Black Panther Video Game Developer Doesn’t Hire White People

Video Games

Wakanda is more exclusive than we thought. Video game studio Cliffhanger is developing a Black Panther game for Marvel, for which it said it was putting together a team consisting of “veterans of top franchises including Halo Infinite, God of War, Call of Duty and others.” Well, one of these veterans is Dani Lalonders, and apparently, she’s a nutjob. X account Libs of Tiktok, scourge of people who don’t want things they’ve said publicly to be made public, shared a video in which Lalonders, who identifies as “non-binary,” said she doesn’t hire white people because they make her feel “unsafe”:

This is Dani Lalonders, a nonbinary game developer. She was hired by @CliffhangerDevs to create a game based on @Marvel's #BlackPanther.

She says she doesn’t hire white people because they’re unsafe and it’s hard to work with them and only hires people of color.

Is this… pic.twitter.com/zVodAvagLN

— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) March 12, 2024

Using “unsafe” in relation to “microaggressions,” which can be anything from wearing the wrong hat to failing to use a term that was invented thirty-five minutes ago, is ridiculous and nothing a rational person would take seriously. But it appears to be par for the course with Lalonders, who has a history of saying loony things when it comes to race. An article from That Park Place released yesterday (which I found through a video from The Trent Report) runs down some of the X posts Lalonders has made regarding race in support of Sweet Baby Inc. (let’s all be shocked together). Here are quotes from a few (I can’t embed the posts because her X account is protected, naturally):

“i just stopped taking yall seriously when yall start running around saying white people can experience racism because i did not suffer through 2020 for yall to act like you werent an #ally to #blm 4 years later”

“yeah im racist so what now?”

“if you think you can be racist to white people you literally are”

“i didnt imply anything. racism and prejudice are not the same thing. racism is systematic. white people are not systematically affected negatively by racism. Certain groups of white people throughout history have been affected by prejudice based on where theyre from.”

Aside from her clear disdain for capital letters and the apostrophe, she doesn’t seem to care for white people. I’m still trying to make sense of that one about 2020 and who she’s mad at, exactly, but the gist of all this is the same thing Kotaku writer Alyssa Mercante said amid the backlash to her Sweet Baby Inc. defense – that it is not possible to be racist against white people. At least Lalonders tries to explain why she feels the way she does; she seems more angry, while Mercante was just unduly smug. Regardless, I think it’s safe to say the Black Panther video game will be about as fun as it must be to work with Lalonders, with T’Challa facing the diabolical forces of white microaggressions. Can’t wait.