A few years ago, Ken Levine’s hit first-person shooter, Bioshock Infinite, was accused of enabling racism.
The game, some in the social justice movement argued, was racist in the way it portrayed the brutal oppression of minorities. Bioshock Infinite, they said, was insensitive to the social justice struggle because of the way it depicted both the racists within its universe (The Founders) and the social justice warriors (Vox Populi) in similarly damning terms. Extremists of every stripe resort to indiscriminate violence, while moderates and innocent bystanders—including sympathizers to the social justice movement—are made victims based on the color of their skin or socioeconomic status.
In response, I wrote an article defending the game and argued how—if all elements of the game were taken into consideration—the game wasn’t racist at all. The universe Ken Levine created was honestly intelligent and well-crafted.
Though I mentioned some of the individuals arguing that the game was racist by name, my intention was to simply further the conversation. I woke up the next day to a stream of apoplectic responses in my timeline that accused me of ignorance and called me a full-blown racist and not much of a social justice “ally” after all. My references to individuals were seen as a public “call out.”
The shame I felt was immense. I was misunderstood, and to some I had become a pariah. I was fully immersed in the social justice movement at the time—before I realized that it was more of a cult than an actual cause. I know how bad the culture is now, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t get upset when people branded me a racist. And when you’re fully immersed in groupthink, the last thing you want is to be socially ostracized by your peers and disconnected from your only support network. It is a culture of fear.
Apparently, someone else felt similar to how I did at the time. In fact, it led her to kill herself. An official inquest has heard that a teenage girl named Phoebe Connop in the United Kingdom posted a photoshopped image of herself with darkened skin and wearing a headscarf on Instagram. She shared the image with friends, and jokingly suggested that she’d only get the approval of the parents of the boy she was interested in, who is of South Asian descent, if she resembled the edited photograph.
Unfortunately for her, the image was shared outside her private circle of friends, and Connop feared a backlash that would lead to her being branded a racist and subsequently ostracized. So Phoebe Connop, age 16, took her own life.
Her parents say that she wasn’t behaving out of the ordinary in the months and weeks leading up to her death. Connop, who was an award-winning gymnast, had posted pictures of her school leavers prom just days prior.
During the inquest, the police detective investigating her suicide testified that she had taken her own life entirely because of her fears about the consequences of the photograph. There was no other reason, the police said.
“From speaking to her friends in the weeks following her death, we discovered that the image had circulated further than she wanted it to,” said Sergeant Katherine Tomkins. “There had been some negative reaction and she confided in her friend, who did take the image down at her request, that she was scared of what the reaction might be from the Asian community in her area.”
Phoebe Collop isn’t even the first victim of this culture of fear. In 2015, a fan artist who drew illustrations of her favorite characters in the cartoon show, Steven Universe, was bullied into attempting suicide. The artist, who went by the name Zamii, was accused by the Steven Universe and Homestuck fandoms—which are heavily immersed in social justice rhetoric—of racism, transphobia, fatphobia, ableism, and a litany of other sins. She came under fire for drawing an anime character with slightly slanted eyes and yellow skin, and again for drawing a “Native American” Fluttershy from the popular My Little Pony cartoon that was accused of being “stereotypical.”
But not everyone is as fortunate as Zamii. The social justice movement has fostered an environment—not just on social networks like Tumblr, Instagram and Twitter, but in the real world—in which everyone is afraid of being “called out.” And those affected the most by the social justice-driven culture of fear, shaming, and public callouts are often the most vulnerable, like Phoebe Collop.
Being called by your peers and shamed by them for inexplicable reasons is something most people are unable to deal with, especially not teenagers. It needs to stop.
Ian Miles Cheong is a journalist and outspoken game critic. You can reach him through social media at @stillgray on Twitter and on Facebook.