Hand-Waving and Leatherface // BHVR's Slow and Ineffective Action

In fear of not being taken seriously, I have to preface this with the fact that yes, I am black. I have been the target of racism in online video games as well. That's all to say that...

Removing Leatherface's customization options does absolutely nothing to solve the issue of the rampant racist targeting of our black DBD community. If anything, this makes it harder for people to know with certainty who is unfairly targeting them now that these racists don't have a means of (stupidly) identifying themselves and what they're aiming to do in the game.

My problem here also isn't that the masks were removed. I don't play Bubba too often, nor do I have the masks in question. My problem here is that this is a hand-wavy solution to a serious issue that the DBD community has and that BHVR has yet to meaningfully address. The blatant targeting of players who belong to a specific group of people. This happened back during Pride month until the homophobes realized that there are too many people with Pride charms on and they're losing their games. Now it's happening again against the black players-- small streamers in particular getting the worst of these attacks. But with removing these cosmetics, all I see is "We hear you!" and "Cosmetics gone, problem gone!" and "No more racism!" Without actually doing anything about it.

And that always seems to be the problem; BHVR is extremely slow to act on anything. We can see it with our rampant and longstanding cheating problem and with these same players even blatantly streaming their cheating, with the same names popping up. Then, when BHVR finally takes action, it's probably (usually) not effective in actually solving these issues.

Bl*ckface is an intentional twisted satire. It's a depiction of a racist stereotype of a black person, meant to depict them as less than. Leatherface is quite literally just wearing someone else's face because he's insane. There is no attempt to stereotype. There is no attempt to see them as lesser-- as he does the same to Claudette's white and Asian peers. We can't attribute these negative meanings to everything in the game just because Racist John decided it'd be funny if something that can be vaguely seen as racist is what he wore when he targeted black players-- otherwise we'll get to people clamoring for the removal of a certain killer that can vaguely represent the imagery of a certain racist cult.

So, BHVR, this is your call to action. Why don't you start cracking down on these racists? Why don't you start monitoring their post-game chat logs? After the many many reports, and many many instances of video evidence, why aren't these people banned? Racists will continue to plague the game long after these masks are removed, and you've just made them a lot harder to identify... unless you get up and actually do something to stop these people.