>>48311241Now that it's been said I see it. But, as a black person myself, I also see where the confusion came from. In burgerland, we all know we're different and we form cliques based on shared cultural descent. Hatians with Hatians, Jamaicans with Jamaicans, etc. Generally, we can tell the differences between ourselves by eye shape, differences in frame, and skin undertones. If everyone is an anime girl with wacky fantasy hair and rainbow eye colors, two of those go out of the window. The only remainder is skin undertones. It just so happens that Nessa's undertones, along with Iris, Hop, Leon, Raihan, and Olivia's match up with the more explicitly african-american ones and mainstream(read: twitter) blacks are generally just pretending to be fringe. I can guarantee you the ones who freaked out about the whole whitewashing thing, if they were black at all, have never played a jrpg in their lives and I'm not counting Persona 5. I will say, however, that there's a large disconnect between asians(Explicitly chinese/japanese. Koreans/indo-pacific relations are fine and idk why tbqhwyc) and blacks as far as communiation and cultural understanding. In my experience we just don't mesh well and that leads to misinterpretations. The one explicitly black character I can think of is Lenora and her undertones are just uncommon for anyone who isn't early-gen immigrants. Had she been given Kiawe's undertones, it'd be more accurate, but i'm sure no one at gamefreak had the correct background to give that insight when she was designed. This is part of the reason characters in anime are "black-coded" through behavior or choice of clothing. Mina Ashido from MHA is a pink skinned gyaru and nothing more, but since that's how modern black girls act, there's a clear projection. Correlation wothout causation in a way.
Tl;dr murican blacks use skin undertones to recognize each other, Nessa's fit the more common black tones thus the confusion. Hope this helps someone
Source: am black.
