Today comes my copy of the Paleo board game. This is the third version of the Game of the Year logo. Other than that, there is almost no difference from the first version. Due to the very strong protests of the Americans and the British who woke up, many of the characters in the game are now black. It is a problem because it does not represent the entire race of the population.
Paleo is designed and manufactured in Germany and sold primarily in Europe. In fact, the game is very difficult to obtain in the US because it was not created for this market and is not directly distributed there. Today, Germany is a largely multicultural society, and a quarter of the population has immigrated since 1949 to parents and has "immigrant origins" that they identify. As you walk the streets, you will see many different nationalities and religions. The main groups come from Turkey, Eastern Europe (including Russia) and the Balkans and since 2015 more than one million people have migrated from Syria.
There are no large numbers of blacks or East Asians in Germany. Less than 1% of Germans are black. This is a direct consequence of the fact that Germany never imported large numbers of slaves from Africa and had little effect on colonization (they didn't want to, but they arrived late and were expelled early). before World War II). This means that the first version of the Paleo ethnos on the streets of Cologne, where the game was created, was the perfect representation of the people you meet. It is certainly different from the ethnic mix in London or Washington. The third edition of Paleo ethnic mix belongs to Washington, but more to Cologne. This does not match the ethnic composition of Beijing. Or an ethno-historical mixture of the Paleolithic people. (Wake up only cares when historical accuracy is appropriate, see The Witcher 3).
When the creators of Paleo had to change the ethnicity of the characters in the game to reflect the racial mix of the United States, to reflect the racial mix of their own country, it was very similar to the cultural imperialism that woke me up. I mean, I can understand why Americans assert that black representation in their country is important to them, based on the guilt they feel about slavery and the racial mix that comes from this story. But perhaps the Germans had a different sense of guilt than slavery. Even for a very brilliant German, the reflection of blacks in games is only so important that he brought his brilliance from America. And if we're talking about global race, why would the German game want to represent an ethnic mix of the US and not, say, Chinese?
