They might have been more eager to push Griffey because he was black but it was 100% justifiable because he was that good. He was right there in the running with Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa during the home run record chase in 1998.
Optics don't matter at all for their side. they openly campaigned on letting convicted sex offenders in women's bathrooms and replacing all white men with Guatemalan migrants and we only won because Donald Trump is an extraordinary, once in a lifetime politician.
Leftists can read about a setting where a race of creatures from the darkest jungles are completely dedicated to death and destruction and say "wow, why are they writing about black people like that?" and they're not joking.
Somebody's going to have to come up with a sweeping, broad "don't be a piece of shit" anti-malicious compliance ordinance that gets enforced extremely quickly and comes with disproportionate consequences before things can get better.
All they had to do from the beginning was make a game where you're a ninja in feudal Japan and maybe have segments where you play as a ronin samurai to break up the flow. It's the easiest concept you can possibly have for a game about an assassin.
There's at least one version of the Superman origin story where it explicitly shows the Kents secretly dropping Kal-El off at an orphanage and then going to adopt him the next day.