What’s in a Name: Huckleberry Finn, Racism, and RDR2, Part I

All articles on this site feature detailed discussion of literary allusions in Red Dead Redemption 2, and as such contain unmarked major and minor spoilers for the game, and occasionally the eventual fates of some characters in Red Dead Redemption. Read at your own risk.
Content Warning: This essay series discusses anti-Black and anti-Indigenous racism, including white supremacist violence. As a point of clarity, I’ve focused on anti-Black racism in this series because of the work of literature I’m discussing. The anti-Indigenous, anti-Chinese, and anti-Mexican acts that white people committed during the period in which RDR2 is set and the way the game deals with those are equally important and worthy of analysis.

An unfortunate feature of American storytelling is the “anti-racist” text that is, itself, racist. These pieces ostensibly speak against racism, but the authors haven’t done the difficult work of confronting their own false and negative beliefs about the people they’re writing about. As a result, they uphold or create harmful stereotypes, like the white savior or the Uncle Tom. One such text is Quentin Tarantino’s film Django Unchained, which probably gave RDR2‘s writing team the idea for a Western set in the South. Having chosen that questionable inspiration, they chose another with similar flaws: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain. The novel tells the story of Huck Finn, a boy running away from his abusive father, and Jim, an enslaved man escaping his enslaver. Mark Twain was the pen name of Samuel Clemens, for whom RDR2‘s Clemens Point and Clemens Cove are named. Huck and Jim escape by rafting down the Mississippi River, which is why Rockstar chose Southern locations on the water to name after Twain.

Regarding Jim, Professor Stephen Railton says,

With this figure Mark Twain deliberately appeals to, gratifies and confirms his readers’ prejudices. Before and after the raft trip, for example, instead of the marvelous conversations Jim and Huck share on the river, in which they argue back and forth about the Bible or the cosmos, we’re presented with a series of routines that Twain derives straight from the minstrel shows that established the identity of the ‘Negro’ in popular white culture.

Jim and Mark Twain: What Do Dey Stan’ For?

Unfortunately, it’s not surprising that Red Dead Redemption 2 would embrace a text filled with harmful stereotypes. As Esther Wright notes, “Rockstar’s games have a history of problematic representations of people and communities of color, and have been heavily criticized for including harmful, racist caricatures and stereotypes of Black, brown, and Asian people” (Rockstar Games and American History 182). No doubt it’s partly with this bad press in mind that the game makes some effort to appear anti-racist. The player can gain honor by executing members of the KKK, who are bumbling losers, and the forerunners of people who put confederate flag stickers on their trucks are pathetic whiners. As gleefully as RDR2 mocks these racists, its efforts are shallow.

Outer Realities

Instead of demonstrating comprehension of or engagement with the social realities and specific policies that persecuted African Americans, RDR2 presents the era’s racisms as the concern of outsiders who mope around the woods. In fact, it was “regular” white people who tortured and murdered Black people in the Robert Charles riots in Louisiana only a year after Arthur Morgan and the gang were in the game’s version of that state.

Some historical elements are inappropriate to include in a game like RDR2: games are immediate and immersive in a way that other mediums are not, and people should be able to play them without encountering traumatizing content. How to strike the balance between historical fidelity and respect for the wellbeing of players is a marked challenge for a game set in the U.S. in 1899, but Rockstar doesn’t seem to have considered this question deeply, if at all. RDR2 fails to account for aspects of the Jim Crow era that are — while definitely evil — less viscerally horrifying, but includes triggering content like a random event in which a cop murders a Black man for stealing an apple, and the still-manacled body of a man who starved to death after being kidnapped by a slaver. Clearly, the reason history is excluded from the game isn’t because Rockstar cares about its players (see also: the fact that the player character can be raped).

While RDR2 portrays upsetting racial violence, other elements of Jim Crow are obscured. Tore C. Olsson points out that New Orleans — the game’s Saint Denis — underwent a substantial change between 1899 and 1907:

here the game misses a tremendous opportunity to showcase this shift. . . . As Marston witnesses it, the Saint Denis of 1907 is notably different from that of 1899. New buildings have been erected, hotel signs have changed, but the game acknowledges no changes to the racial climate. This is gravely wrong. One might not imagine eight years as a long time, but in this brief window New Orleans became a fully Jim Crow city. It would remain one for more than sixty years.

Red Dead’s History, 168

That change didn’t come from nowhere. It came from everyday white people’s everyday beliefs — not that you’d know it, playing RDR2.

In Saint Denis, a man on the street spouts racist pseudoscience and hands out a pamphlet about eugenics. Helpfully, he has a little Hitler mustache (in case the player is particularly dense). If the player shoots this man in full view of the cop stationed 30 feet up the street, there will be no consequences: no Wanted status, no bounty, no shots fired. The term “virtue signaling” is much abused, but the game actually does it here: you’re the good guy. We’re the good guys! But killing the eugenicist is not like dead-heading members of the KKK in the woods in the dark of night. One of Rockstar’s obvious goals with RDR2 was to create a world that realistically responds to player actions: not only do NPCs react to things like Arthur firing a gun, they comment on it if he has blood on his clothes, if he walks too close to them, if they don’t like his outfit, and so on. When the player murders someone on the street and the cops do nothing, RDR2 is positing that this is a realistic response, that the police would let Arthur kill the eugenicist because of his repugnant beliefs. This is absurd. Before the Civil War, slave patrols monitored and abused enslaved people. After the war, slave patrollers were deliberately recruited to work as police officers; they used similar methods and targeted the same people (Maier). The eugenicist’s views are in line with those of the police.

New Orleans — Saint Denis — in particular has a foul history of carceral violence against Black people: as historian John Barnes explains, the city was home to the New Orleans Police Jail, which was created and designed specifically to “be a factory that would seize rebellious people and beat them and brutalize them into submission.” He also says, “authorities in New Orleans were very deliberate and thoughtful in designing and perfecting a prison for the brutalization of Black people. They debated how to make the prison experience more brutal, more humiliating, more dehumanizing” (quoted in Newport). Policing in New Orleans is rooted in active systemic racism. To create a scenario in which the men trained by and working in this system tacitly approve of the murder of a white racist is to whitewash history.

Despite the gritty realism it strives for, “whitewash” is a word that applies to RDR2 in more ways than one. One of the most striking things about RDR2 is its sheer size: at the very least, the map represents partial versions of Montana, Colorado, and Wyoming (Ambarino); Nebraska, South Dakota, Iowa, Oklahoma, Kansas, Ohio, Tennessee, West Virginia, and New Hampshire (New Hanover); Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, and Kentucky (Lemoyne); California, Arizona, and New Mexico (West Elizabeth); and Texas and other bits of Arizona and New Mexico (New Austin). Regions from those 20 states are ripped out, compacted, layered and cemented together by some unseen hand. That size is one of the game’s greatest deceptions. Its silent claim is to represent a substantial portion of the country. It doesn’t. It only represents the land.

The game is overwhelmingly white; overwhelmingly male. To make a game about white men is just fine (if overdone); to make a game about white men that is supposed to represent over 40% of the U.S. is an erasure. As Esther Wright points out, “The promotion of the Red Dead franchise included numerous claims, in no uncertain terms, about the series’ attempt at offering a historically ‘authentic’ experience of this period in American history” (“Narratives of ‘Progress'” 4). Let’s examine what that attempt at authenticity looks like quantitatively. To take the state the game represents the most recognizably as an example, in 1900 — the year after RDR2 is set — the population of Louisiana looked like this:

Compare the historical reality with whom Rockstar thought worthy of inclusion:

This data covers every named character who physically appears in RDR2′s Story Mode (and will be published on this site shortly).

In other words, a little over 47% of the population of Louisiana was African American; in RDR2, it’s a mere 7% (to calculate this percentage, Charles Smith is categorized as Black). Historically, 26% of people living in Louisiana were white men. RDR2 falls just short of tripling that: 72% of the distinct characters are white men.

Obviously, not all of the game is set in Lemoyne, but broadening the scope hardly helps the overall picture: RDR2 erases whole populations of people. Comparing the physical U.S. to RDR2′s map isn’t an exact science; however, we can glean a broad idea of the nations one could reasonably expect to see living in the 20 states the game represents: the Reservations of the Choctaw, Chickasaw, Muscogee (Creek), Cherokee, Arapaho, Cheyenne, Wichita, Kiowa, Comanche, Osage, Kansas, Sac & Fox, Seminole, Potawatomi, Kickapoo, Ho-Chunk (Winnebago), Omaha, Ponca, Peoria, Modoc, Ottawa, Shawnee, Seneca, Wyandot, Apache, Pueblo, Apsáalooke (Crow), and Diné (Navajo) Nations all fall within them. Many of these nations have multiple Reservations for different bands or tribes. (This is the map, from 1900, that I consulted.) Compare that list of nations absent from the game to the fact that just within the gang, there are four people who have immigrated to the U.S. from other countries.

Perhaps it would be too much to expect all of those nations to be represented in one game, but certainly it’s reasonable to ask that more than one single nation represent the 346 federally recognized tribes in the contiguous United States. But if it is “too much” — words that Rockstar doesn’t seem all that familiar with — why should already-marginalized people be what’s left out of the game? Plenty of talented Indigenous American actors are available, as the success of projects like Dark Winds (2022-), Prey (2022), and Reservation Dogs (2021-2023) attests; certainly we’d know about more of them if they were given more opportunity. If Rockstar needed the game to be a more manageable size, why not make the map itself smaller? Failing that, why not make fewer Points of Interest (50), fewer challenges (90), fewer random encounters, fewer cities and towns (8)?

While “artifacts” of some Indigenous nations are scattered across the map, the distinct peoples who created them are absent, which implies they no longer exist. This is a racist erasure, especially considering that as far as RDR2 is concerned, there are no Native Americans living in its entire world after 1899 — save Charles Smith and select, unnamed members of the murderous and evil Skinner Brothers gang. RDR2′s approach is analogous to representing every European country and culture with the population of Vienna, and then re-creating versions of Père Lachaise, Stonehenge, and Auschwitz on the map so that it has that “European” vibe.

The game looks slightly more diverse than the charts above imply, if you walk around in it. But if you play the actual missions, the most important characters are usually white and male: other people exist, the game says, but this is who matters. The white men not just set dressing; they are considered as persons. They have personalities, careers, desires, names. Names are an incantation, an acknowledgment of vital individuality. They’re a hook to keep characters from sinking into anonymous background noise; without names, there’s nothing to differentiate them from the game’s overwhelming sprawl. They’re pixels. Modern-day white supremacists fundamentally fail to understand what a person is, and they apply the term “NPC” — non-player character, a broad term most often used for random unnamed characters in a game — to people of color.

In the documents found around camp, the following characters are named: Micah Bell’s white brother (Amos), Bill Williamson’s (probably white) commanding officer (Col. Harold T. Irving), Sean MacGuire’s white father (Darragh), Arthur Morgan’s white mother and white father (Beatrice and Lyle), Hosea Matthews’s white wife (Bessie). Even Leopold Strauss’s little sister, Anna, is named in his one campfire monologue. The following characters are not given names: Charles Smith’s Native American mother and African American father, and Lenny Summers’s African American father. Even very minor white male characters in RDR2 are given names: in town after the snake bite random encounters, the white victim is named (Norbert); the Black victim is not. Nearly every shopkeeper has a full name. The Black man who runs the store at Wallace Station only a first name: Ross.

The Black woman who runs the bait shop at Lagras is not given a name at all, first or last.

Nor is the character played by the most accomplished artist who worked on RDR2: Carmen de Lavallade, a Black actress whose talent as a ballet dancer brought her to the stage of the Met in the 1950s, who has been given prestigious positions as choreographer and performer-in-residence for Yale’s School of Drama, who has been laureled with an honorary Doctor of Fine Arts from Juilliard and the Kennedy Center Honors Award. Having had the good fortune to cast her, what use does Rockstar make of her talent? Most people who play the game will never even see her character: she only spawns in the dead of night, when it’s foggy, tucked away on a side path in the alligator-infested swamp. The game generically labels her “Soothsayer.” Her white male counterpart, who will be encountered throughout the day at locations all over the map, has a name.

In fact, the only Black woman character in RDR2′s entire world who has a name — out of more than 280 distinct characters physically present in story mode — is Tilly Jackson.

Rockstar’s failure to adequately represent Black women, both in number and by name, is a failure to recognize their equality, worth, and importance. Historical realities did not somehow impose the underrepresentation of Black women characters on Dan Houser et al. It’s true that there weren’t many Black outlaws: white supremacist patriarchy fostered a delusion of superiority in men like Jesse James and Bob Dalton that made them believe not only that they had a right to commit their crimes, but that they could survive where so many others died. But most of RDR2′s characters aren’t outlaws.

Many of the game’s minor NPCs are lifted from history, and many Black women of the time period were remarkable. Ida B. Wells’s anti-lynching journalism ranks with the most important reporting ever done; she was in New Orleans, covering white supremacist violence, a year after Arthur Morgan and the gang left it. There’s no shortage of examples: Mary Ellen Pleasant and Madam C. J. Walker were businesswomen and self-made millionaires (like Leviticus Cornwall); Mary McLeod Bethune was an educator, as well as being an activist (like Dorothea Wicklow and Olive Calhoon); Olivia Ward Bush-Banks was a writer (like Evelyn Miller), as was Anna J. Cooper, the brilliant scholar; and Edmonia Lewis was an artist (like Charles Châtenay and Albert Mason). If those people don’t seem Western-coded enough (despite their in-game parallels), well, there was the horse trainer Johanna July, the mail carrier “Stagecoach Mary” Fields, Mormon pioneer Jane Manning James, and Clara Brown, an important figure in the Colorado gold rush.

It doesn’t take a multi-billion-dollar corporation with hundreds of thousands of dollars to spend on research to find these examples; they all have Wikipedia pages. The absence of figures like these in RDR2 is not a question of not looking hard enough, or even a question of not looking at all, but of looking away, of ignoring, of discounting. Out of over 280 distinct characters in the game, only three (3) are Black women. That’s 1%. Historically, Black women made up 24% of the population of Louisiana. That’s an awful lot of people to deem unworthy, an awful lot of history to cut dead, an awful lot of injustice to perpetuate.

Next week: RDR2′s representation of 1899 demonstrably lacks breadth, but when it attempts to draw characters in depth, it doesn’t fare any better. Plus, more of the actual allusions to Huckleberry Finn.

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