I just find it shocking how defensive so many people in this thread are getting.

People are forgetting perceived and actual intent.

The actual intent here (I believe) was Capcom choosing a setting for their game without any sort of racial bias. A member of the dev team said they liked the sun-drenched and lone wolf setting of Black Hawk Down, so they wanted to try and ape that a bit. In addition, RE:0 referenced something going on in Africa, so I'm assuming there will be throwbacks to that.

Ok? I think we're all agreeing here that a bunch of isolated Japanese developers wouldn't think much about a big burly white guy brutally murdering a bunch of savage, inhuman black guys.

But it's different in the US. For a long, long time, the social norm was that black people weren't equal to whites - that they weren't even human. If you seriously think that the public consciousness isn't going to do a double-take when seeing something that's somewhat reminiscent of a dark part in our nation's history, then you're out of your mind.

Now, I'm not saying that the perceived intent (that this is supposed to be some sort of racial dominance) is valid. I'm not even trying to argue that IGN should have or have not written the article. But trying to dismiss the discussion because you're not offended is not only wrong but would probably do more harm than good. I'd like to think that we wouldn't have to go into this, but when we had a rant (or was it off-topic?) thread a few months ago with dozens of PSOWers trying to argue that using a racial slur was the proper way to refer to a group of people, I feel like we've got a problem.