Let me tell you something about me. I love The Ghostbusters. I love Ghostbusters big time. Ray is my favorite, and Egon is probably next--a big factor of that is probably because Dan Akroyd and Harold Ramis created it, and also because Dan Akroyd is hot, shut up. And I have played the game through several times and am finally trying for the "Are You A God" achievement for the first time--while Bioshock Infinite sits half-played on my shelf. I just can't get sick of anything Ghostbusters. Believe me, I've tried.
Which is why one line in the Civil War Exhibit section of the Museum level is like nails on a chalkboard down my spine every time I hear it. If you've played it, you probably know what I'm talking about. It's that line, shouted by Winston while you and the Ghostbusters bust an ongoing ghostly Civil War battle, that goes, "It couldn't have been the American Revolutionary War, could it? Or the War of Roses. Even the War on Drugs! It had to be THIS one!"
HA HA HA HA HA HA...oh, no wait. That's not funny. At least, it isn't if you're aware of the fact that the War on Drugs is effectively the most recent continuation of the values of the South in the Civil War, and possibly the most successful attempt to return to those halcyon days of enslavement of black people for white profit. And to put those words into the mouth of Winston, a black man living in New York City, where blacks and latinos make up about 45% of the city's drug users but represent over 80% of drug incarcerations due to various racist applications of Drug War policies such as the recently neutralized (here's hoping) "Stop and Frisk" laws, where minority schoolchildren are funneled into the prison system in the "School to Prison pipeline" in an effort to ensure that as many minorities as possible will enter adulthood with criminal records that will guarantee their futures as career prisoners, where those prisoners are then put in prison, often private for-profit prisons wherein prisoner labor is used for commercial profit...well, words simply don't exist to sufficiently express my disgust.
The War on Drugs is an enabling policy of modern day slavery on modern day plantations. It is a return to the days when predominantly black labor is used to enrich predominantly white people--the fact that this time, there are a few white faces in the sea of human livestock means nothing, as the rich white Drug War supporters are more than happy to throw a few of their own on the grenade if they can get rich,but the primary target is minorities, because it's easier to get people to ignore the pain of people who look different from the majority, especially if you can use misinformation about drugs and tie it to misinformation about minorities to convince that majority that "those people" are just suffering their "just deserts" for being so evil. The Drug War is a thinly veiled modern-day extension of the institution of slavery from the Civil War, and to have a black character, suggest that this newer institution, wherein people who exist today are currently suffering, is preferable to the Civil War and nineteenth century southern slavery which, as terrible and unconscionable and utterly wrong as it was, is over--and to have him express this preference in such a way that it is suggested that the two are mutually exclusive, unconnected to one another, and that the former is not the continuation of the latter--well, that is the kind of thing a privileged and sheltered white idiot would say. Or a privileged and sheltered token black person. In either case, someone who is entirely ignorant of the facts. Or a complete traitor who doesn't care because their own private gravy train is set. It's exactly the kind of dumbshit thing I would have said many years ago before I stopped assuming I knew what was going on and actually bothered to shut up and listen and learn. I'm not proud of that, but I did learn, and a lot of other people need to do likewise in this country. Believe me, it's not as hard as they say it is to admit you were wrong, America! Especially when you can do something to fix your mistakes!
Please, Dan Akroyd and Harold Ramis, please don't make me think that Winston is not just a Token Black Guy but a conservative Republican Token Black Guy toboot--a total sellout and a tool. And please don't make me think that, failing that, Winston is somehow ignorant of how the majority of the toll of the failed Drug War has fallen on minorities, especially black Americans, and how it is nothing more than a front for racist economic and social policies? You spent so much time developing your three white guys to the point where a single episode of The Real Ghostbusters told me more about WHO Winston was as a person than two whole Ghostbusters movies, and now you're starting to give him a bit more development--even making him an educated man rather than the "help"!--and you have to ruin it by making him say something boneheaded and ignorant--or dare I say it, reeking of white privilege--like this?
Pretty please with sugar on top?
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