just another example of really bad voice acting -- and sorry, but that doesn't make it racist. Now, if she was digging around for something in the garbage that is stereotypically associated in our society with her ethnicity, then that would probably be fair to label racist.
I think the real important thing to take away from all this is that in a world full of great voice actors (or even good ones) and an entire country of hundreds of millions of people just to the south, why do developers continue to employ bad Canadian voice actors to completely butcher what are often otherwise very good games? I mean, for fuck's sake, you can't even get an American accent down right. I don't know if that's easy or hard to do, but I do know that you're like a half hour drive from a country filled with Americans who could probably pull off the American accent. I could maybe see other accents being harder to do well, since I don't know what the available talent pool is for quality accents (or even native) for other countries -- but I do know that French/Canadian, and American accents should be pretty easily for anyone on this continent to have done right.
And to close this unfortunately long rambling post out, let's not forget Sean Connery. A Scottish guy with a Scottish accent. Does that make him racist, because he uses that same Scottish accent to play an English secret agent? Or a Spanish Highlander? Or is that not racist, because he's not even bothering to do an accent?
STEREOTYPE: A widely held but fixed and oversimplified image or idea of a particular type of person or thing
RACISM: The belief that all members of each race possess characteristics or abilities specific to that race, esp. so as to distinguish it as inferior or superior to another race or races.
A stereotype is not necessarily racist. Asserting or utilizing a "jock" stereotype or a "nerd" or "My name is buffy and my father owns this yacht club" stereotype is hardly racist. Not even necessarily offensive, though some may find them so. Especially if they're somehow exploitative. A stereotype about an ethnicity or nationality isn't even necessarily racist. It can be and the two can be associated, but one does not necessarily imply the other. Asserting that you are a superior race, because of your skin color? That's racist. Asserting that another race is inferior, because they "lack the mental capacity" or "are not civilized"? That's racist. The stereotypical "shrimp on the barbie!" Australian, the "It's aboot time for hockey, eh?" Canadian, the "I'm good at math" asian, and the "I have a flat butt and love mayonnaise" white guy are all stereotypes, but not racist.
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