Fiction: No Country for Black People

Note: The above picture for this article is, in fact, a snapshot of my own Angel Shephard (Femshep for the Liara shippers out there) from Mass Effect 3. I realize the picture is awesome, but if you share this image, please credit blacknerdproblems.com when doing so. Thanks. Heathens. I have a friend who is basically a tech genius. He also happens to be white. A few years back he fixed an issue I was having with my computer (it wasn’t porn). When he gave it back to me, he commented that my desktop background surprised him. It surprised me that it surprised him, but I guess it shouldn’t have. I had taken a screencap from my Mass Effect game and used it as a background, never really intending for anyone to see it. My friend had seen a Black and Female Commander (Angel) Shepard on my desktop and it couldn’t have appeared more different than the stock, white male Commander Shepard he had spent probably close to 100 hours with so far. This explained how great Bioware’s customization was and how completely necessary it is for the purposes of representation. Mass Effect for those unfamiliar is a Sci-Fi role-playing game that takes place a few hundred years in the future where intergalactic travel has been discovered bringing humans into contact with a large number of alien species that all have their own sets of politics within their own species. All these alien races have been given their own cultures and personality types with their own biases or prejudices just like humans. In a w…