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My mother had no idea I was picking up sex workers. My sex appeal wasn’t very high, but I figured the paint job of my lowrider was attractive enough for me to get lucky.
I drove to the corner my friends had suggested and waited. Nothing. I did another lap around the block, worried about looking like an idiot for leaving the barbershop with Jheri curls instead of a high fade. Right as I noticed the pixelated woman appear around the corner, my mother called me downstairs for iftar.
I put down my PlayStation 2 controller in frustration.
It had been only a couple of days since I had borrowed Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, a monumental video game that draws from Los Angeles and is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year, and I was just starting to appreciate its endless possibilities. It was also just a couple of weeks into Ramadan.
A video game I was told I shouldn’t be playing at the age of 14 — the freedom to commit crimes and escape from the police in fast vehicles thrilled millions but scandalized others — informed so much of my understanding about race, religion and gaming culture that I continue to reflect on the period.
The argument that violent games like the Grand Theft Auto series make violent people couldn’t be further from the truth. In reducing video games to one-dimensional harbingers of chaos, we miss cultural nuance and hidden but important stories.
Islam guides all my mother’s principles, and much of my youth was centered on being the best Muslim boy I could be. I volunteered on the weekends at my mosque, sharpened my singing skills for every call to prayer I was asked to perform and maintained a nonexistent social life outside of school. When she had caught me trouncing gang members and selling drugs in the fictionalized Miami of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City two years before the release of San Andreas, I nearly lost one of the greatest gaming consoles ever produced.
During Ramadan especially, I was to abstain — not just from food before the regular iftar meal at sunset, but from nearly all manner of entertainment, distraction and temptation. At Friday prayers, the imam at my South Florida mosque warned of the damnation awaiting people who indulged in sinful practices.
But the punishment I really feared was being left out of the group of boys who met in the dimly lit corners of the mosque’s parking lot as our families prayed inside after iftar. There we exchanged cheat codes and tips about San Andreas before passing around the coveted plastic case that one of us got to borrow for the weekend.
Notably, we had gathered there at the behest of the hafiz, the most important figure in the community. A year or two younger than we were, he had already memorized the entire Quran in Arabic, a mythic feat for those of us with only cursory knowledge of the text.
It was this same hafiz who nonchalantly bragged about the guy he had bought Grand Theft Auto from, who had supposedly stolen it off the back of a truck. His blasé attitude about it all was contagious, providing us a kind of sacred license.
That made secretly indulging in the sprawling world of San Andreas as my mother prayed salah in the other room somewhat bearable. I wasn’t allowed to play football in the street with my friends, so I freely roamed the digital streets as often as I could. Yet I still wondered if I was setting myself up for an afterlife of Sisyphean tortures because I had fought digitized cops and tossed Molotovs at the cars of rival gang members.
I was also a Black child controlling a Black protagonist in a digital world where negative tropes of Black people were common. I later grew up wondering if I was too Black for the digital space itself.
When the group of boys met in the parking lot during iftar, we discussed the optimal strategies for missions, argued about the best cars and chided one another over the weapons we preferred. One night, someone said he would just drive around a neighborhood in the game killing “whatever Black dudes showed up.” The hafiz would also make crass comments about the Black characters.
It felt so pedestrian, so commonplace, that I always let it go.
I was the only Black Muslim kid I knew in my predominantly West Indian community; my mother was born in Guyana and my father in Haiti. I grew up hearing both thinly veiled and overtly racist jokes, listening to people’s shoddy Haitian impersonations. (I didn’t know it at the time, but a coalition of Haitian activists was pressuring Rockstar Games, the publisher of Grand Theft Auto, to re-examine Vice City’s violent tone toward the Haitian characters.)
I wasn’t thinking then about how to navigate race and religion. Whenever I played San Andreas, my concern was to protect my family by indiscriminately mowing down gang members and other characters. I hoped the digital ride would never end.
As I got older, I learned that places like the fictional Grove Street, where the protagonist Carl Johnson is from, are often drawn up by writers with little background knowledge beyond the stereotypes of squalor in Black communities. The video game industry remains mostly white despite efforts to push for greater representation over the years.
Race and video games have a history that goes back to the original gamer stereotype — the one trapped in a basement, eviscerating demons and other nefarious monsters as Duke Nukem or Doomguy. For all of San Andreas’s faults, Carl Johnson was a leading Black character at a time when they were even more of a rarity than they are now.
Grand Theft Auto games have a complicated relationship with race, sex and violence, yet since San Andreas, I’ve played every major entry in the series. I still join online lobbies with my cousins in Grand Theft Auto V, and we get into the same kinds of high jinks I did when I was a lot younger than they are now.
What I’ve learned while navigating this passion is that I love the escape.
I will always remember my first time hitting jumps on a dirt bike or parachuting out of a helicopter in San Andreas. But I’ll also keep holding on to what more I wish the game did, what grace I wish it had for Black characters relegated to stereotypical antics. It’s a game that is more important than most media I’ve consumed, and the only damnation would have been to miss out on it entirely.
This review is supported by Critical Minded, an initiative to invest in the work of cultural critics from historically underrepresented backgrounds.
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