lolwut? I remember history pretty well, so correct me if I'm wrong here, but I'm fairly certain we/anybody never claimed people of African descent could summon demon dogs, or spread flesh eating bugs around, or even make a wall of zombies. The idea that we conclude a tribal character of African (by our standards not the game's standards) is instantly racist when he has the same opportunity to develop as a character as all the other potential choices you could make kinda makes me think you call any portrayal of a dark-skinned male racist.
No, it's the fact that
You jump to the conclusion that it must be racist and the witch doctor can't instead be based off of African lore and be a really cool example of said lore. A (perhaps) stereotypical design does not equate to a stereotypical character.
If the design is a racial stereotype, that's still a problem... and I'd say it's more than the design anyway. Seriously, the guy runs around wearing skulls, giant hoop lip-rings and comically oversized masks while raising the dead. It sounds like the sort of classical American/British caricature of African tribal (and possibly Caribbean) culture that I didn't think was even around anymore.
Voodoo witch doctors are bad ass, and just because it's a possible stereotype, doesn't mean it's stereotypical.
Quoting this just to bring attention to it. Seriously, what does this even mean? And yes, it is a stereotype. The entire freaking character concept is an amalgamation of fucked-up Imperial British style attitudes toward African tribal peoples, with a dash of American stereotypes surrounding "voodoo". I wouldn't be surprised if the Diablo character also had head-shrinking powder, for crying out loud.
Stereotypes exist for a reason, and they started somewhere, they didn't just appear out of thin air. Characters are also supposed to be VIBRANT and possibly even EXTREME in what they represent, other wise they wouldn't be, you know, characters.
Actually, yes, you can have memorable characters without making them "extreme" or basing them off real-world cultural stereotypes. I'm not sure why that needs to be explained to you. The rest of your post was so off-kilter it's honestly not worth responding to. Lay off the straw-men and non-sequitur crap.
The fact of the matter is that racial and cultural caricatures still exist and are still
not very nice, so you have to be kind of careful when you're teetering on the edge of seeming ignorant about what you're trying to represent in
any work you create. People do that shit with "gypsies" all the time, incorporating them into stories as dudes who curse people or steal things or act as conniving tricksters without realizing that they're maligning an actual ethnic group and people in the process. In this case, if you're going to base a character class off of some particular tribal society, you have to make damn sure you do it right and that it doesn't come off as the same kind of head-shrinking witch-doctor (seriously, that word
itself is pretty damn ahistorical and steeped in the ignorance of an earlier historical period) caricature that you'd have seen in cartoons from the 1940's.