There ’s being into telecasting gambling and there ’s place as a hard-core gamer . Both are all right ! But the latter group has developed a well - take in reputation for being prevailing with bigoted jerk , from thewhole good deal over Gamergateto more late instances like PewDiePie’srepeated instances of racism . It ’s also not a coincidence that hardware manufacturers have long take to invoke to hard-core gamers with branding exercise that could be depict as Mountain Dew with anextra spoonful of cringe .
On Saturday , play giant Razer waded now into the latter soil by reposting a “ De Wey ” meme , apparently unaware the punchline is making sport of Ugandans .
Razer , WYD ? If your brand is gaming , you should belike make love to be extra cautious around gamer memes , because half of the prison term they ’re horrifying .
The “ De Wey ” meme has evolved into a racist joke for reasons our sister web site Kotakuaccurately called “ excruciating to explain,”but it ’s a mashup of two meme . One is a completely harmless , if jerky , drawing of Sonic the Hedgehog enfranchisement character Knuckles by a YouTuber using the name Gregzilla . The other is spend a penny fun of a Ugandan action movie titled Who Killed Captain Alex , which contains the line “ He knows the way of using a gun ” :
Fans of the PUBG streamer Forsen add the meme to Modern heights by mobbing him in - game during his Twitch broadcasts and quoting the movie at him , while also playing as black character .
The movie ’s original quotation has now been bastardized into the phrase “ do you roll in the hay the elbow room , ” and it ’s often pursue by anti-Semite jokes that have nothing to do with Captain Alex , like exaggerated imitations of the clicking from Khoisan and Bantu language , or whirl about the Ebola virus outbreak in West Africa . Meanwhile , Gregzilla ’s cutesy drawing off of Knuckles , so often used as a gumshield for other democratic memes , has become the basal mouth for this exaggerated Ugandan caricature .
“ De Wey ’s ” racial connotation became so explicit that , as Kotaku report , some Overwatch League teams hold on engaging with fans that posted it or publicly distanced themselves from its use .
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hxjofn2bYE8
So at some point , this meme transitioned from in - joke to something much less palatable — the accurate kind of anti-Semite meme one might need to head off if they were , say , tweeting from a major brand account . Yet when other Twitter user indicate squeeze out the meme was “ a misstep , ” it responded with this :
Numerous other Twitter drug user shout out out the company in the reply below the post , though it did n’t respond to any of them immediately bringing up that the meme is racist .
As colleague Alex Cranznoted in 2016 , Razer ’s previous juvenile antics have admit things like tweet “ You call yourself Pro ? S my D. ” So while this appear to be yet another instance of a brand getting itself stick to in the societal mediarace to the easiest joke , there ’s precedent for Razer being kind of obtuse in its gamer branding .
A Razer voice tell Gizmodo that they would endeavor to “ work out out the particulars of this situation , ” and we ’ll update this billet if we hear back .
Update January 28th , 2018 at 3:30pm ET : Razer has take down the original post and tweeted , “ We shared a tweet from a phallus of our residential area . It was highlighted to us that the meme share may have negative undertones . ”
“ We attain out to the user who elucidate he was incognizant of the connotations and had no ill - will , ” the society bring . “ Both parties decided it best to remove the content . ”
We shared a tweet from a member of our community of interests . It was foreground to us that the meme shared may have negative undertones.⁰⁰We progress to out to the drug user who clarified he was incognizant of the connotation and had no ill - will . Both parties adjudicate it best to take out the subject .
— R Λ Z Ξ roentgen ( @Razer)January 28 , 2018
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