I wish I could blame it on being an adolescent, but I can’t. My sister, a fellow Simmer, would always ask me why. What was this fascination with being white? I didn’t want to be white in real life, I replied again and again. But, I did, though, right? Sure, EA, The Sim’s parent company, had unrealistic Afrocentric features like patchy dark skin and oddly shaped afros that look like cauliflower, but they did have options. Bad ones, yes, but choices nonetheless that I could have made to create a Black Sim. And yet, in my virtual world where I ventured to escape reality, I chose to be someone so unlike my real self; someone who was always seen on TV, in film, in my dolls, in the descriptions of my favorite novels. I chose to be white in my video games because I was replicating what I’d been told in media: being Black was the anomaly; it was “wrong”; it was “inhuman”; it was “ugly”; it was “criminal.”
