At least we got a latino who doesn’t carry his racial stereotype with him.
Why is Deadlock a sponsor of the newspaper?
I think that’s just using advertising space for their rally? The Deadlock Gang and Deadlock M.C. are related, but not necessarily the same. The Gang was started by Ashe, McCree and two others. The M.C. appears to have started in the 70s.
You could consider Baptiste to be African American, since Haiti is a part of Latin America.
Shouldn’t the important part be that he is Black, And not pretending that an American who is also black is special?
A character of any origin can be interesting. But African Americans are different from every other group of African descent. And all of those groups are different from each other.
I personally don’t think we should be fawning over personal characteristics in the first place. It’d be like counting the amount of characters who have blue versus brown eyes. I have blue eyes, but seeing another character with them doesn’t make me feel attached to them any more or less.
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I agree. I do.
Just saying IF people are going to fawn over it, I would hope the country the currently live in would be less important 
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It seems we have a natural bias for putting African-Americans in things. not to say we can’t have them in things, but when we look at the entire world and ethnicities one of the first top-five we tend to expect to be in something as African-American before Indian American before Asian American. There’s really so much diversity in the world but we put African-American on the representation pedestal above the others.
I’d like to see a Canadian hero.
African American is a specific subculture of American culture. So anyone wanting a character for the sake of a cultural representation is a valid reason.
That goes for any culture, of course. That said, I’m glad there are non-American black people in the game, because you actually tend to see that sort of thing less often represented than African Americans.
You could also argue that Lucio, to some degree, represents African American culture despite not being from the States. He’s a DJ, which is a musical art from that has its roots in America, as does breakdancing (though you could also argue Capoeira plays a part in this, which is from Brazil).
Pharah is half-Canadian. Her father is heavily teased an aboriginal from British Columbia, but its never been explicitly told to us.
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Lucio is in an interesting position. When he was initially developed, he was intended to be from Canada, but then the team realized that they didn’t have any heroes from South America at all, so they retooled him to be from Brazil instead. I’m curious to see if Brazilian fans have really embraced him.
To speak to the OP’s initial comments: no, there are currently no heroes in the playable roster that represent African-Americans. Doomfist (Nigerian) and Baptiste (Haitian) are voiced by African-American men (Sahr Ngaujah and Benz Antoine, respectively), while Orisa (Numbani, which is West African) is voiced by a British actress of Jamaican heritage. Sojourn is voiced by an African-American actress (Cherise Boothe), and has been heavily implied to EVENTUALLY be a playable hero, but is not playable yet.
The key thing about representation is that if a group feels they don’t have it, they deserve it. From the first day it was announced, Overwatch was billed as a game where everyone could be a hero, which is why the cast is as diverse as it is in terms of nationality, gender identification, body shape, age… the list goes on. So when a demographic like African-American women is left out of the playable roster, given the history of that demo as being under-served in general and by video games in particular, it’s reasonable that African-American women would be agitated by the snub. It’s made worse when details like “Sojourn has been in development since 2015” get made, when it’s 2019 and she’s only now getting revealed, or when a rival game like Apex Legends launches with TWO African-American-coded women in the roster.
The desire for Blizzard to do better and to serve this community by giving them the representation they’ve been waiting for is completely valid. And I don’t say that to imply that any other hero that they’ve added is any less for being what they are, or to say that African-American women deserve it more than Indian-Americans or any other demographic: if a group, ANY group, earnestly wants for representation in a game that has billed itself on diversity and inclusivity, then they deserve it and I hope Blizzard is able to service all of them.
And I will push for that whether I am part of that group of not.
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This is a myth. He was never conceptualized as a Canadian hero.
To use an example, I’d like to talk about Lucio. But first I’d like to address a popular rumor about Lucio, is that he was supposed to be Canadian because of that skin. So, you know, I guess it’s hard to believe that a Brazillian would be into hockey, but you know he’s got the skates, and honestly if you ever sat in an office with the developers of Overwatch […] you would understand why this skin exists. We love hockey. So that’s really the reason behind this.
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The Art of Overwatch, page 46, states the following:
CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT – As the designers were fleshing out Lucio’s backstory, they decided he would be from Brazil. The country fit well with the hero: it was a vivid and lively place with a proud music culture. The developers incorporated aspects of Brazil into Lucio’s final concept design. His color theme was inspired by the Brazilian flag, and they based his frog symbol on the giant monkey frog, a bright green amphibian from the Amazon basin that’s used in traditional healing ceremonies.
So… what I extract from that is that Lucio wasn’t initially concepted as a Brazilian hero, but that it came about when they were fleshing him out. It is entirely possible that the “he was Canadian” part was either a creation of my own brain, an explanation for the hockey references, or just a misconception. So mea culpa on that part.
Either way, I think the question of who feels represented by Lucio is a valid question to ask, but I would argue that saying “Lucio is ~kinda~ African-American so we’re good?” isn’t really a good answer to the OP’s question or the larger implied question of “when are African-Americans going to get representation in this game?”
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Sym: am I a joke to you?
Symmetra is not Indian-American. She is Indian.
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I mean doomfist was speculated to be african american and was speculated also to be voiced by terry crews… so ya…
no dude she american indian, like kamala khan or aziz ansari or Chloe Frazer
Symmetra was born in India, and as far as we know has never been to America. She is not an American.
Neither is Kamala Khan (she’s Pakistani-American) or Chloe Frazer (she’s Indian-Australian).
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