Blog Post #6

        This week, the articles that we read focused on Intercultural communication and racialization in communication ethics. I wanted to focus on the idea of privilege within gaming. In the article ‘Not a Post-Racism and Post-Misogyny Promised Land: Video Games as Instruments of (In)Justice’, Kishonna Gray and David Leonard talk about how “while video games may be a distraction to some communities and a source of power and pleasure to others, they can at times also be a source of violence, oppression, pain, and trauma” (Gray & Leonard, 5). I found it very interesting to think of the people that have a lot of privilege – white males – and how they can take advantage of their privilege. This is shown when discussing Gamergate. Gamergate was a movement that focused on white men’s anxieties of losing power in a universe assumed to be homogeneous (Gray & Leonard). White men were afraid to lose their privilege in the gaming world, since games have always surrounded them. Due to their fear, they started undermining everyone else in the gaming world and justifying their actions as ‘singular incidents’. 

While reading these articles, I thought of the narrative that white males tried to create in the midst of the Black Lives Matter movement. After George Floyd was murdered by a Minneapolis policeman, the Black Lives Matter Movement skyrocketed. White men started to vocalize that they were being oppressed by the public due to the actions of the policeman, completely changing the narrative that was happening. This was because they started to question their privilege, in a world that has always prioritized it.