You don’t have that energy for the real thing | Hood Warfare 2

I waited for the Hood Warfare 2 conversation to die down before saying anything, because honest discussion is close to impossible in the heat of it. Everybody gets sorted into a camp no matter what they actually think.

Let me get this out of the way first. I have no interest in playing this game. Never did. The spectacle around it has been something to watch, though.

What I watched was people I know personally go into a stream saying they were going to play it, and then not play it, because their audience told them they could not. Lines in the sand got drawn over a five dollar meme game, and people tied activism to it.

The objection is that the game mocks an aspect of black culture, and that anybody participating in it is perpetuating negative stereotypes. I am not here to argue about whether those stereotypes are accurate. My problem is a different one.

The activism is largely bogus. It is for the internet. It is a place to be publicly on the right side of something, and that is about all it is.

Here is why I cannot take it seriously. The same people do not have that energy for the folks actually doing this stuff in real life. Not a fraction of it.

I grew up in the South Dallas area and came up through Oak Cliff. I participated in bad behavior and I will own that. I was into a lot of goofiness and I made things uncomfortable for people around me. Everybody I had problems with back then was black. And not one time, while I was actually doing all of that, did anybody call me a sellout or less than black. That only started later, and it was over politics.

So when I see people online going at streamers over a meme game, while there are places in this country other black people cannot walk through without risking getting robbed or beaten, I cannot pretend the priorities line up. If that energy were aimed at the people making it nearly impossible to open a shop or build anything in those areas, a lot of these problems would not exist.

And if it were consistent, people might take the complaint about the game seriously. Maybe some of us would look at it and say yes, I see the problem there. But it is not consistent, and that is the whole issue.

For the record, nobody seems to know who made this thing. It is credited to Trapstar Games and there is no public information about who is behind it.

We are not monolithic and we never were. But people keep talking about the black community like it is one block that thinks the same way and gets offended at the same things, and it has never worked like that.