>>712936515Knuckles being black is honestly a meme.
>>dreadlock spikesWho says it isn't just long hair? Amy basically has the same type type of hair but just shorter.
>>jamaican shoe colorsThey're also the color of the flag of Portugal, but I don't see anyone calling him Portuguese. Unless you can prove that was an actual intentional reference from the devs it doesn't mean anything.
>>was originally supposed to have a jamaican accentProof? I have never seen actual original sources for these things when people talk about dev intentions, just people making claims. The closest thing I've found for this is a highly American guidebook that obviously doesn't align with SoJ canon and does its own thing having Knuckles say "mon," and this seems to be the sole source of this claim. This would be weird from the get go, it's a character from a game that didn't even have characters speak but somehow we are to know he was originally supposed to speak with a Jamaican accent?
https://archive.org/details/sonic-knuckles-official-game-book/page/n9/mode/2up
>>boxer glovesBoxing isn't exclusively black, Knuckles is the strength character and it makes sense they'd give him boxing gloves as a consequence, not because they based him off being a nigger lol.
>>skin darkened in SA2 onlySpecifically in battle.
Knuckles' origins are obviously based off of Mesoamerican civilization, it's highly unlikely he has anything to do with blacks for inspiration. I see people argue and believe otherwise but I think that's just taking superficial things and making them into something that isn't actually there. The closest thing is that Knuckles has rap music in the Adventure games but Rouge has Jazz and nobody calls her "black" for that. Rap is just a popular genre of music that was going to be put in the game one way or another.