Ninja Can’t Do It All
Tyler “Ninja” Blevins recently went on the record to discuss where his career has gone recently and some things he’s noticed over the course of his professional streaming career. The professional streamer discussed problematic chat and how he feels when it comes up, ultimately saying it isn’t his job to teach kids about racism, white privilege, etc. Ninja is currently shredding it up in Riot Games’ Valorant which is available for free exclusively for PC right now.
“Your information and data are precious and should remain private, but it sucks that there are kids who can say racist things and be incredibly aggressive and threatening to women online and have zero repercussions,” said Tyler “Ninja” Blevins. “It would be awesome if when someone said something threatening, you could be like, ‘Let me look up this dude’s gamer tag on this website,’ if the law could do this, not a normal person, and then boom: ‘It’s Jimmy. He said this. Let’s call his parents.'”
“But it all comes down to parenting. Do you want to know who your kid is? Listen to him when he’s playing video games when he thinks you’re not,” continued Ninja. “Here’s another thing: how does a white kid know he has white privilege if his parents never teach him or don’t talk about racism? If they’re gaming and their first interaction with racism is one of their friends saying the N-word and they have no idea what it is, what if it was on my stream? Is it my job to have this conversation with this kid?”
“No, because the first thing that’s going on in my head is, This kid is doing this on purpose to troll me. If someone says a racial slur on someone else’s stream, it can potentially get that streamer banned. It’s awful, but that’s the first thing I think of.”
What do you think of Ninja’s hot takes? Let us know in the comments below!