“But before I be a servant in White heaven, I will rule in a Black hell.” Killer Mike, “God in the Building”, I Pledge Allegiance to the Grind, Vol. II
Promotional poster for Belle, directed by Amma Asante
Early in Amma Asante’s socially conscious romance Belle (2013), audiences spy a British nobleman walk with purpose through a lower class section of an unnamed port city. Humid, overpopulated streets obstruct the uniformed Royal Navy Captain’s passage. The nobleman enters an attic dimly lit by a small window and sparse candles where a middle aged Black woman waits for him. Dressed in everyday homespun and a worn apron she stands alongside a quiet tan child with brilliant brown eyes. Prepared and dressed by the matronly woman, the silent girl holds a simple doll and stands impassive, unmoving, and observant; her simple hairpin struggles to contain an infinite cascade of light sienna locks. After the untimely death of her mother, the nobleman plans to whisk the little brown girl away to his family, to her birthright. To privilege. The nobleman kneels, and offers chocolate. Reluctantly, the girl accepts. The year is 1769.
“How lovely she is,” the nobleman exclaims softly. “Similar to her mother.”
It’s easy to regard the nobleman’s plan as obvious and uncontroversial given today’s standards. Leaving for the British West Indies on a navigational expedition, the Captain intends to leave the child in the care of his uncle, William Murray, 1st Earl of Mansfield, and Lord Chief Justice of the British Empire. With family. However, late Eighteenth Century Great Britain revolves around its slave economy; colonial procurements replete with agricultural wealth, exotic goods and slave labor revolutionized British high society. Propriety, refinement, culture — these were the watchwords of an Enlightenment where civilized humans were encouraged to exert the “freedom to make public use of one’s reason in all matters”, according to Immanuel Kant [i]. Kant and his enlightened contemporaries judged persons of African descent incapable of higher order reasoning; animalistic Blacks offer stark counterpoint to virtuous White humanity. British nobles viewed Africans as subhuman beasts, unfit for culture, education, or reason. As slaves, Africans lacked any capacity for aesthetic sensibility, according to Enlightenment thinking. Slaves were property, and property does not think, feel, or reason. Given this, the nobleman’s request runs afoul of his homeland’s strict social order; a global empire that demanded unfree labor for economic stability could not conceptualize Black humanity. One locates diasporic Blackness during this period on balance sheets, cargo manifests, and maritime rapists’ salacious reports, not within British mansions’ gilded contours.
Sir Joshua Reynolds, Charles Stanhope, third Earl of Harrington, and a Servant (1782),
Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection
Lord and Lady Mansfield reservedly accept the little brown girl, Dido Elizabeth Belle Lindsay, into Kenwood House, a massive estate in Hampshire Village, London. Left alone soon after her arrival, Dido walks among Kenwood House’s massive portraits, and through her wary brown eyes viewers spy a visual synthesis of Enlightenment individualism and slavery apology. Painted by preeminent portraitist Sir Joshua Reynolds, a founder and inaugural president of the Royal Academy, exhibited at the Academy in 1783 as Portrait of a Nobleman,[ii] and housed today within the Paul Mellon Collection at the Yale Center for British Art, Charles Stanhope, third Earl of Harrington, and a Servant (1782) welcomes all to eighteenth century British machismo.
Stanhope, encased in unblemished armor, stands upon an active and sweltering Caribbean battlefield, sword in hand, both preternaturally calm and oddly petrified. An adoring brown youth holds Stanhope’s plumed helmet and gazes above, awestruck at his master’s magnificence. Reynolds paints Stanhope as desperate to impress all with martial skill earned in the slick red mud of the courageous and the damned but enhanced in an elite art studio; this oil-on-canvas press release asserts virility to contemporaries and whispers vulnerability to posterities. Stanhope, barely a man, plays at war. [iii] Below foreboding clouds Stanhope’s pale, effete visage peers above glistening golden armor; his pointed, boyish chin, hairless face, and perfect, Proactiv complexion force modern viewers to regard English nobility as special, refined, comfortable, free from want or struggle. Contrast this against the adolescent Servant shoved against Stanhope’s left, against guileless brown smiles trained by the lash, against another Marrakech rich in human capital but poor in civic defense, and Stanhope’s serenity approaches incredulity. Under Reynolds’ direction Stanhope does not stand with us, but above us; there’s no sweat upon his ghostly brow, no dirt under his manicured fingernails, no blood on his thin steel blade.
Bartholomew Dandridge, A Young Girl with a Dog and a Page. (1725)
Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection
One can easily imagine Reynolds’ conversation with Stanhope upon completion of this commissioned work; the abject flattery, the direct reassurances, the stroked ego, the payment for service rendered. With this portrait Reynolds both thunders Anglo-Saxon dominance and whispers sly rejection of that fantasy, a noble veteran revealed as farce without his helmet. Modern criticism of this object centers on the anonymous Black Servant whose illiberal assistance literally frames Stanhope’s polish. Similarly, in Belle, Dido’s inarticulate frustrations with her uncle’s desire for a commissioned portrait of herself and her cousin Elizabeth Murray is centered on her silent disapproval of the dark servant shadows who frame British portraits during this era, contrasting White civility with Black servitude. Paintings like Bartholomew Dandridge’s A Young Girl with a Dog and a Page (1725) and Arthur Devis’ John Orde, His Wife Anne, and His Eldest Son William (between 1754-1756) typify Enlightenment prejudice against Black personhood; baby-faced background slaves assist blanched central figures who thoroughly enrapture the pitiful anonymous with sophisticated British grandeur.
With dark, curly hair and infantile wonder, the Servant in Sir Joshua Reynolds’ Charles Stanhope, third Earl of Harrington, and a Servant anticipates every cute Black child ever seen in Western popular culture, from Keisha Knight Pulliam and Raven-Symoné on The Cosby Show to Noah Gray-Cabey on Heroes and Marsai Martin on Black-ish. Cherubic and brown, servile and friendly, these children of the darker nation deflect others’ revulsion toward their melanin with youthful gaiety and infectious innocence, and Reynolds co-opts this to both parallel the untested manhood on display and show Stanhope’s privileged freedom as natural and moral.
The peculiar institution’s American apologists often invoked the artless Sambo stereotype to justify their generational plunder of Black labor, wealth, and self-determination; it is easier to justify the transatlantic slave trade’s depraved criminality when we consider those reduced to beasts of burden emotionally underdeveloped and cognitively deficient.
“Comparing them by their faculties of memory, reason, and imagination, it appears to me, that in memory they are equal to the whites; in reason much inferior, as I think one could scarcely be found capable of tracing and comprehending the investigations of Euclid; and that in imagination they are dull, tasteless, and anomalous. But never yet could I find that a black had uttered a thought above the level of plain narration; never see even an elementary trait of painting or sculpture. … I advance it therefore as a suspicion only, that the blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind.” — Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, Query XIV (1784)
Arthur Devis, John Orde, His Wife Anne, and His Eldest Son William. (between 1754 and 1756)
Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection
Art historians speculate wildly about the Servant’s life, and the lives he represents. Whether colonial acquisition or indentured employee, the Servant signifies Great Britain’s longtime human trafficking and exploitation; modern viewers experience Stanhope as majestic, proud, and free, largely because history’s judgments identify the barbarous subjugation and domestic terrorism behind the Servant’s awestruck gaze. Mouth agape, eyes wide, the angelic brown face registers wonder at a life without whips and chains and commands and fear; a life lived free. Liberated. The Servant illustrates lifelong submission to chattel slavery; Reynolds’ otherwise unmoving portrait appropriates the systemic plunder of Black bodies and the bureaucratic corruption of Black labor to establish and augment Western global hegemony. White dominance. Notice the intricate detail attended this secondary, unnamed, background figure. Regard the Servant’s cowering awkwardness and unsure social position, both justified by the coerced assistance he renders. Compositionally, the patient attendant holds the viewer’s gaze and conscripts recognition of the static central figure. The Servant’s immaterial, indiscernible, questionable humanity fascinates, today more than yesteryear; because the Servant is inferior, Stanhope is superior. Because Blackness cannot equal freedom, Whiteness approximates divinity.
Sam Wilson and Steve Rogers. Man and Superman.
The intended narrative of Sir Joshua Reynolds’ Charles Stanhope, third Earl of Harrington, and a Servant operates as an eighteenth century White male power fantasy. Modern superhero comic media fans easily recognize this dynamic; mainstream superhero comic companies publish cartoonish variations on this worn, well-traveled groove ad nauseam to meet monthly operating expenses. Whether as friendly bystanders, costumed sidekicks, everyday henchmen or caped vigilantes, race and gender minorities exist in superhero comic media to validate and define the normative Whiteness central to the genre’s narratives.
Take Captain America: The Winter Soldier: early in the film we watch an athletic Black man sprint effortlessly around the National Mall in Washington, D.C. Wearing exercise shorts and a shapeless grey sweatshirt on a crisp spring day, viewers indulge athleticism, defined. Landscape shots capture republican majesty at the Washington Memorial and the U.S. Capitol. Suddenly a blurry blonde humanoid whizzes past, and frenetic limbs pump faster than the naked eye can detect. Comical frustration darkens Grey Sweatshirt’s expression: once, twice, thrice, the splendid blond beast laps the public track while Grey Sweatshirt bellows disbelief at his strained cardiovascular system’s futile effort. Played for laughs, this scene introduces viewers to Sam Wilson, the cheerful brother with an easy smile and Marvin Gaye on standby who extends friendship to a man living outside his era and outside his war, and who reminds viewers of the extra-normal abilities experimental industrial steroid injections granted this Greatest Generation throwback. “Blessed are the meek; for they shall inherit the Earth,” Jesus Christ teaches in Matthew 5:5; Marvel Studios’ Captain America: The First Avenger imagined that inheritance as tactical perfection augmented with avant-garde biochemistry and electroshock therapy. Doubtless, the screenwriters and producers of Captain America: The Winter Soldier applaud their intentional rejection of Black male stereotype, but to watch Steve Rogers literally run circles around Sam Wilson establishes a questionable on-screen dynamic that complicates this superheroic bromance at conception. In Captain America: The Winter Soldier, viewers experience the White protagonist’s superior physicality in contrast to a Black inferior, Charles Stanhope on creatine painted by Industrial Light and Magic. All this, to deify military service.
Captain America and the Falcon. Photo Credit: Zade Rosenthal ©Marvel 2014
Superhero comics employ violence to establish justice. To ensure domestic tranquility in Gotham or Hell’s Kitchen or Space Sector 2814 jackbooted vigilantes adorned in colorful, form-fitting leather and Kevlar ground and pound the criminally confused outside all legal authority. The superhero concept appeals to the adolescent desire to compel order through brute force, to define peace as the absence of credible threats. No matter how intellectually gifted or technologically adept or physically remarkable or preternaturally perceptive or unabashedly godlike, superheroes use violence to solve problems, foreign and domestic. The depictions of Charles Stanhope and Steve Rogers mentioned above show unsophisticated, immature White males who wrest manhood from their military experience, who telegraph masculinity by glorifying war. Yesterday’s crude colonial plantations and human trafficking syndicates drained profit from a world order enforced by eighteenth century British naval expenditures; today’s multinational technology conglomerates and global financial institutions wring fortunes from American guaranteed global stability. In this unipolar world, where the American hegemon assumes responsibility for political and economic stability from Minneapolis to Medina, from Seattle to Shenzhen, from Albuquerque to Addis Ababa, superhero action figures like Captain America argue the Athenian position in the Melian Dialogue; Rogers’ very existence symbolizes undisputed American technological supremacy. Of course, Rogers is not Cable, or Magog, or the Punisher, all logical extensions of the super-soldier concept updated for modern, antiheroic eras where callous scribes and tragedy pornographers painted scarlet horror in rectangular comic art panels while illiterate dealers and nihilistic gangsters sprayed arterial abyss on letterboxed nightly news broadcasts. Frozen in the cheery bombast of the last just war, Rogers’ outdated moral binary and Franklin Roosevelt phonetics convince comic fans that the extra-normal abilities he exploits service peace; given this conceit, we watch Rogers conscript Sam Wilson and Natasha Romanov into an ad-hoc terrorist conspiracy in Captain America: The Winter Soldier to incapacitate and scrap three floating, flying aircraft carriers authorized by American policymakers, funded by American taxpayers, staffed by untold hundreds, worth untold billions, because he alone determines the strategic advantage of perpetually aloft gunboat diplomacy counterproductive, an existential threat to world peace. The floating nuclear version at sea today does not enter the debate.
)Su•per•he•ro (soo’per hîr’o) n., pl. – roes. n., pl. – roes. A heroic character with a selfless, pro-social mission; with superpowers, extraordinary abilities, advanced technology, or highly developed physical, mental, or mystical skills; who has a superhero identity embodied in a codename and iconic costume, which typically express his biography, character, powers, or origin (transformation from ordinary person to superhero); and who is generically distinct, i.e. can be distinguished from characters of related genres (fantasy, science fiction, detective, etc.) by a preponderance of generic conventions. Often superheroes have dual identities, the ordinary one of which is usually a closely guarded secret. superheroic, adj. Also super hero, super-hero. — Peter Coogan, Superhero: The Secret Origin of a Genre, ©2006, pg. 30
Cyclops & Wolverine dismantle Sentinels. Comic unknown.
The superhero is a deceptively simple concept. The reactionary militarism, the thoughtless violence, the binary morality, the unquestioned righteousness, the colonial sociology — all of the superhero genre’s boyish charm reinforces the Western imperialist impulse to control, to order, to rule. The superhero genre does not promote fantastic Western imperialism alone: science fiction, espionage fiction, and medieval fantasy win popular culture’s hearts and minds with similar power fantasies designed for adolescent White straight males, sold globally. Still, every Wednesday, carrot-topped Caucasian perfection dons skintight primary colored lycra to unleash energetic ruby strobes at giant purple killing machines crafted in man’s image while a hairy Crossfit junkie with indestructible metal claws hacks and slashes fundamentalist cannon fodder amid blasé exurban spectators numb to repetitive superhuman brawls but unnerved all the same. Every Wednesday, superheroes seduce the innocent with disturbing commentaries on justifiable public conflict, acceptable casualty rates, and unspoken racial hierarchies. Superheroes are White male power fantasy distilled to narcotic purity, blue magic on white cardboard wrapped in clear polypropylene to show variant cover art. Consider Jim Lee as Frank Lucas.
Peter Coogan, founder and director of the Institute for Comics Studies, defines the superhero through a narrative triumvirate: selfless mission, amazing ability, and secret identity, all symbolized by a special moniker and distinct costume that elevates the new extra-normal persona to cultural iconography. The Batman’s elementary school ambition to channel elemental fear and unspeakable tragedy into a personal war on crime impacts everything about the character, from his costume’s shadowy color swatches, morose blue-grey later rendered midnight black, to his scalloped cape’s predatory motion silhouette, to his variable but always recognized centrally placed Bat-logo. Like Michael Jordan, we recognize Batman in profile with nothing more than dark cranial contours as evidence. Everything Bat-related identifies with a central simplicity: punish the bad man who killed Mommy and Daddy. †Law and order, uncomplicated.
“Despite what you may have heard, Superman is not a complicated character. He’s an extremely simple idea: A man with the power to do anything who always does the right thing. That’s it.” — Chris Sims, “Ask Chris #171: The Superman (Well, Supermen) of Marvel”, ComicsAlliance.com
This is the problem. For nearly eighty years, superhero comics etched the world in bright Crayolas, without emotional nuance or political complexity, to display imagined realms where the mundane and the fantastic coexist without incident. When the soapy X-Men adventure in the Savage Land’s meteorological impossibility, when the stately Justice League intercept planetary conquerors unfazed by Earth’s gravity or thermonuclear weapons, everyone drawn and colored and inked and lettered in panel conducts themselves in accordance or in conflict with mainstream, middle-class White American social ethics. The ‘right thing’ Chris Sims believes Superman insists upon remains a moral good defined in panel by rural Midwestern Protestants, and the superhero concept’s resultant normative Whiteness enjoys broad, international appeal. Most superhero comic fans regardless of race or creed or national origin judge Superman and his compatriots as truth and justice’s universal avatars, Golden Rule morality made myth. Because of this fantasy, fanboys and fangirls of color imagine themselves as living Kryptonian solar batteries who ignite still, unmoving skies with chaotic blue flame as they race through lower Earth atmosphere trailing angry pyrotechnics and leaking ozone while millions watch breathlessly, transfixed at an ungodly spectacle where petrified cosmonauts expect certain death after heat shield failure during reentry only to meet a scarlet and navy blue blur branded with hope’s own chevron in the upper stratosphere. The darker nation also wants to play the hero; they too, wish to be redeemed.
Make no mistake: this is a redemption song. The desire for full inclusion in superhero comics both behind the cowl and before the camera by patient progressive integrationists yearns to humanize those dismissed as unfit for heroism by superhero comics’ irrepressible identity indifference. Race, gender, sexual orientation: hashtag activists and comic bloggers clamor for more representation of all these political identities in superhero comics, television, and movies; whether straight-to-Blu-Ray animation or tentpole summer blockbuster, non-traditional superhero comic fans cajole, threaten, and shame mainstream superhero content creators into diversifying superhero and villain properties. Everything’s appropriate — racebending established heroes when franchises jump from print to live-action, with unconventional character origins that discard existing character history, cross-racially casting superhero protagonist roles, even cowl-rental, the shift of established major superhero properties from White male classics to new-age minority sidekicks — so long as nerds of color and their progeny revel in superheroes who approximate their phenotypes. I charge that this desire for inclusion — this need to see oneself in the corporate culture one consumes — is not ethical. When applied to the superhero concept, this inclusion is not possible.
Anti-busing rally at Thomas Park, South Boston, 1975 Copyright © Spencer Grant
Coogan’s definition is incomplete. To craft a superhero, add Whiteness to the mission-powers-identity troika; coat liquid latex and electrostrictive polymers onto the White body, code the costume design with identifiable brand marketing, apply catchy appellation. Done. Artistic license and open casting calls nurture false hope among nerds of color desperate for private sector social approval; these patient progressive integrationists forget that characters who wear their faces but forget their cultures do not promote their interests. These nerds of color also neglect history. Professor Derrick Bell, civil rights lawyer and intellectual progenitor of critical race theory in legal scholarship, wrote in the landmark “Serving Two Masters: Integration Ideals and Client Interests in School Desegregation Litigation” (Yale Law Journal, 1976) on the widening interest divergence between Black parents who sought high quality educational opportunities for their children, and the civil rights attorneys who fought to dismantle state-sponsored Jim Crow segregation with legal remedies applied to public education. For the lawyers, the grand revolutionary movement to desegregate American classrooms secured with Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, KS (No. 1.) the right to ensure “equal educational opportunity” in government funded public schools. Equal educational opportunity meant integrated schools, because for the lawyers only racial integration could guarantee Black children and White children received identical instruction. A generation after Brown, when public school districts needed forced busing to achieve numerical racial parity and angry middle and lower income White parents took to the streets to protest social experiments that designated their children test subjects, national civil rights attorneys from the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund held firm to the conviction that integration alone prophesied American race relation nirvana. This ignored, in Bell’s view, mounting social science evidence that chronicled forced busing-imposed student difficulties, class discrepancies in American integration experiences, and the ethical quandaries presented when civil rights attorneys routinely disregard or rebuff client perspectives.
An ahistorical pretense argues that integration presents the only salvation for an American experiment plagued in infancy by torture, rape, and genocide; chattel slavery and rampant land theft are not ‘birth-defects’, to paraphrase Condoleezza Rice, but cornerstones. From bondage on, Black political thought’s enduring fault line debates separation versus integration; from the titanic Frederick Douglass (“This Fourth of July is yours, not mine.”) through Booker T. Washington’s glad-handing industriousness and W.E.B. Du Bois’ pan-African intellectualism, through Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Birmingham fury at White liberalism and Malcolm X’s snide disdain for White patriotism, through the uneasy synthesis of partisanship and revolution from post-Civil Rights Movement Black elected officials and the criminalized irrelevance of Black Nationalist counterculturalists, the darker nation continually questions American citizenship’s lofty promises and David Simon realities. Casting integration as the sole pathway to postracial Eden in public education, superhero comics, or any other grand American tradition substitutes race visibility for race uplift, and confuses simple appearance with documented progress.
“To sum up this: theoretically, the Negro needs neither segregated schools nor mixed schools. What he needs is Education. What he must remember is that there is no magic, either in mixed schools or in segregated schools. A mixed school with poor and unsympathetic teachers, with hostile public opinion, and no teaching of truth concerning black folk, is bad. A segregated school with ignorant placeholders, inadequate equipment, poor salaries, and wretched housing, is equally bad.” — W.E.B. Du Bois, “Does the Negro Need Separate Schools?” The Journal of Negro Education, Vol. 4, No. 3, The Courts and the Negro Separate School. (July 1935), pp. 328-335
Fevered battles over forced busing ripped bare Northern antagonism toward civil rights advocacy; center-left White parents who nominally tolerated nonviolent civil rights activism responded to federal desegregation orders with the same massive resistance found below the Mason-Dixon. Casting the neighborhood elementary school as a ëWhite space‘ where John Q. Public easily sidesteps racial difference strikes cosmopolitan citizens today as antiquated, backward logic, like Salem’s witch trial groupthink or Cold War domino theory. Still, nerds of color walk behind enemy lines every Wednesday to stay abreast of Jonathan Hickman’s Avengers or Geoff Johns’ Justice League; for many the local comic book shop’s mainstream customer base mirrors the standard-issue suburbia within biweekly superhero stories. Progressive integrationist comic fans poorly navigate the irony around which Disney and Time Warner craft business models: regardless of race, gender, or sexual orientation, superhero comic fans wholly accept the antebellum identity politics of both the superhero concept and its target audience. Diversity does not sell superhero comics — nostalgia does, and this nostalgia hearkens back to postwar America, with its effervescent, bubbly nationalism, cleanly delineated racial hierarchies and obvious, unquestioned gender roles, even in private. For this reason, superheroes maintain their appeal to adolescent straight White males; everything in superhero narratives is designed to make Whiteness comfortable, to intensify the power of the privileged. Even nerds of color marvel when Captain America orders Sam Wilson to serve as his personal air support; computer generated scenes where Anthony Mackie’s sepia tones flit across Washington airspace spraying submachinegun rounds at unmasked Hydra agents while the winged brother evades rocket propelled death with hairpin banks at upchuck velocities satiate those who devolve superhero social justice into a Black actor’s screen time. Progress, for the superhero integrationist, requires nothing more than a regular census: survey the number of non-White, female, gay, lesbian, and transgender superheroes, and count the number of non-White, female, gay, lesbian, and transgender writers, artists, inkers, editors, and executives within the superhero comic industry. Tweet results with practiced outrage. Rinse and repeat. Qualitative analysis of minority portrayals violates the chirpy bluebird’s one-hundred forty character limit and does not engender comment.
Sam Wilson as The Falcon, played by Anthony Mackie, in
Captain America: The Winter Soldier
The only reputable progressive position on the superhero advises abandonment. The superhero concept’s narrow simplicity cannot possibly render human difference with substance or nuance. Corporate superhero fiction cannot dramatize the adrenal fear and visceral loathing police officers’ feel during traffic stops, sidewalk detentions, and no-knock warrants any more than it can judge the abject terror and furious anger the darker nation conveys through candlelight vigils, ‘I Can’t Breathe’ t-shirts, and Chris Rock’s unfunny selfies. “America begins in Black plunder and White democracy, two features that are not contradictory but complementary,” writes Ta-Nehisi Coates, senior editor of The Atlantic, in his landmark feature “The Case for Reparations“; in contrast, superhero comics lack all political theory more intricate than the Powell Doctrine. When Noah Berlatsky, writing at the Hooded Utilitarian on Static Shock, notes that the easy synergy between superheroes and law enforcement transforms Black superheroes into unwitting avatars for a modern mass incarceration state that translates public criminal justice into prison conglomerate profit, he should recall that urban post-Civil Rights Black elected officials championed draconian drug possession sentences with tough-on-crime rhetoric usually associated with Richard Nixon or Rudy Giuliani.
According to Yale Law School professor James Foreman, Jr., incarceration rates from majority Black cities “mirror the rates of other cities where African Americans have substantially less control over sentencing policy.” Black people, in the pulpit or the ballot box, can support robust and militaristic law enforcement initiatives deployed against their communities without tension, and those members of the darker nation with the financial stability and leisure time to engage electoral politics represent Black America’s most established, integrated, and conservative elements. What patience can veterans of color have with the dope pushers and domestic batterers and petty thieves and flamboyant pimps within their communities whose criminal enterprises depress already anemic property values? These old-school race men, with military precision and patriarchal inflexibility, assume the uplift of the race as personal responsibility; taught to kill by a country that hates them, taught to overcome prejudice with hard work and determination, the Black veterans who constitute the core of the Twentieth Century Black middle class personify bootstrap conservatism to chase economic inclusion, not revolutionary overthrow. This Black middle class, perennially called to account for a dysfunctional, systemically impoverished Black underclass left uneducated by dropout factory public education and unemployed by Silicon Valley’s outsourced manufacturing, loses its patience with both neighborhood criminals and municipal White political structures who concentrate drugs and violence and death in urban communities. Given this, Black elected officials these men chased the same militarized solutions to combat rising crime statistics during the 1970’s and 1980’s as their White counterparts, and municipal city councils stocked with pious Morehouse men and holy Spelman sisters proved no sturdy bulwark against dreaded million dollar blocks, no matter their local political success or state budget dependence. Unfortunately, when mostly non-Black superhero comic writers depict Black superheroes that support punitive carceral state solutions for minority criminality, no one references this history.
The problem here involves the superhero concept’s inability to envision non-White straight males as fully realized humans. The agony and the ecstasy of Black cultural and political complexity — from Jesse Jackson’s frustrated expletives in July 2008 over Barack Obama’s irrepressible moral centrism to Jesse Jackson’s joyous tears in November 2008 over Barack Obama’s irrepressible electoral victory — overloads the superhero’s straightforward make-believe. Black Panther, Black Lightning, Bishop, Mr. Terrific, Green Lantern, John Stewart, and U.S. War Machine: different power sets, different publishers, indistinguishable skin tones and identical personalities, all inflexible, assertive, upstanding old-school race men known more for quiet dignity than solo bombast, these characters present White male metahumanity shellacked with a moist black paste of burnt cork and water. I suggest that culturally authentic minority superheroes do not and cannot exist: all people of color receive from the superhero publishing industry replaces authentic and innovative characterization with race and gender drag. Sam Wilson’s instructive: these empowered Negro automatons unmask as superhero comics’ eternal sidekicks; they highlight White heroism’s astonishing brilliance and sacrifice race minority self-respect. This uncontroversial nostalgia justifies Black superhero inclusion in nearly every mainstream superhero team of note and illustrates an antiquated genre’s authorial recognition that the superhero concept cannot handle human difference. Every Black superhero is Will Smith drained of charisma, Denzel Washington without sex appeal, Barack Obama absent Michelle Robinson. All the same, all forgettable, all inhuman. Anonymous, nameless, Black. Other.
Michelle Rodriguez, captured by TMZ.com
When actress Michelle Rodriguez bellows “Stop stealing all the White people’s superheroes!” to a TMZ reporter, the initial backlash from superhero integrationists used digital condemnation and public shame to exact mob justice; within a day, Rodriguez’s pseudo-apology explained her disdain for superhero cross-racial casting as a desire to find multiple cultural mythologies Hollywood representation. Her critics remain unconvinced. I believe their skepticism toward Rodriguez’s perspective stems from the fact that everyone interested in posthuman and/or augmented, empowered human fiction in America today starts with seventy-seven years of superhero comic history as their main reference point. Imagine a future without the superhero. Imagine a future without the notion of a single person who can direct world history’s meandering river with unsanctioned activities that violate state sovereignty and ignore the rule of law. Imagine a future without the White male power fantasies that differentiate the superhero from the Gilded Age’s mystery men or Graham Greene’s quiet American. Imagine tomorrow as cosmopolitan cacophony, as an urban jungle gym where Asian Americans both support and oppose affirmative action, where Black Americans both support and oppose gay marriage, where gay men both support and oppose immigration reform, where Mexican Americans both support and oppose contraceptive mandates, where women both support and oppose religious freedom. Imagine tomorrow as remotely affected by today, and acknowledge that the superhero outlived his usefulness. The anachronistic Superman does not speak to individual aspiration, but to herd anxiety. Superhero films today comment upon unlimited power’s impossible paradox; Superman and his contemporaries personalize the unipolar American hegemon’s failure to establish justice and ensure domestic tranquility with Call of Duty martial advances at ready disposal via Raytheon and Lockheed-Martin. The superhero concept dramatizes White male power fantasy to express virile manhood through war and conquest; these figures of empire police unruly colonies populated with indiscernible aliens untouched by rational thought and Judeo-Christian order. Plot manifests from variable pacification success rates. The superhero’s great power lacks all sense of responsibility; it simply persists, unmoored from anything more complicated or complex than ‘punish the bad man who killed Mommy and Daddy’.
Adding melanin is no cure for unchecked militarism, fictional or otherwise; two Black Secretaries of State advised President George W. Bush before and during the Iraqi quagmire. Only rank racial tribalism exalts the need to view one’s own face in the corporate culture one consumes; this ethnocentrism leaves no room for critical examination of the superhero concept itself. Diversity initiatives in superhero comics fail because the superhero concept rejects human difference; every recent example of misogynistic cover art or fandom backlash against superhero cross-racial casting stems from general superhero creator/audience acceptance of the White male power fantasy as natural and normal. The term ‘Black superhero’ identifies a logical impossibility with a pejorative. Nerds of color who refuse to discard superheroes and wrangle superhero narratives with alternative reading practices to fit their politics and complement their group identities deny reality — there is simply no way to cast the Servant as Charles Stanhope.
Stanhope’s ethereal polish and command posture require chattel subjection. Reynolds’ portrait depicts a British nobility fueled by tortured adoration from broken children whose urgent pleas for respite from arduous toil and impassioned prayers for return to beloved parents go unheeded and unnoticed. The superhero is not a natural evolutionary step for reality or fiction; it’s a seventy-seven year old straight White male privilege delivery system. Those who believe superhero media’s reactionary excesses can be soothed with increased race, gender, and sexual orientation diversity wish only to substitute themselves for their oppressors, and combat nothing.
JLA: Liberty and Justice (2003), written by Paul Dini with art from Alex Ross
The DC Comics’ art from painter Alex Ross outlines the superhero concept today: in his JLA: Liberty and Justice, written by DC Comics’ animation legend Paul Dini, the Justice League characters feature smooth bulk and rounded brawn, adult muscle paired with primary colored paunches. Men are active but middle-aged, steely and determined, without care for clogged arteries or hypertension. Perfectly shaven with Brylcreem pomade and hip-hugging leotards, Ross’ work recalls Norman Rockwell’s America, where respectable Americans consumed conspicuously and segregation preserved decent communities. Like Matthew Weiner’s heralded Mad Men, Ross transports the audience to a postwar American economic success defended by flinty men with squinty eyes and absolutist ethics while readers enjoy safe genre futurism on every page. Batman’s cowl, tight enough to transmit facial expressions, locks into a perpetual scowl as he deconstructs villainous master plans. Ross’ Batman stands pudgy, comfortable; his grey contours testify to expense account living replete with three-martini lunches. Witness nostalgia as comic art, before Alcoholics Anonymous and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission wrecked the party.
Unknown artist, Dido Elizabeth Belle Lindsay and Lady Elizabeth Murray (1779).
Scone Palace, Perthshire, Scotland.
Ross’ antiquated Establishment action figures present the superhero self-image integrationists accept, defend, and then beg to subvert on the margins. It’s not enough. Brown palette swaps that color over George Reeves and Adam West recreations prove meager reparation for superhero comic whitewashing. This too, ignores history. Dido Elizabeth Belle Lindsay and her cousin Lady Elizabeth Murray appear together in a portrait from the late Eighteenth Century, friendly, enigmatic, and equal — to a point. Dido, in a Indian turban plumed with ostrich feathers and exotic silver satin, enters posterity an exaggerated Oriental, a perpetual foreigner totally without definition unless visually justified by non-Western affectations. The unknown portraitist does not imagine smiling brown Dido, a free English woman born from British imperialism, with the prim reverence afforded her cousin and countless other noble British ladies. The skin still matters. Today, art historians’ alternative analysis of Charles Stanhope, third Earl of Harrington, and a Servant interrogates the time-lost lives behind servile brown eyes, and speculates that this tortured gaze scans something past Stanhope’s shiny armor. Perhaps the Servant spies tomorrow, Jubilee, a new birth of freedom. We can never know. To my mind, Reynolds’ portrait allows superhero integrationists a prophetic metaphor: however difficult, look past the intended narrative of one’s age. Imagine tomorrow. Envision a world where your humanity depicts more than a detailed frame for someone else’s daydream.
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[i] “An Answer to the Question: ëWhat is Enlightenment?'” — Immanuel Kant, 30 September 1784
[ii] Esther Chadwick, Meredith Gamer and Cyra Levenson, Figures of Empire: Slavery and Portraiture in Eighteenth-Century Atlantic Britain, exhibition wall text, Yale Center for British Art, 2014
[iii]Stanhope sat for Reynolds two years following his regiment’s deployment to Jamaica to battle back French incursion that threatened Britain’s largest slave colony. — Esther Chadwick, Meredith Gamer and Cyra Levenson, Figures of Empire: Slavery and Portraiture in Eighteenth-Century Atlantic Britain, exhibition wall text, Yale Center for British Art, 2014
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The entire roundtable on Can There Be a Black Superhero? is here.
Shots fired
Thanks for linking to my piece, if only to dismiss my approach.:)
The thing for me is I can’t disagree with your analysis about the origins of superhero comics in white supremacist notions and the continued embeddedness of those frameworks in comics (and their film/tv adaptations). That being said, I believe in working with what we got, resisting through reading practice and artistic reworking individually and collectively.
Abandoning the superhero genre does not look like it is going to happen any time soon and I can’t imagine it doing must good given its pervasiveness in a shared (or at least imbricated) cultural dynamic. Instead, I’d rather work to provide and encourage the kind of reading (working towards, revisioning, deconstucting, reconstructing) that might serve the countless (so-called) nerds of color in navigating mainstream culture – and that I contend (in the linked piece and in other places) already happens to varying degrees.
Alex Ross: http://thecribsheet-isabelinho.blogspot.pt/2015/04/look-at-images-below.html
Great post, by the way.
So…I think James’ central point rests on the idea that the superhero is white supremacist because the excess power, the superness, is basically a metaphor for hierarchical power over people of color. Superman can fly because there are other people, over there, who aren’t allowed to walk.
That seems to dovetail with superhero’s links to the immigrant experience and assimilation narratives. Superman is white and powerful because he isn’t the Jewish Clark Kent; Steve Rogers becomes the blonde beast by ceasing to be the puny immigrant, etc. Empowerment is about rejecting/transcending marginalized identity and grabbing hold of whiteness.
There are a couple of possible counterarguments…but one big one might be that James doesn’t really think about the extent to which parody has been central to the superhero genre. Many of the best/most popular superhero narratives are parodies in one way or another (Batman 66 and Watchmen are two that come to mind immediately.) As a result, something like the Black Kirby project really remains in the central tradition of superhero narratives while explicitly exposing/mocking/reworking the relationship between those narratives and race.
I have to say that while I agree with Osvaldo in that the summations of the superhero genre’s origins and continued practices of white supremacy and racism (and sexism) are totally sound…the conclusion of the black superhero as a contrariety feels too defeatist, too fatalistic to justifiably apply in accordance to real world history and in the face of actual social change. Because at no point are the instances of progressive comic work, however inefficacious or vain in their attempts, ever brought up beyond the naming of a number of black heroes. Did Captain America: TRUTH or Green Lantern/Green Arrow #76 or Icon or Ms. Marvel just not happen? The industry has a long, long way to go in order to achieve true diversity and by doing so it will most probably have to upend the very foundation of defining what a superhero is and what their stories should be about. But I can’t see that as an impossibility in today’s fandom. There are too many outspoken fans and too many ambitious creators, however small their steps are being taken in, who are working and commenting on the works to be more progressive and are conversing about race to write off the whole of the medium as immovably white supremacist.
To me, it speaks to a larger myopia of our nation’s history in general. Yes, we still have a nation built on slavery that currently sanctions government to target black Americans, but that’s being directly confronted with right now as we speak. We’ve been through segregation and we’ve been through Jim Crow and we’re still going through those injustices in some institutions, but is the suggestion at the heart of this essay speaking towards a larger resignation of combating a socially destructive industry rather than working to make it better?
I almost hate to do this, because it’s the ultimate cheese-card, but I’ve gotta quote Dr. King in this instance as I feel he sums up the situation perfectly:
“The inevitable counterrevolution that succeeds every period of progress is taking place. Failing to understand this as a normal process of development, some Negroes are falling into unjustified pessimism and despair. Focusing on the ultimate goal, and discovering it still distant, they declare no progress at all has been made.
A final victory is an accumulation of many short-term encounters. To lightly dismiss a success because it does not usher in a complete order of justice is to fail to comprehend the process of achieving full victory. It underestimates the value of confrontation and dissolves the confidence born of a partial victory by which new efforts are powered.”
Everyone, thanks for reading and commenting!
@Osvaldo: The radical solution I propose here asks progressive superhero comic fans to examine how the integrationist approach has really served their interests. If progressive integrationist superhero comic fans want interesting superheroes of color that reflect their communities, they should admit that they’ve not found such characters in seventy seven years. No amount of altered reading practices will transform Cyborg into a fully realized human being; Robert Jones’ itemized list of grievances against DC Comics’ sexless characterization appealed to many because it was true; if we’re honest with ourselves, if we’re willing to sacrifice our fandom to reasonable appeals, we should admit that characters of color like Cyborg are the norm, not outliers.
I’m trying to avoid hyperbole here; this isn’t about policing other people’s fandom for me. But encouraging alternative reading practices for a racist genre searches for loopholes in Whites Only signs.
@Noah: Please explain in greater detail how parody helps navigate the dynamic I outline above. My argument is that the superhero genre cannot handle human difference because it requires exalted Whiteness to operate. The Enlightenment and British portraiture of that era offer useful parallel to the superhero: a single individual (straight, White, male) assumes superhuman or posthuman physical and mental characteristics, and applies them in service of public, prosocial activity. This only updates Kant’s interest in straight White men who assume the “freedom to make public use of reason in all matters”; in both, the primacy of the individual remains paramount.
Because of this, the superhero concept has no room and no patience for group identities and group politics. Race is too complicated for the superhero, outside of White male power fantasies. Slapping shoe polish on the Incredible Hulk makes no meaningful racial commentary; it’s just demeaning blackface that illustrates prejudices that characterize Black men as uncontrollable animals. Jennings and Robinson subvert nothing with the Black Kirby project; all we find here is a perverse example of Osvaldo’s ‘altered reading practices’ as comic art.
The Black Kirby project reminds us that superheroes of color are no more than racial stereotypes given artistic form to benefit straight White male audiences or straight White male characters in racial drag. Jennings and Robinson’s “Unkillable Buck” is crude and disgusting, but it’s not at all far from Luke Cage. To see this work as a meaningful subversion of superhero genre conventions that exclude people of color is to my mind, difficult.
@Donovan: Captain America: TRUTH was a horrible comic. GL/GA #76 defines heavy handed race talk (without ‘of color’ agency) in comics. Icon is a standard issue 90’s Superman pastiche weighed down by nonsensical character history and condescending Black conservatism. And Ms. Marvel is a genderbent Peter Parker in brownface for fourteen year old girls who don’t know any better. This isn’t “the industry has a long way to go”. This industry is utterly broken. Seventy seven years of superhero comic history and the best we can do is pull Icon out of mothballs to stand alongside Ms. Marvel as examples of White male story templates with minority race and culture details haphazardly slathered on like silly putty? Really?
You wish to make superheroes better on race? Stop buying them. Leave their stories on the shelves, ignore their merchandise in stores, and avoid sharing tidbits about their blockbuster movies. Everything else has been tried already. Tried and failed. This isn’t cynicism, this isn’t pessimism. I make public use of my reason and reject the notion that the superhero genre can remain itself and include me.
To enjoy superheroes as a person or color, as a woman, as a LGBTQ human being, one must compromise their identity on some level. I’d rather not. As Browning wrote, “E’en then would be some stooping; and I choose never to stoop.”
So, I think Ms. Marvel changes Peter Parker in important ways. The real racist part of Spider-Man (and other early superheroes, IMO) is the denial/repression of their ethnic content. Ms. Marvel is open about Kamala’s Pakistani Muslim background,and so can engage with issues of assimilation much more consciously and effectively.
The point about the Unkillable Buck is that it’s parodying superhero stereotypes of blackness. It’s saying what you are (at least in part) — that is, that superheroes are built on racist assumptions. But it’s doing that from within the genre, which suggests that the superhero genre, through parody, can maybe talk about these issues in ways that don’t exclude black people (arguably.)
I think Truth is a great comic that comes apart at the end…in a way that does unfortunately tend to confirm some of your arguments.
I can’t defend GL/GA. Those comics are crap.
GL/GA comics aren’t entirely crap in that I do find charming fun in how utterly unsubtle and outrageous they are. But I wasn’t exactly holding #76 up as THE sole beacon of anti-establishment writing. I still think the attempts are important…very important. It is in small ways anti-super hero. GL #87 Might be a better example. John Stewart has no interest in using his powers for any purpose other than to fight the type of real world evil he sees, which is racist senators. Again I’m not saying it’s a shining example of black characterization in super hero comics, but it isn’t stroking the ego of white readers in any way I find (expect for Denny O’Neil, I dunno).
I think saying Ms. Marvel is “genderbent Peter Parker in brownface” is especially condescending and reductive, not to mention false. Kamala is in no way an orphan who gets picked on at school for her intelligence, suffers indignities at the hands of her employer and the public at large or struggles to maintain balance between her costumed life and her civilian life, or in the case of the last point not as melodramatically. Are we calling all young costumed heroes Spider-Man now, just because he was the first 50 years ago? As Noah has said more than once, there’s an open consciousness with Kamala’s ethnicity and religion that helps the comic stand out over most other crime-fighting narratives.
I don’t see how TRUTH is a horrible comic except for maybe the end, and I won’t argue too much about Icon’s origins, but those are stories that directly involve the characters’ race in ways that reveal a level of true perception concerning the superhero genre. Maybe Icon doesn’t go far with it, but it is his conceivable background as a black conservative being brought into action by a young black teenager that people take to. It fires up imaginations, and though it doesn’t push the genre enough to where it could go, it pushes the genre.
My point is that people remember these stories where black or non-white identity were enthusiastically used to tell stories, American stories, that resonated with audiences of color. Maybe they’re all failures and maybe none of them make the reader realize how white supremacist the superhero genre really is, but that doesn’t take into account the audience who would pick up those books, see how they’re different and want to see something more along those lines because those stories resonated with them. People today enjoy diversity, true meaningful diversity, in their superhero books. People love how Kamala Khan never wants to hurt or destroy anything with her powers, or how at the end of Icon #1 he and Rocket are held at gunpoint by the cops they attempted to assist. That is diversity, diversity of storytelling by way of equal opportunity concerning the characters.
I appreciate you’re analysis and your perspective, as it really is incredibly insightful, but we’re not done with the genre. The road to meaningful equality is long, but not as long as you’re making it out to be.
Donovan, you may not be done with the superhero genre because you’re a fan, not because the superhero genre has respect for human difference. Women and people of color can enjoy superhero comics all they wish, but the narratives exalt White male power fantasy and nothing else. Progressives on race and gender and sexuality should recognize the limitations of this simplistic genre, instead of pretending that slow integration has ever produced meaningful narrative benefits.
And yes, Kamala Khan is a genderbent Peter Parker in brownface. Her first issue introduces Zoe, basically Flash Thompson in drag, whose concern trolling offers readers a mean girl confused by non-Western cultures but too ugly American to respect them. Kamala’s near-obliviousness to Zoe’s hateful commentary reminds me of pre-spider bite Parker, too comically good-natured to oppose high school idiots.
Further, Khan’s journey to Ms. Marvel parallels that of Brian Bendis’ Miles Morales. Both are so young the expected racial and sexual conversations their superheroism should ignite are sidestepped by their youth and inexperience. When Khan spends an issue swooning over Wolverine, when Morales learns how to be a superhero from 616 Parker, fans are supposed to find this heartwarming. I do not. Wolverine and Peter Parker know nothing about living as visible race minorities in their America. Khan and Morales should, but they are presented as so young and immature that their narratives avoid any serious race talk.
Icon makes no sense at all. Even if we suspend belief to read about an alien made to appear Black and male with Superman’s abilities who lived through chattel slavery in America just did nothing to dismantle that system, his choices as a superhero prove identical to every other White superhero ever made. Icon’s controlled by genre conventions on violence, and as a Black man he should know better. His ready interest in violence erases his authenticity.
The point? Accepting anything less than effective, realistic minority characterizations in superhero comics only encourages DC, Marvel, and all the smaller companies to ignore meaningful diversity, and illustrates that the superhero concept is to small and narrow to accept race and gender and sexual difference. It accepts straight White men in blackface as Black superheroes. These are fictional stories, not single-payer healthcare: if the road to meaningful equality is long here, in this space, then that road is not worth traveling.
The only reputable progressive position on the superhero advises abandonment. People who aren’t willing to go that far should examine whether their fandom has overruled their reason.
I kind of liked the Wolverine/Kamala conversation, in part because it’s not super clear to me that we’re supposed to actually think that Wolverine knows what he’s talking about. He advocates violence pretty straightforwardly; Kamala disagrees with him, and I think the book is overall on her side. I’d agree though that it would be nice to see a mentor who isn’t white, since that seems like it could and should be important.
I also didn’t think she was as blasé about the racial insults as you’re suggesting….I still haven’t read the Morales spider-man, so can’t comment on that.
After the first encounter with Zoe in issue #1, Kamala’s friend Bruno remarks “I hate her.” about Zoe, after she leaves. Kamala’s response? “But she’s so nice.” Nakia admonishes, “You’re such a baby Kamala. She’s only nice to be mean.”
Kamala persists with her defense of Zoe, and faces furhter admonishment from Nakia, who can perceive Zoe’s ugliness. Kamala’s left innocent, untouched really, by race. Kamala has to appeal to White audiences so she can’t start her story reasonably aware of other’s perceptions of her minority background, apparently. Kamala’s indifference to hate from a popular, blond antagonist is as we all know, straight out of the Peter Parker origin.
Look, I respect that most everyone does not want to turn their backs on the entertainment they enjoy. I get that. But instead of looking for loopholes, instead of searching for the one comic with a meaningful non-straight White male superhero, perhaps we can discuss whether my criticism of the superhero concept makes sense? If people agree with my discussion of the concept’s history and particulars, but refuse to accept the conclusion, that’s fine. But that decision requires more substance than “we should work within the industry” or “let’s work with what we have”. That’s tradition masquerading as good sense.
None of us are forced to purchase superhero comics. We need not enter the white space of the comic book shop every Wednesday. You don’t have to see Age of Ultron in Imax. If people are not willing to give up on superheroes and diversity, that’s a political choice, and if those same people accept a historical framing that at best can only produce questionable and marginal examples of respectable superhero diversity (none of which I accept, to be clear) then that political choice is not rational from my perspective, and requires further discussion.
Peter Parker’s not indifferent to Flash Thompson? He’s bitter about him and the others who harass him, isn’t he? That’s why he initially decides he doesn’t care about anyone and is going to make money for his family.
I do think that superhero comics are rooted in assimilation narratives, as I said — so I think the dynamic is somewhat different than the Reynolds painting (which is about already established groups glorifying themselves), but it’s related. I think the assimilationist origins give more leeway for discussing race than you’re perhaps allowing for—in Ms. Marvel, for one.
I also think the superhero genre is more innately white supremacist than some genres (like romance, I’d argue.) But…also less white supremacist than some (KKK genre fiction.) And I think there have been uses of the genre that deal with diversity meaningfully, though they’re mostly pretty far from the mainstream (Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis series, for example.)
But the thing is…most pop culture is white supremacist to one degree or another. My wife commented once that if she was going to only listen to non-sexist pop music, she would never listen to any pop music. It’s not just that people are fans and so blinded; it’s that I think people rightly understand that their options are limited in a white supremacist society in terms of finding pop culture that is not white supremacist. So…you make do to some degree. Like, even within comics, superhero comics hardly stand out as racist. Crumb, Herge, McCay, Asterix, really much of the underground tradition; it’s not hard to see problems even with Herriman and Schulz, really.
“. Kamala has to appeal to White audiences so she can’t start her story reasonably aware of other’s perceptions of her minority background, apparently”
I guess I’d point out that these comics are not documentaries.I’m not sure if raising an empirical question of whether a girl like Kamala exists in real life is the right way to approach the material.
However in this instance there is a similarity to Parker: why is Parker not aware that that cool jocks aren’t going to want to go to a science exhibit? In fifteen years on planet earth he’s wholly unaware of the existence of high school cliques? Nobody has ever chastised him for being geeky until he tries to befriend Flash Thompson? Was he born yesterday or something?
Just to expand my Parker point slightly people go through “fitting in with peer” issues during middle school, if not younger. Parker is in high school, unless he’s homeschooled he should have already learned Flash Thompson isn’t going to want to go to the science exhibit with him. But I’m not sure anyone cares if Parker is “authentic” in a documentarian sort of realism, why does it matter if Kamala is?
Yeah I was going to ask to what degree is the white supremacism in comics majorly different than most forms of America pop culture. Movies have black protagonists and Asian protagonists and Hispanic protagonists and non-white of all kinds (sometimes, admittedly rarely), are they too all propagating white supremacism in blackface? Certainly some of them do, but then you have others like the original Harold and Kumar movie.
How exactly is Kamala untouched by race? She’s dealing with it directly in the very first issue, even if she isn’t fully aware by how racism is coming at her. Should every 16 year old be fully cognizant of every single iteration of racial prejudice and bias that can come their way? We’re now at the point where racialized characters must fit through a pinhole of characterization, otherwise their sellouts. Which is ridiculous.
I mean the girl says “Zoe thought that because I snuck out, it was okay for her to make fun of my family. Like, Kamala’s finally seen the light and kicked her dumb inferior brown people and their rules to the curb.” with a rueful look on her face. This isn’t just the story of a Muslim character, but an American Muslim character. And like Noah said, the Peter/Flash comparisons don’t apply. Peter often wanted to kill Flash for the first several issues of ASM. He considered letting him die at the hands of Dr. Doom in ASM #5 and in AF#15 he’s swearing to himself “Someday I’ll make them pay! They’ll all pay!”. The characters are completely different because while both Peter and Kamala desire acceptance at some level, Kamala recognizes that she doesn’t want the acceptance of certain people, whereas Peter either wants acceptance or revenge as a substitute. So after all that, if you’re still gonna say “Kamala Khan is Peter Parker in brownface”, you’re not proving yourself knowledgeable of the material you criticize to fully illustrate your point and back up your claim/conclusion. I listed four recognizable examples of the Spider-Man comic’s makeup, and all you squeezed out was “someone was mean to her”.
And this isn’t meant to be geeky fact-checking to stroke a fan’s ego, since I am a fan. I very well may too close to the material to fully engage in deep criticism and acknowledge the flaws that make it crumble from a progressive perspective. But I’d like to think that the essay I wrote about black Cap portrays my willingness to take the genre at its face and confront the failings it contains when it comes to diversity, with my fandom on the line. But saying that the white supremacism is impenetrable, inevitable and will never cease to be so in the superhero genre speaks to the larger issue of white supremacism in our society and culture in general. If one element of pop culture cannot exist without it, the country can’t. And maybe it can’t, but you’ve yet to prove how it can never exist without it from now until the end of time, in the face of the times we’re living today where . It’s going to take more than purple prose and utter avoidance and dismissal of any example of non-white based storytelling to convince that meaningful diversity, and equality, within this genre is utterly hopeless. Has that proven to be the case elsewhere?
And FWIW going by the Letters pages in Ms. Marvel, Muslim women of all kinds, Pakistani, Turkish and others, find Kamala to be very authentic. And not just in a “We love to see Muslim superheroes!” but “We really appreciate the nuance you’re faithfully portraying that speaks to our life experience”.
So, I’m never really sure how much stock we should place in the proposed connection between the superhero concept and assimilation narratives. This argument always requires some acknowledgement of the personal racial and cultural identification of Siegel and Shuster and other early creators, and I find their backgrounds interesting historical tidbits, but less influential to the concept itself than their cultural products. I don’t think nearly eighty years of fanboys read Superman as a guy trying to become White, as someone who’s Whiteness is ever in question. Rather, Clark Kent and Superman emerge fully formed as White men in panel. There’s zero conversation or debate about Superman’s Whiteness in the context of his stories; he’s different because of what he can do as a White man, not because his skin and/or cultural sensibilities telegraph difference to those around him.
The Reynolds painting for me speaks to the superhero as colonial agent, the White male who defines masculinity through martial force applied to subject races. Superhero narratives concern the just and moral use of awesome, world-altering power by individuals, the same question that has plagued Western nations’ foreign policies since WWII. I make an intersectional claim about the superhero concept in the essay above, and etch a mechanism by which we can understand how race and gender and sexuality affect this genre’s conventions. Since the superhero concept promotes White male power fantasy for militaristic, hegemonic ends, there’s no place for human difference within the genre. This is the reason writers routinely fail to provide meaningful race and gender and sexuality difference in superhero comics.
So modern consumers should maintain a popular culture White supremacy threshold? Accept this much prejudice in the books you read and the plays you witness and the movies you watch, all of which you pay for directly, but no more? We pay for all of this. “Making do to some degree” accepts and encourages White supremacy, Noah. This is not progressive. This is failure. This begs for marginal treatment. This is no different than the Servant’s learned adoration of Charles Stanhope, taught through terrorism.
If the best defense for Geoff Johns’ Justice League is that it’s not Robert Crumb’s Justice League, if the best defense of the superhero is that other comics are worse, than its reasonable to reject all of these racist genres outright. People do not have to financially support hate.
One would think 14 year old girls would be the expert on whether a portrayal of a 14 year old girl is authentic, yet J. Lamb you wrote this:
“And Ms. Marvel is a genderbent Peter Parker in brownface for fourteen year old girls who don’t know any better.”
Why are we to believe you know 14 year old girls better than 14 year old girls who read Ms. Marvel?
“As slaves, Africans lacked any capacity for aesthetic sensibility, according to Enlightenment thinking.”
Any statement about “Enlightenment thinking” is of course going to be a simplification – nothing wrong with that – but this one is closer to being completely wrong than it is to being right.
“So modern consumers should maintain a popular culture White supremacy threshold?”
Yes. (That’s the correct answer, though of course I can’t speak for Noah.)
“This is not progressive. This is failure.”
Attempts at social progress necessarily end in partial failure. There are points beyond which striving for further perfection ceases to be productive and starts to cause serious problems of its own.
Anyway, it’s easy to demand that superhero stories be morally purified into non-existence, because they are commercial entertainment for white Americans. Making the same demand of a non-white folk art, on the other hand… it would still be wrong, but it would show a degree of courage of conviction (in liberal company, of course; but that’s mostly what the readership of this blog is).
“Why are we to believe you know 14 year old girls better than 14 year old girls who read Ms. Marvel?”
Well, this is just I guess, but I’d say for basically the same reason that the Party knows what’s best for the workers better than the workers themselves.
Pallas misunderstands my claim. I suggest that it’s easier to use characters like Kamala Khan and Miles Morales as superheroes of color because audiences do not expect children at their ages to possess and articulate sophisticated race and gender consciousness. They appear non-White in panel, but authors can pen stories with these characters where those characters do not display a mature understanding of the ways others can perceive their group identities. Kamala Khan in Ms. Marvel #1 is essentially pre-encounter; the initial exchange with Zoe confirms her as someone so interested in the assimilation narrative that they stand oblivious to majority disdain. Wilson uses secondary characters to provide the necessary counterpoint to Zoe’s bigotry.
This works for most, because many consumers will allow representations of young people to avoid race consciousness; in doing so, the audience itself avoids race consciousness. At that point, race exists as meaningless data, and the specific cultural and political histories attached to various races do not affect superheroes or their narratives.
So superheroes of color can enter into violent battles just like their White counterparts, thereby behaving just like their White counterparts, and no one has to care because race itself lacks meaning in panel. Kamala Khan’s one example of this; Miles Morales is another. But this carbon copy similarity in action and thought posits a general sameness of experience that race and gender and sexuality differences do not allow in the real world. This standard superhero experience for minority superheroes assumes that all people would respond to possessing extra-normal abilities in roughly similar fashion, by wearing gaudy skintight outfits and engaging in public battles that cause property damage and threaten civilians.
None of that makes sense if race and gender and sexuality are meaningfully rendered in a narrative. This is the enduring failure of Milestone Comics properties like Static Shock and Icon: if Blackness mattered to these superheroes, writersshould have applied different reasoning to standard superhero dilemmas than readers found in these characters’ stories. Icon’s a run-of-the-mill 90’s superhero saga with Booker T. Washington sensibilities thrown in for kicks: his indifference to reconceptualizing the point of a superhero makes his racial identification inauthentic, in my view.
These characters display varying attempts to square superhero genre conventions with meaningful race, gender, and sexuality identification in panel. The reason they don’t work is not because we ask too much to request meaningfully Black or meaningfully female or meaningfully gay superheroes. They fail because the genre itself inhibits such complex characterization. It’s not ridiculous for the buying public to request better than this, or to discard superheroes for their failure to render human difference.
Graham, I’d suggest that you check out Simon Gikandi’s brilliant Slavery and the Culture of Taste to learn more about Enlightenment perceptions on the capabilities of people of African descent. Thomas Jefferson was no outlier; many Enlightenment theorists promoted African intellectual inferiority notions within their works. Take Kant:
If you believe my take on the Enlightenment flawed Graham, please share your knowledge on the subject.
Recognizing the superhero concept as hostile to human difference does not present perfection as the enemy of the good, nor does it demand a moral purity of anything or anyone. The basic suggestion of all my superhero writing to date has been that non-straight White males possess a social richness worth examination in comics, and that superhero comics routinely fail in those examinations.
I really don’t blame the writers and artists and editors and fans; but all these constituencies support a superhero concept that abhors human difference and promotes White male power fantasies ad nauseam. The essay above attempts to explain why that dynamic occurs, and offers a meaningful response to that dynamic. No one need accept my solution or my articulation of the problem of superhero diversity, but it’s clear I’ve offered a comprehensive take on both.
Given what I describe above, incrementalism is not a virtue. People who wish for meaningful diversity in superhero media should boycott superhero media.
“If you believe my take on the Enlightenment flawed Graham, please share your knowledge on the subject.”
I cordially invite you to do your own work.
I’ll take the opportunity to note that hostility toward the Enlightenment is generally an inclination of conservatives, and of people who would be conservatives except for a non-economic grievance against the establishment, that is, identity politics (racial, gender, pr queer) or libertarian anti-statism (both in the case of Foucault).
“Given what I describe above, incrementalism is not a virtue.”
Nobody recommended incrementalism.
“People who wish for meaningful diversity in superhero media should boycott superhero media.”
You can’t have it both ways. If the genre is by nature racist, you can’t get “meaningful diversity” into it. You can either settle for perhaps somewhat ameliorating its inherent tendencies, or eliminate it altogether.
“You can either settle for perhaps somewhat ameliorating its inherent tendencies”
Better way to put it: You can demand that it doesn’t manifest its inherent racist tendencies too egregiously.
“So, I’m never really sure how much stock we should place in the proposed connection between the superhero concept and assimilation narratives.”
I don’t really think this washes. Superman’s literally an alien from outer space; that figures into a lot of stories over time as a problem/barrier/something to think about or resolve, one way or the other. Clark Kent, Steve Rogers, Peter Parker— the iconic characters are all elaborately weak/despised outsiders. Superheroes are disempowerment fantasies as well as empowerment fantasies (especially by the time you get to Marvel with characters like the Jewish Thing being presented as a despised outsider–or the X-Men, with all their troubles.)
Also…comics was, and has long been, a marginal genre. Maybe less so now, but comics have in the past had little cultural cred; they’re low status pop culture, as opposed to Reynolds, who was canonical because of his relationship to the powerful. So…I think the comparison between Reynold and superhero comics is provocative and interesting, but it’s doing a lot of work for you—more than I think your thesis can bear without at least some adjustment (IMO).
“Accept this much prejudice in the books you read and the plays you witness and the movies you watch, all of which you pay for directly, but no more? ”
I think if you don’t want to buy any of this stuff, that’s totally reasonable—but I’m really leery of moral purity tests. At least for me, I feel like there’s a line between saying, this comic is racist, and saying, anyone who buys this is tainted and suffering from false consciousness. The point I was trying to make was that, in a white supremacist system, there’s not a whole lot of pop culture to choose from that’s not going to be white supremacist, in one way or the other. Consumers, readers, creators react to that in various ways —by coming up with oppositional readings, by reworking white supremacist tropes, by starting their own companies and trying to make better things, even if they’re compromised. I’m reluctant to rule those out as reasonable options—even though, like I said, I also think just saying, “this genre is racist and not for me” is a fair thing to do.
“Anyway, it’s easy to demand that superhero stories be morally purified into non-existence, because they are commercial entertainment for white Americans. ”
Graham, this is false. There are lots of non-white comics fans. James is engaging them pretty directly throughout his piece. Not sure if you failed to notice that or what…but James really is not backing down from the more painful results of his thesis (including criticizing black creators.) So…you’re asking him to do what he’s already doing, and asking him in a really unnecessarily belligerent way.
The thing about the Enlightenment also—you’re being a condescending jackass. If you have objections, make them. James’ point about the Enlightenment being really extremely racist is pretty dead on, in my view. You don’t agree, disagree, but the pretense that you’re the smartest guy in the room gets really old really fast, and is especially unpleasant to witness when deployed in this particular context.
“Graham, this is false. There are lots of non-white comics fans”
Not the point. (The point being that nobody’s going to accuse you of attacking non-whites as a group because you attacked superhero stories as a genre.)
“The thing about the Enlightenment also—you’re being a condescending jackass. If you have objections, make them.”
Where? The part where I said he was wrong? Or the part where I declined to do what he could just as well do for himself? (I would say that is the opposite of condescending.)
First, it is the point if you’re criticizing Milestone Comics, which James does.
Second, both. And you know it very well, or should. James provided sources and quotes and readings. You just sneered and said, hey, I’m right, because I’m so damn smart I don’t even have to have an actual conversation. You haven’t even bothered to explain why you think James is wrong. You’re just insisting you have some sort of superior authority to speak on the basis of…what? Your willingness to be more of a jerk than anyone else? Again, if you want to have a conversation, then have a conversation. If you think you’re too good for the thread, then get off the damn thread.
I don’t know where you’re getting “so damn smart” and “superior authority.”
If you’re implying that you can’t say somebody is wrong without incurring the obligation to expend further effort… well, it’s your comment section. I would say that invites a situation where the less rewarding an argument is to answer, the more likely it is to pass without any negative comment at all.
“sources and quotes” Gee, you mean if you want to you can find racist quotes by some important Enlightenment philosophers? Well I guess that settles it!
You can say something is wrong. But if you refuse to explain why you think it’s wrong, and refuse to say what you’re argument is based on, then you’re just making an argument from authority, and contributing nothing to the discussion except condescension and jerkishness, basically.
I didn’t say the sources and quotes settled anything. But James provided them. You didn’t. We’re supposed to take you seriously because you won’t (can’t?) provide evidence, or even an argument? Please.
And the crap about the argument not being worth answering is crap. You’ve spent lots of time in this comment section now saying nothing except that you can’t be bothered to engage. If you can’t be bothered to engage, again I say, go away. If you have an actual argument, then present it, rather than nattering on and on about how you’re too awesome to be bothered.
Simon and Schaeffer’s Leviathan and the Air Pump argues that the Enlightenment science pretense of objective scientific inquiry was in part a way to hide the role of authority and power in determining truth. Edward Baptist’s The Half Has Never Been Told argues that forward looking capitalism and rationalized labor were not antithetical to slavery, but perfected by it. Racism is at the center of that important Enlightenment document, the Constitution.
I think you could make the argument that there are anti-racist resources in the enlightenment too. But to say that it’s more wrong than right to talk about the way racism permeated the enlightenment; I’d need to see some pretty strong evidence to be convinced of that.
Arguing that anti-enlightenment rhetoric is conservative is also nonsense, imo. Pointing out that the enlightenment was in many ways racist doesn’t make you a conservative; or if it does, then that just means conservatism is in the right in this case.
@Noah The time I’ve spent writing comments under this article comes to less than five minutes. And if I’m arguing from authority, then what’s the problem? Either I don’t have any, in which case you and Lamb can safely ignore me, or I’ve somehow acquired some, in which case my work in that respect is already done.
The problem is you’re being a jerk. And I’m having to waste my time dealing with you being a jerk. Go away.
“Pointing out that the enlightenment was in many ways racist doesn’t make you a conservative**”
No, but implying that the Enlightenment strengthened rather than weakened racism* – when the trend from early to late Enlightenment philosophers and intellectuals was in the latter direction – does.
*More precisely, “racism” being an anachronism: the belief in the inherent intellectual inferiority of some “races,” particularly black Africans, to Europeans.
** Again more precisely, “conservative” being vague: It is factually wrong, in a way that implies an anti-rationalist agenda, which usually comes with an aversion to social democracy as well as the economic aspect of communism***, and a preference for both “feudalism” and free market capitalism. The underlying assumption being that particular individuals or groups of people have exceptional qualities that can’t be identified by rational means, but are somehow supremely valuable (valuable to what isn’t always clear) – and that these can only flourish in the latter systems.
(Foucault is, again, a quintessential case, and a brief glance shows his fingerprints to be all over the two books you mention – not to mention on your own précises: “a way to hide the role of authority and power in determining truth”).
*** The cultural aspect of Maoism of course held an attraction for the post-structuralists.
“Go away.”
I can’t tell if this is a permanent dis-invitation from the comment sections on this blog. If yes, please confirm. If not, I suppose that whatever comments I write here in the future will be mostly positive, since if I wanted to write with the level of rigor that you seem to want in negative comments, I’d do it on my own page.
It’s possible I’ve misunderstood you, Noah. I’m less interested in what happens when an alien with Teutonic features raised on Earth gains superhuman abilities and performs as a superhero and more interested in what happens when a human within the African diaspora gains superhuman abilities and performs as a superhero. Possibly to my detriment, I’ve been focused on racial assimilation in superhero comics, not broader assimilation discussions. Kent, Rogers, and Parker never seemed too weak to me; all benefit from straight White male privilege, all could find work (even if Parker couldn’t always hold it to it for long, he never knew poverty). Once empowered, their potential was limitless, but none were all that outsider, unless their social isolation is viewed as a condition of living within all-White societies where 1950’s high school ‘jocks vs. nerds’ tribalism applies. Kent, Rogers, and Parker only play the despised and weak outsider in a White world where color doesn’t matter, so I tend to find the assimilation discussion difficult. This may be my bias.
Put another way, growing up reading superhero stories I never found the social isolation in many mainstream superhero origin stories believable. Steve Rogers is a geeky, thin kid, but he’s still White in America. Clark Kent’s a mild-mannered klutz, the butt of office jokes, but he’s still White in America. Peter Parker’s tenuous employment presents difficulty, but he’s still White in America. In a monoracial comic book these characters use their superhero alter-egos to gain fame and importance, but that dynamic provides further evidence for my contention that the superhero concept has no place for human difference. So I don’t know. I think I understand the logic behind characterizing superhero stories as assimilation narratives, but the major characters do not read as racial assimilation narratives to me at all; rather they reinforce the genre’s basic obliviousness to human difference.
When guys like John Stewart assimilate Whiteness to perform as superheroes, I believe writers repress or ignore basic social and cultural Blackness outright, along with any sense of identity politics. Most of the Black superheroes we can name serve as crude templetes of Black middle class veterans, as I discuss above: this choice, and the inclusion of characters like Luke Cage who are obvious racial stereotypes, promote the White male gaze’s definition of acceptable diversity far more than anything meaningful to actual Black people. Donovan and Osvaldo and all comic fans are, of course, free to support characters of color; buying a comic book makes no one a sellout. But incremental change in the superhero genre faces steep opposition from revenue models that still appeal to the White male gaze above all other concerns.
Miles Morales is the sort of Black superhero White guys can appreciate. Kamala Khan is the sort of Muslim superheroes White girls can appreciate. When these comics are touted by some as reason to maintain optimism on superhero diversity, I find it difficult to agree.
I have to say, whatever differences of opinion aside, that this is a really well conceived article. Really gave me something to think about.
So here’s the thing: I used to think Thomas Jefferson was an outlier. I read his Notes of the State of Virginia in my early twenties, and found him disgusting. There’s all manner of amazing Jefferson scholarship out there, Annette Gordon-Reed comes to mind. While researching this piece, I learned about other material, enough to understand that many famous Enlightenment philosophers did not find people of African descent capable of the intellectual heft necessary to function as rational citizens. This offered context for Jefferson’s views and the portraits I displayed above.
Again Graham, you don’t have to agree with me. But you’ve failed to offer a compelling counterargument to my views of the Enlightenment, or of my argument generally.
Mywa, thanks for reading and commenting!
@Lamb I would say you haven’t offered an argument to begin with. An argument would present a representative sample of evidence that apparently contradicts your thesis as well as evidence that supports it, and then demonstrate why the latter is more significant than the former. You haven’t done that.
For James Lamb, is there any sort of fantastical setting fiction (Sci-fi, fantasy, mythological, whatever) that addresses your concerns in a successful fashion? I would like to read some. Thanks.
How could I forget, fictional comics as well? I do like to read non super hero comics but generally pass on auto-bio ones. Although did really enjoy the first 2 March books about John Lewis. Exception that proves the rule. Thanks.
@Andrew Interesting question. I’m not J. Lamb, but I would say an anti-racist genre in a racist society is most likely to be one that is primarily created by, and disproportionately consumed by, the oppressed race. Hip hop is an obvious candidate. (Not a form of fantastical fiction, admittedly.) (Well, sometimes it is.) (Of course, this does not rule out the possibility of hip hop being, at the same time, an inherently misogynist and anti-queer genre.)
Noah and James,
I’ll take appeals to evidence and testable hypotheses over ancestral curses of slavery and tribal bloodguilt any day of the week. If someone argues that I’m destined to be shit on in perpetuity because of evidence, I can look at the evidence, but if God said so there isn’t much I can do.
Graham, it was just telling you to go away from this comments section…but instead you’ve started to actually make arguments, more or less, which is all I really wanted. So thank you!
So, I think science-fiction, for all its troubles, has managed to really grapple with racism pretty effectively, not least because of black writers like Octavia Butler and Samuel Delany.
There are lots of African-American musical genres—jazz, hip hop, funk, blues, gospel. The divide between black participation/representation in music and comics is pretty stark (which isn’t to say music is perfect or has solved all racial problems forever; just that, in comparison, even given all the problems in music, comics don’t come off looking so great.)
James, re: assimilation. So, the thing is, Jews are not coded racially different now in the U.S., but they have been coded racially different at various points in various ways. I think you can argue that the superhero is not so much about glorifying white people in power (a la Reynolds) as it’s a dream of racial outsiders trying to imagine themselves as white. As you say, Steve Rogers and Peter Parker don’t really make sense as discriminated others—but that’s in part because the project of the narratives they’re in is to erase their racialized otherness. That’s why Ms. Marvel can be seen as progress (I’d argue); because it’s a vision of assimilation that doesn’t involve completely whitewashing ethnic identity, but tries to figure out a way to retain human difference.
So, I think you can see the struggle around assimilating different racial identities as part of the superhero DNA, and that provides an opening for dealing with various kinds of human difference, arguably. The problem is that in the US context, Jewish and black experiences of marginalization are very different, and often even opposed. But that relationship is still more complicated and I think possibly more productive than the relationship between English nobility and black people which Reynolds portrays.
Does that make sense? The point is that, if Steve Rogers is Jewish, and I think he is, then his experience of race is pretty different from that of the white people Reynolds is painting. That doesn’t mean that Kirby dealt intelligently or effectively with race (I don’t think he did almost ever.) But it does mean that there’s maybe more room in the superhero genre for dealing with marginalized people than the comparison with Reynolds allows for.
@Noah re your interesting suggestion in another article that stereotypes that were once consciously recognized as Jewish are now consciously recognized merely as “nerd”: Maybe to some extent the superhero story can be seen as evolving from an ethnic empowerment fantasy in the ’30s to a class empowerment fantasy – nerds versus jocks – by the early ’60s, becoming more complicated as nerds became rich in the ’80s and then (the more socially high functioning ones) cool in the ’00s.
Graham, I think it’s not just Jews…assimilated male identity often becomes read as emasculated/nerdy. So, Jews in the past, Asians today.
Black masculine stereotypes are the flip of that; they aren’t (allowed to be) assimilated and so are seen as hyper-masculine/dangerous/threatening.
Speculation: There are stories about costumed heroes fighting the establishment, which seems like a possible starting place for anti-racist stories – Zorro, Doctor Syn. But is it a coincidence that these anti-establishment heroes are themselves members of the establishment – i.e. the exact opposite of pro-establishment members of a marginalized class, as in the X-Men? (And then there’s Robin Hood, who doesn’t wear a costume, but in another sense is always in costume, since he permanently abandons his aristocratic life for Sherwood Forest.) (Batman is an interesting contrast: The masked establishment hero who stays loyal to his own class.) (In all aforementioned cases, no actual superpowers. Maybe they’re redundant when you’re already one of the masters of the universe.)
@Noah Often, but not always. Didn’t happen to the Irish or the Italians. I would say the essential factor is whether the assimilated ethnicity in question is seen as having assimilated disproportionately into the professional class (which is maybe what people essentially mean when they talk about “model immigrants”).
Andrew, thanks for reading and commenting!
In order to address my concerns, a fictional work would have to conceptualize characters whose social sensibilities and critical reasoning reflected the specific history and culture their skin promotes. The X-Man Jubilee is a Chinese American who shoots fireworks out of her hands(!) but has no interest in or knowledge of Chinese American history in most media where she appears. She lacks any concern for Chinese exclusion or westward expansion during the Gilded Age, and almost never deals with perpetual foreigner or model minority stereotypes. I can’t remember a time when Jubilee met X-Men at dim sum.
Obviously, all Chinese Americans are not required to have direct knowledge of all this stuff; my point is that some measure of conscious cultural and/or political specificity matters if race, gender, or sexual diversity is employed in speculative fiction. Otherwise the diversity means nothing. I don’t have an example of a work that gets all this right, but I find the many failures I’ve seen instructive.
Take David Walker’s Super Justice Force: The Adventures of Darius Logan, Book One. Walker, writer of Shaft for Dynamite and the upcoming Cyborg for DC, delivered a young adult novel that posits a Black teenager on the wrong side of the law who’s given a second chance before prison: he’s sent to work at a Justice League knockoff’s headquarters. Think of it as Omar Epps’ First Time Felon with superpowers. Darius’ family died as unwitting collateral damage in a superhero battle, and the poverty and antisocial personality that develops is viewed as a direct consequence of unchecked superhero power. Readers come to understand that reducing recidivism rates involve directly understanding the social ethics taught the poor and the disenfranchised by an unequal society. Really, preventing crime by empowering society’s easily forgotten proves the whole point of the story.
The downside is that genre conventions take precedence throughout this work, but especially in the novel’s climax; superheroes of color here approach their duties in the same fashion as all superheroes, and that’s not sensible. If race matters, it should produce different outcomes and sensibilities in character action. So no, Super Justice Force is not by any stretch an example of speculative fiction ‘getting it right’ on race to me, but it centers a superhero story on mass incarceration concerns that people of color do experience. Race needs to be more than apolitical background data to matter in speculative fiction.
“Obviously, all Chinese Americans are not required to have direct knowledge of all this stuff; my point is that some measure of conscious cultural and/or political specificity matters if race, gender, or sexual diversity is employed in speculative fiction. Otherwise the diversity means nothing.”
Well, phenotypical diversity together with cultural homogeneity does mean something. It may or may not be true to the current reality, it may or may not be desirable, but it does mean something.
Isn’t Jubilee the character who wasn’t originally Chinese American, but had some sort of body transformation turning her Asian?
Or was that someone else? I know I didn’t just make that up…
i think that was psylock, noah.
“Isn’t Jubilee the character who wasn’t originally Chinese American, but had some sort of body transformation turning her Asian?”
I think that was Psyloche. Jubilee may be asian and maybe it’s referenced in the comics, but I don’t remember that ever coming up in the 90s X-men cartoon where she was the kid character. Then again I haven’t watched it in decades.
It’s weird that J. lamb describes her power as “shooting fireworks out of her hands”. Isn’t her power similar to Dazzler, an earlier character? I think that argument that it’s about fireworks is a real stretch.
Noah, you’re thinking of Psylocke (the psychic Englishwoman turned psychic Japanese ninja assassin). It’s a little embarrassing how readily I know that, but I was a child of the 90’s, after all.
Pallas, a Chinese American teenager develops a mutant power that allows her to shoot multicolored pyrotechnic energy from her hands. Stereotypical as it was, they were always fireworks; it’s actually most explicit in the 90’s X-Men cartoon. Not a stretch, it’s just another example of a character of color defined by people outside their community.
Yes. It means whitewashing. It means the erasure of non-White cultures and perspectives to promote mainstream Whiteness as universally normal and desirable. It means the reduction of race to unimportant bio-data, like eye color or left-handedness, without regard for the specific historical circumstances attached to various races.
I doubt any of us regard this as positive.
“it’s actually most explicit in the 90’s X-Men cartoon.”
It’s been a long time since I watched it so I have to concede you may be right.
The argument can be made, sure. I’m not persuaded by this argument because I think we need prior knowledge about creator background to make this stick. It never really matters to me that Superman was created two young Jewish men; since 1938 their creation has been a White man. That Whiteness was a political choice; other directions existed. In Superman’s narrative, he’s been accepted as White throughout his life; without being told that his origins are extraterrestrial, no one in panel would know.
Obviously, the Jewish American experience includes a history of prejudice and discrimination; Jewish superheroes reflect on this too seldom. Ben Grimm’s one of the only Jewish superheroes we can name, and his social ostracism begins after he loses his physical humanity (and with it, his White privilege). If Steve Rogers is Jewish, his Jewishness completely lacks meaning; Reynolds painted his society’s elite, and Steve Rogers becomes a member of his society’s elite after the government issued injections. To read Steve Rogers as marginalized because of a barely hinted connection with Jewish heritage strikes me as problematic. I would suggest that Steve Rogers has White privilege before and after the super soldier serum, and a self-made or government issued aristocrat still appears superior to the Black servant-sidekick standing behind him to his right.
It means the reduction of race to unimportant bio-data, like eye color or left-handedness, without regard for the specific historical circumstances attached to various races.
I doubt any of us regard this as positive.
– See more at: https://www.hoodedutilitarian.com/2015/05/figures-of-empire-on-the-impossibility-of-superhero-diversity/#comment-183625
I don’t know, I may be missing something but that does seem like it could be positive, at least in the sense that Richard Lewontin is positive in relation to, say, Charles Murray.
James: “Obviously, the Jewish American experience includes a history of prejudice and discrimination; Jewish superheroes reflect on this too seldom. Ben Grimm’s one of the only Jewish superheroes we can name, and his social ostracism begins after he loses his physical humanity (and with it, his White privilege).”
Right; the stigma is displaced, in virtually all those old comics. But *not* in Ms. Marvel (nor in the Shadow Hero). The assimilation narrative is buried, but it can be recuperated, which arguably gives superhero comics some resources to talk about difference.
“If Steve Rogers is Jewish, his Jewishness completely lacks meaning; Reynolds painted his society’s elite, and Steve Rogers becomes a member of his society’s elite after the government issued injections. To read Steve Rogers as marginalized because of a barely hinted connection with Jewish heritage strikes me as problematic. ”
I mean, Rogers isn’t *really* Jewish, clearly—in the first place, he’s a fiction. But I don’t think it’s that hard to read his origin story as a assimilationist dream, in which stigma is displaced (when he’s Steve) and then rejected when he becomes Captain America.
This is the case with Ben Grimm and the Hulk as well; those are characters haunted by the fear that they’re passing as human (white) when they’re really something else. That’s why Jenning’s Buck character works so well; because the Hulk really is this racialized panic about being or becoming a racial other.
I wouldn’t argue that any of this has been handled that well over the years; the early X-Men with the good minorities policing the bad minorities is repulsive, IMO. But I think the genre has some more resources for dealing with racial difference than is suggested by the Reynolds comparison, is all.
Worth pointing out that it took four decades for Marvel to admit Ben Grimm was Jewish (though he was intended to be so and legible as such from the beginning, more or less.) That sort of gratuitous cowardice around these issues is frankly embarrassing, and certainly a point in favor of James’ argument.
Thanks. I will check it out. Normally not much for novelized super heroes (as the crazy outfits are part of the fun) but can’t beat free and the chapters are short.
“It means the reduction of race to unimportant bio-data, like eye color or left-handedness, without regard for the specific historical circumstances attached to various races.
I doubt any of us regard this as positive.”
Sure we do. Nobody thinks that an American descendant of Lutheran Germans who came here in 1848 suffers for not knowing any more about Germany than she does about Mexico or Japan.
Don’t know if this is just whitewashing but I liked Shadow Hero. http://www.firstsecondbooks.com/books/shadow-hero-the-green-turtle-chronicles/
Got it out of the library awhile back. It is super hero stuff but I like First Second. This books seems to put his identity in a social context but it is not modern day (the 30s or 40s I think) so might not be what you are looking for. Been awhile since I read it but I do think it seems more on point than the other Marvel/DC ones you noted.
I couldn’t find a free sample. This has a [shudder] Motion comic version.
http://geneyang.com/the-shadow-hero
But don’t let that scare you off.
If you’re right, and I’ve unfairly discounted the superhero concept’s resources to examine difference, we should also acknowledge why the vast majority of the superhero canon utterly ignores diversity or treats diverse representations superficially, over seventy seven years. As stated, I don’t think that Ms. Marvel gets us closer to meaningful racial diversity, but the comic works well as to promote female empowerment to young women. Throughout the first issue Kamala disregards familial and peer group expectations to set her own rules; she displays as sense of unfair female restriction that she proactively combats.
But Kamala does not tackle racial expectations in like fashion in that first issue. Rather, her youth and naiveté allow readers to sidestep any direct confrontation over other people’s prejudice. As Donovan mentioned earlier, many would find a sixteen year old with the presence of mind to articulately confront racist expectations of school peers unlikely. Maybe that’s true, I don’t know. But Ms. Marvel #1 left me with the impression that gender, not race, was the real point of that comic.
That’s still worthy human difference to examine, to be sure. I’m reluctant to call this comic a win for progressive integrationist fans though, because when i first read it, I felt like I was reading Ultimate Spider-Man, where a young happy do-gooder puts up with peer-group stupid, gains powers, and then saves those who ostracize him. It appeared to me that the comics’ interest in genre conventions overruled everything. Starting off, Kamala Khan totally adores Carol Danvers in the same manner as the Servant totally adores Charles Stanhope above. Were superhero diversity really possible, I’d like to believe that that tortured adoration would not exist in panel.
OK. For the record, Graham has no problem with whitewashing cultures to achieve ‘diversity’ in superhero comics. So noted.
And Andrew, Noah’s also discussed the Shadow Hero in this thread positively; I’ll take your advice and check it out. Thanks!
So basically your strategy now is to stick your fingers in your ears and say “whitewashing” over and over again until the inconsistencies in your paradigm go away.
I don’t think James is being inconsistent.
Assimilation is a really, really ambivalent thing, especially for black Americans. Pointing out that German immigrants don’t need to be connected to their country any more—that’s not a refutation of James’ point. It’s an illustration of it. Some people are allowed to assimilate; other people aren’t. Superhero comics tend to pretend not to know the difference. That’s a failure, not a success. And the fact that German’s have assimilated is in fact an instance of whitewashing; people who come to America who can be absorbed by whiteness—when they do that, they are in fact being whitewashed, and part of that whitewashing is a collaboration in the oppression of non-white people.
Have you read James Baldwin’s essay “The Price of the Ticket,” Graham? That lays these issues out fairly clearly.
“Starting off, Kamala Khan totally adores Carol Danvers in the same manner as the Servant totally adores Charles Stanhope above. Were superhero diversity really possible, I’d like to believe that that tortured adoration would not exist in panel.”
Right..but then Kamala decides that actually being Carol Danvers, and in particular actually being white, is not what she wants for herself. She loves America (symbolized by superheroes) and wants to assimilate—but she’s also inspired specifically by her own heritage, and wants to be true to that as well.
I think the ambivalence around the transformation into an icon of white femininity is about both race and gender.
No Graham. I just find your suggestion too cute by half.
When individuals decide to invest in or avoid connections to their various group identities, that displays agency. That’s what you describe with your Lutheran German descendant. That’s a radically different dynamic than what we discuss, the deliberate choice to replace social and political history of non-European backgrounds in superhero comics by a tight-knit mainstream superhero creator community almost completely staffed by straight White men for the visual pleasure of straight White men, for the entire history of the genre. That’s bigotry; the only agency in that dynamic belongs to straight White men.
My argument is consistent and fair, Graham. There’s nothing improper about boycotting material one finds racist. Your acceptance of my argument is entirely up to you.
“Some people are allowed to assimilate; other people aren’t.”
Exactly, but I don’t think that is James’ point. For him, the problem seems to be not merely that some people aren’t being allowed to assimilate; he seems to consider assimilation as a negative development per se – except for the groups that have already been truly assimilated, in which case he doesn’t care.
“And the fact that German’s have assimilated is in fact an instance of whitewashing”
Except that nobody calls it that, because whitewashing is pejorative, and nobody really regrets the Germans’ successful assimilation.
“when they do that, they are in fact being whitewashed, and part of that whitewashing is a collaboration in the oppression of non-white people.”
I would say you can narrow that down from “non-white” to “black.” Everybody else is either already an honorary WASP or demonstrably getting closer to that status over time.
“Have you read James Baldwin’s essay “The Price of the Ticket,” Graham?”
Of course.
“There’s nothing improper about boycotting material one finds racist.”
You might as well say there’s nothing improper about boycotting material one finds classist. (And oh boy does that cover a lot, in high art as well as popular entertainment.) (Except that, significantly, classism, unlike racism and sexism, is not perceived as a vulgar quality today.) In both cases, yes, there can be something improper about it, if taken to the point of philistinism. Not that there’s much risk of that when it’s superhero comics, movies, and tv shows that you’re boycotting, but we’re arguing general principles here.
“the deliberate choice to replace social and political history of non-European backgrounds in superhero comics by a tight-knit mainstream superhero creator community almost completely staffed by straight White men for the visual pleasure of straight White men”
You seem to change subjects from the background of the character to the background of the creators half way through this sentence, and also to imply either that it’s okay for the Asian character to be deracinated if there are Asians on the staff, or that it’s insufficient for the Asian character to have a realistically represented, culturally specific background if the staff is all white.
This is a great example of the problem. Graham, we’ve never lived in a Black vs. White racial paradigm in the West. America, for example, has always been multi-ethic and multi-racial. To reduce the experiences of various Asian American and Latin American groups to varying degrees of ‘honorary WASP’ commits the same foulness we discuss. I think you subsume other people’s cultural and political experiences into Whiteness, and then pretend they do not matter. I oppose this.
For example, Samoan Americans, Hmong Americans, and Puerto Rican Americans aren’t on some generational Whiteness journey. To assume so, to assume that everyone who’s neither Black nor White is simply becoming White strikes me as absurd and offensive.
The main group I was thinking of who aren’t (all) black, but who aren’t really allowed to assimilate either (or who have been able to avoid assimilating) are Native Americans.
“Except that nobody calls it that, because whitewashing is pejorative, and nobody really regrets the Germans’ successful assimilation.”
You know, I’m white, but it occurs to me my old Asian roomate in college used to sometimes call other Asians he didn’t like for whatever reason “whitewashed”. Essentially attacking them for trying to assimilate, I guess, or acting “too white”.
I’m just throwing this out there, but is it possible this is not a cool term to be using when attacking comics made by minorities? (such as the milestone books or Ms. Marvel?)
“Except that nobody calls it that, because whitewashing is pejorative, and nobody really regrets the Germans’ successful assimilation.”
The process whereby various European ethnic groups become white is, as I said, intimately tied to the way this country sets up the only meaningful difference as white/black. So…yeah, I regret that process, and so do a lot of other people. It’s an immoral way to structure society.
“To reduce the experiences of various Asian American and Latin American groups to varying degrees of ‘honorary WASP’ commits the same foulness we discuss.”
I’d say equating the experience of Asian or (non-black) Latino Americans with that of black Americans commits a “foulness” of its own.
“For example, Samoan Americans, Hmong Americans, and Puerto Rican Americans aren’t on some generational Whiteness journey. To assume so, to assume that everyone who’s neither Black nor White is simply becoming White strikes me as absurd and offensive.”
Well, some people find the subsuming of Irish Catholics and Jews into “white” as offensive. Deal with it.
“my old Asian roomate in college used to sometimes call other Asians he didn’t like for whatever reason “whitewashed”.”
My friend used the term “banana”: yellow on the outside, but — well, you get the idea.
@Noah American Indians are in a unique situation, with limited legal rights and a generally low standard of living on the reservations, but, when outside of the reservations, not particularly excluded or persecuted compared to other ethnic minorities, measuring by intermarriage rate, incarceration rate, economic progress, and so on. It might be approximately accurate to say that outside of the reservations they are in the position of non-black immigrants.
“So…yeah, I regret that process”
You know what I mean: you don’t regret it for the Germans’ sake. As for regretting it for black people’s sake, or for the sake of society in general, I would say that is self indulgence. We are where we are, the question is what to do about it now. (We’ve been trying identity politics for forty years and change. It doesn’t seem to be working very well.)
No one did this.
No? Either the situation of black Americans is particularly exceptional – that is, more so than the experiences of all other non-white groups, each of which is of course exceptional to some extent – or it isn’t. Which is it?
This is true. It doesn’t all happen in the first issue, but it’s true. The beginning turned me off considerably; it was a slog to collect the later material.
We should also acknowledge how that dynamic — the immigrant’s daughter who loves America but can’t totally discard her racial heritage and blends the two — still appeals to the White gaze in ways that many may not read as logical from minority communities. One of the most interesting elements of Ms. Marvel as a comic is that Kamala’s powers allow her to pass for White, and she rejects this as inappropriate. She’d rather represent both cultures, and she can’t achieve this as a White doppelganger.
But she totally accepts the logic of the superhero concept, and it’s not clear to me why that logic would appeal. She keeps the gaudy costume; the quirky mask and secret identity stay, she still wants to fight crime in a public, attention grabbing manner. It’s never clear to me why we would expect people of color to appropriate such conventions, and for that reason heroes like Kamala Khan appear too constricted by the genre in which they exist to adequately examine race.
“But she totally accepts the logic of the superhero concept, and it’s not clear to me why that logic would appeal. She keeps the gaudy costume; the quirky mask and secret identity stay, she still wants to fight crime in a public, attention grabbing manner.”
Because she’s a kid? And a superhero fan?
I argue that the superhero concept prefers to highlight a particular Whiteness — the White male power fantasy — and apply that sensibility to everything in superhero narratives. This doesn’t work for me, because I do not view people of color through the White gaze to which superhero comics appeal. If we’re not willing to respect the unique cultural and political histories that various racial groups possess in superhero comics, than I suggest that superhero comic diversity does not and cannot exist.
None of that argument assumes exceptionalism for any group, including Black people. Actually, it opposes the general exceptionalism the superhero concept, and some genre fans, ascribe to Whiteness.
Because she doesn’t to my knowledge consider other uses of her newfound powers outside of superheroics. I don’t pretend to have read every issue of Ms. Marvel, so I concede that others here will have more knowledge of her narrative trivia. But Kamala Khan’s youth and inexperience leads her to the gaudy costume and quirky mask, and I don’t believe that that logic always makes sense from minority perspectives.
But it’s a genre convention, so other minority perspectives that do not flatter seventy seven years of superhero concept Whiteness are not examined.
To me the superhero concept has always made more sense when applied to underage characters, for only teenagers would have the believable mindset to do such a thing.
“As for regretting it for black people’s sake, or for the sake of society in general, I would say that is self indulgence”
I do regret it for the German-Americans sake, and for Jewish-Americans sake as well (closer to home.) Participating in a brutal system of injustice is bad for your soul, and not infrequently bad for your body as well, as many white prisoners thrown into a system justified on the basis of racism can attest.
I don’t understand why it’s self-indulgent to look at our culture and say, this is bad, we should change it.
Identity politics is in place because the state creates identities to police, essentially. Folks then do what they can—which is to rally around those identities as political lobbies and sources of strength. It’s not perfect, obviously, but blaming the creation of identities on the minority groups who are forced to organize around them because of stigma and violence is just blaming the victim. A very popular form of blaming the victim, but still. You want identity politics to end? Get the state to stop treating people disproportionately. You could start by trying to contribute in some way to BlackLivesMatter, which is that huge civil rights movement happening now that somehow always goes unmentioned when someone or other wants to explain how social justice isn’t working because the people fighting for social justice are insufficiently perfect.
There’s definitely space in the Ms. Marvel comic for her to decide to quit superheroing. She doesn’t like committing violence at all, and that is in tension with her superheroing in various ways throughout the issues we have so far.
I’d be surprised if Wilson actually went anywhere with this…but I guess we’ll see. There’s a little precedence; Animal Man at the end of Grant Morrison’s arc essentially foreswore violence (though of course that was instantly undone by the next creative team.) And…Morrison’s Doom Patrol, too—those characters (queer, black, mentally ill) eventually refused to behave like superheroes on the grounds that they liked the villain they were fighting more than the status quo they were theoretically supposed to uphold. So…there are examples.
So…re the “this isn’t working” meme. I understand where that’s coming from: yes, it’s true, we have not achieved utopia, or even a vague approximation of racial justice. However, blaming that on the people who are trying to change things seems really pernicious—and also ignores the huge resistance to change. Like, MLK didn’t fail because he was failed tactically—he was shot. Reconstruction didn’t fail because black people weren’t ready for political power; it failed because white people launched a vicious campaign of terror, and the federal government backed them up. And so forth.
“People sometimes also argue that no one is doing anything because change hasn’t been successful…
How do you then not include the possibility that many more people would have been lost, and that the misery index would have been much higher had the people who have been resisting not done that? I mean you can’t prove a counterfactual, but I will tell you this: it isn’t by accident that black people are still alive in this country, and contributing to the culture of this country, being integral to the culture of this country. It’s not accidental. We’ve resisted from the beginning. We continue to resist.”
—Mariame Kaba
@Lamb
“This doesn’t work for me, because I do not view people of color through the White gaze to which superhero comics appeal.”
If you think comics have an obligation to represent an Asian American character as having a background in Asian or Asian American immigrant culture, even while admitting that’s not the experience of many phenotypically Asian Americans today, then you view “people of color” in a way particularly characteristic of the culturally Anglo-Saxon countries – America, Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand.
So actually you are viewing minorities through a mostly “white gaze” (Christ, we’re just going to append every word in the English language to “gaze” now, aren’t we?), and a quite specific kind of white at that. It’s just not the kind you’ve learned was bad.
@Noah
“Identity politics is in place because the state creates identities to police, essentially”
Identity politics mostly exists because private enterprise and the state (mostly in that order) discovered by trial and error in the late ’60s and early ’70s that they could take the impetus out of mass protests against the treatment of black people and (to a lesser extent) women and other ethnic minorities by admitting a few more of them to high positions.
“You want identity politics to end? Get the state to stop treating people disproportionately.”
Sure, and let’s get the state to end poverty and cure cancer while we’re at it. How?
That’s what identity politics was supposed to do. (Though the focus on the state – as if the state alone created the policies of the rich and the opinions of the masses – seems again to betray a post-structuralist influence.) Its success so far has been, at best, modest, and accompanied by conditions in some ways getting worse (the incarceration rate, the economic situation of the poorest).
@Noah (continued)
Assuming this was directed at me:
“However, blaming that on the people who are trying to change things seems really pernicious -“
So, what? If somebody’s goal is admirable but his methods aren’t working, we shouldn’t say the methods aren’t working and look for new ones, but instead award an A for effort?
Sure; arguments about methods are cool. “It’s not working” isn’t an argument about methods, though. It’s a slogan; it doesn’t actually engage with anything in particular. It also presupposes that there’s only one method being attempted at any one time, which is false. And, again, any even remotely serious critique of left struggle at the moment needs to engage with BlackLivesMatter, it seems to me, which comes out of identity politics, and has launched a nationwide protest movement and a great deal of change. It hasn’t won…but that doesn’t mean that it’s failed, or that it’s irrelevant.
I really don’t think you’ve got a very good understanding of identity politics either.
Organizing around marginalized identities didn’t start in the 1970s. Organizing around race has been happening for 100s of years; organizinng around gender too. The power structure creates marginalized categories, and people then are in the position of building community to counter that, which means organizing (in part) around identities.
And as to how to stop that…well, BlackLivesMatter is approaching the issue in a number of ways. There’s communication to raise awareness; protest; pushing power structures to respond within the law in various ways, etc. All of those are based in identity politics; BlackLivesMatter has identity politics in the name.
And identity politics over time has many successes; ending slavery, the vote, some legal acknowledgement of rights. And, as Mariame Kaba says, who knows how much worse things would be if there were no protest and no resistance?
And, you know, if you’re judging the success of the movement by mass protests,you might want to acknowledge we’re in the middle of a mass protest movement at the moment.
“To me the superhero concept has always made more sense when applied to underage characters, for only teenagers would have the believable mindset to do such a thing. ”
This makes sense to me. While there are adult superheroes I’ve enjoyed, superheroes are at the core adolescent fantasies, so there’s really nothing particularly odd about Marvel’s Muslim superhero being adolescent.
“I really don’t think you’ve got a very good understanding of identity politics either.”
Judging by your most recent replies, I don’t think you have an understanding of it at all. Applying the phrase “identity politics” before the late 1960s is an anachronism, at best careless, at worst suggesting either ignorance or an attempt to dignify a recent phenomenon by making superficial connections to the past, like calling Joan of Arc a nationalist.
Anyway, it doesn’t matter what you call it. The dominant form of anti-racism in America since the mid ’70s is not Martin Luther King’s or Malcolm X’s – maybe they would have adopted it as some of their colleagues did, maybe not; we’ll never know – and of course not the abolitionists’.
“And, as Mariame Kaba says, who knows how much worse things would be if there were no protest and no resistance?”
Your consistent insistence on turning a judgment against identity politics into a judgment against protest is starting to look less like a misunderstanding resulting from a lack clarity on my part, and more like bad faith.
No, you’re not getting why I quoted Kaba. You said, we’re failing. Her response is, you can’t tell if people are failing, because you don’t know how much worse things would be without resistance (and if you read the rest of the interview, you’ll see she has a broad sense of what resistance is or can be.)
We’ve drifted pretty far off topic, though, so I think I’ll leave it there.
see, Noah, this is why the site is such a time-sink for you!
Hah; no doubt.
@Noah This is absurd. You’re effectively saying nobody ever does anything wrong, because no matter how bad the result is, it would be even worse if we hadn’t done exactly what we did. (Just trust you!)
This is also, incidentally, exactly the excuse offered by conservatives every time another dose of tax cuts and/or austerity fails to produce the promised improvements for the masses: “It would be even worse if we hadn’t done it!”
I can tell you what’s wrong with identity politics. (It results in the lower middle and working class contingents of the more privileged groups – white people, whoever that is this year; men; to a lesser extent all non-black people – becoming less supportive of welfare state and more inclined to destroy it, so everybody loses except the rich; it aligns the economic interests of the most talented members of marginalized groups with those of the elite.) Can you tell me why it’s supposedly the most desirable option?
So identity politics should be shunned because poor Whites and lower income men may be offended? Really?
Graham, it’s fair to suggest that protecting the welfare state may not be the most pressing issue for people of color who are cut out of its benefits by design, like Blacks who were excluded from the old-age insurance and unemployment insurance provided by the Social Security Act of 1935. For more information on this, check out Ta-Nehisi Coates’ The Case for Reparations in the Atlantic.
Fair enough guys. But let’s be clear — this preference for adolescent superheroes makes meaningful examinations of race, gender, and sexuality in superhero comic books extremely difficult. That may be perfectly fine, but it makes substantive diversity incredibly difficult — impossible, in my opinion.
In the essay above I argue that it is possible for Black men to support and defend militaristic law enforcement policies directed against members of their own racial community, and that when Black superheroes adopt this perspective, they parallel the dedicated race men from the Black community who desired state assistance in reducing the predatory criminality that disproportionately harms lower income Black people.
It’s also clear, though, that the Black superhero who authorizes militarism against Black people is often more acceptable to non-Blacks than one who would oppose such measures. The recent media support for the Baltimore mother who violently reprimanded her teenage son for joining recent protests in the aftermath of the Freddie Gray murder offers example. Anyone willing to violently discipline Blacks proves more acceptable to some non-Blacks than those who protest such violent and racially selective sanctions.
Simplifying these discussions in superhero comics reminds us that the genre itself cannot handle nuance. Given this, I suggest that the superhero genre cannot handle human difference. People who believe me in error on this point can’t simply find one or two instances where they personally enjoy/ respect/ appreciate an author’s attempt to examine group identities in superhero comics. My detractors on this point should explain how a genre that’s nigh-incapable of handling nuance can somehow prefer adolescents and effectively discuss race and gender and sexuality.
Graham, I’m saying the knee-jerk “things aren’t perfect, the left is at fault!” is stupid.
“Identity politics” is a bugbear; you’re not upset about identity politics. You’re doing the standard Marxist thing of arguing that class is the most important identity, and that’s what we should focus on.
I think your argument is fundamentally flawed in an American context, because, as James says, welfare systems and anti-poverty efforts, and amelioration of poverty in general,is always, always in America denigrated because people know that some of the money will go to black people. Again, you’re mistaking the reaction for the cause, here. There used to be broader support for welfare because it was understood that black people wouldn’t get it (i.e., GI bill, etc.) Now support for such programs has eroded because people know (or think) black people will have access. This isn’t the fault of identity politics; it’s the fault of racism.
As it happens, resistance to the police state is an issue that is disproportionately important to lower class people of all races, who tend to be the ones most policed. So, the Marxist canard that identity’s other than class erase class issues seems particularly ill-suited for our present moment. Which is why I guess you *still* seem unable to actually mention BlackLivesMatter, or engage with the fact that there’s a massive protest movement underway. (Freddie DeBoer has this same problem; post after post about how the left is failing, no mention of the biggest civil rights struggle in the last 50 years. It’s amazing what you can miss if you try…)
Well…I think the point with counterexamples (like, the fact that Icon’s law and order rhetoric is presented within a history of black thought, and also seen as a sell-out by other characters in the comic) is that it points to the possibility that things can be better, or that there’s room in the genre for improvement.
I’d also say when I talked to Mikki Kendall about diversity in pop culture, she said that her son found many, many more characters to identify with in superhero comics than in YA fiction. I was somewhat taken aback by that, since I don’t think comics do all that well at all in these matters—but I guess YA fiction can really be a wasteland in terms of diversity.
@Lamb “So identity politics should be shunned because poor Whites and lower income men may be offended? Really?”
“Fuck it if the whites don’t like my policies, they’re racists anyway. Hey, how come I keep losing elections?”
America, the eternally latently Protestant – never mind what your policies are actually doing for people’s material condition, what really matters is being sure of your own moral purity.
As for the implication that poor black people haven’t materially lost from the dismantling of the welfare state since the late ’70s… enough said.
“So, the Marxist canard that identity’s other than class erase class issues”
No Marxist says this. (I’m not a Marxist, but your obvious animus isn’t helping you against my accusation of crypto-neo-liberalism.)
“Which is why I guess you *still* seem unable to actually mention BlackLivesMatter”
Now there’s a major accomplishment for minority rights – mentioning Black Lives Matter (maybe later I’ll retweet it!).
Sure, Black Lives Matter is the “biggest civil rights struggle in 50 years,” just like Occupy Wall Street was the biggest economic protest. That’s good as far as it goes, but how long do you actually expect it to continue, and what do you expect to be the concrete gains when it’s over? Body cams?
Ah, okay, you mention it to sneer at it.
Figuring out goals is very difficult, obviously. I’d say BlackLivesMatter already has more concrete accomplishments to its credit than Occupy; it’s also substantially more focused. And I really don’t think it’s going away anytime soon. Among other things, it’s continually re-energized by the fact that cops keep killing people. It’s created a lens through which formerly invisible injustice is visible, and sparks protest. Occupy never did that. (Occupy also had troubles with leadership, whereas BLM has energized a number of important leaders, many of them local.)
I actually interviewed a number of leaders in the movement recently, and they talked about a range of goals and hopes. Most of them said that specific goals are local; so getting more black participation in elections in Ferguson for example, and substantially changing the racial makeup of the city council was pretty important. Making police brutality an actual issue is I think pretty important; bipartisan, unquestioning support for police state tactics has been de rigeur for decades. Now when black people are shot, it’s a major issue. The fact that the murderers of Freddie Gray are going to have charges pressed; folks I talked to suggested that that wouldn’t have happened without the protests, and I’m inclined to agree.
I think body cams could help, but the goal I’ve seen more talked about is less funding for police. I think people in the movement are pretty aware of the limits of body cams—though they’re also aware that they may help in some situations, and to some degree.
Of course black people have lost from the dismantling of the welfare state. What you seem to have trouble grasping is that *the whole point was to make black people suffer.* That’s why the welfare state was dismantled. So saying, well, if only people weren’t so focused on identity politics—like, was it the left that racialized welfare payments? I’m pretty sure that wasn’t the left. Was it the left that ran that Willie Horton ad? Again, that’s not my memory of it.
It’s useful to remember how skeptical people were of the Civil Rights movement in the 60s, too. Skepticism is I think important; people need to evaluate and reevaluate goals and tactics. But I’d say skepticism of skepticism is important as well.
People aren’t racist for disliking left politics, necessarily. But, yes, in fact, failure to embrace poverty programs is very often linked to the belief that those programs will be used to help black people. And that’s not because the left has somehow failed to get their message across; it’s because there’s a lot of hatred of black people. You need to confront that, not ignore it. That’s part of the reason BlackLivesMatter is important. IMO.
I didn’t mention it at all; you did, then claimed general vindication because I didn’t respond. What am I supposed to do, pretend I think it has more potential than it does?
Occupy did make “formerly invisible injustice is visible,” “spar[k] protest,” and “energiz[e] a number of important leaders, many of them local” – to deny that is simply strange. (Indicating a basic lack of sympathy?)
“Making police brutality an actual issue is I think pretty important” Again, change the object and you might as well be talking about Occupy (“making inequality an issue”).
“substantially changing the racial makeup of the city council was pretty important.” Maybe now black people in Ferguson will have it as good as black people in Baltimore.
“Of course black people have lost from the dismantling of the welfare state. What you seem to have trouble grasping is that *the whole point was to make black people suffer.* That’s why the welfare state was dismantled.” The welfare state benefited black people in the ’30s through ’60s – though of course much less than it did white people – before the reversals of the ’70s through the present.
If identity politics were the primary reason for the defeat of the welfare state! you would be advocating political suicide (“The whites won’t give the blacks equal benefits, but let’s fight for them anyway and lose everything.”), and we could debate the merits of that. But identity politics wasn’t the primary reason. The left lost everywhere in the developed world in the last four decades (ditto the developing world except Venezuela, and of course America is constantly working to fix that little kink in the system), including countries with proportionally smaller ethnic minority populations than America (Germany), or almost no ethnic minorities at all (Japan). Identity politics just probably made the defeat here even more complete than it would otherwise have been, and harder to reverse, since we now have generations of the left’s best and brightest trained in methods of dubious utility. (To be clear, I’m not referring only to identity politics: Occupy’s warmed over New Left Bohemianism was demonstrably pretty useless too.)
The welfare state really did not help black people all that much from the 30s to the 60s. James’ link to Coates’ essay would be the thing to follow there, I’d say. Black people were systematically excluded from many benefits by law and custom. When the rules were changed so they could get in, benefits began to be cut.
Different countries have different contexts of course. And I think the left needs to do better in terms of economic issues. But it’s hard to understate the importance of race to politics in the U.S. basically over the entire course of its history.
“The welfare state really did not help black people all that much from the 30s to the 60s” Yes it did.
“James’ link to Coates’ essay would be the thing to follow there” Coates doesn’t say that.
“And I think the left needs to do better in terms of economic issues.” The left needs to do better – that is, better than pathetically – in terms of everything.
By the way, Black Lives Matter is actually a case study in the limits of identity politics: The rich seize most of the wealth of America and the world for themselves and sit on it, crippling global growth and leaving behind impoverished neighborhoods with few prospects for escape and the attendant higher likelihood of violent crime; and who does Black Lives Matter focus on? Not the rich, but the police, whose abuses are motivated by racism but also by the fear that comes with genuinely risking their lives, while the rich risk nothing.
I’m tempted to go on, but this really has nothing to do with the post at this point, just about. So, let’s leave it there, I guess.
You’re right, of course. Well, I had fun.
James, I am curious; for someone who is so opposed to superhero comics, you seem to have read a lot and have some investment in them. Were you a fan at one point and got disgusted?
I was a fan of superhero comics as a child. I did not become disgusted with the comics themselves; I take issue with the fans. There was never any point where I didn’t recognize that I read about people unlike myself when I read superhero comics; many fans today expect that dynamic to change superficially, as if the only meaningful difference between Icon and Superman should be facial ink.
When superhero comics ignore human difference, that’s to be expected; they are White male power fantasies, after all. I did not expect fans of color to express such heavy investment in those fantasies; casting a White male power fantasy with a Chinese American or female lead to allow race and gender tribalism without altering the basic logic of the genre appears shallow and superficial to me, but it’s exactly what many fans of color want.
That’s the problem I’ve addressed above. Before, I suggested that Whiteness was necessary for superhero comics. I didn’t address how Whiteness was used. Now I have. I appreciate your hosting this essay in this forum, Noah. Thanks for the conversation.
Thank you for running it here James!
Prepping for a podcast, I just read (for the first time), Silver Sable and The Wild Pack #21 and #22. Marvel 90’s at its 90ist. The plot involves gangs from South Central LA taking over Beverly Hills and Silver Sable and her team are hired to rescue some rich people from Beverly Hills. It is crazy stuff. If you stumble across it, I would be interested to see what you say.
Hilarious nonsense, as always.
I particularly like the author’s misuse of the term “ad hoc,” which no one called him on. It doesn’t apply to Hydra, but does so very nicely to the author’s comical “formula of Whiteness.”
Hilarious nonsense?
Really?
You know, I love when people who take issue with my work explain in detail how I’ve erred. The site could use some response articles that discuss how superhero diversity is actually both possible and desirable; how superhero comics owe nothing to the Enlightenment, and/ or how integration in pop literary forms should be encouraged.
Anything’s better than smug dismissal. Especially since the smug dismissal above lacks any attempt to grapple with the ideas I’ve presented. I enjoy reading work here at HU because participants for the most part parse unfamiliar ideas with respect. Gene, you could learn from these examples.
I don’t really know why Gene felt that the thing to do was be a smug jerk rather than say anything substantive; he does talk about his problems with the essay at greater length here.
Gene is very invested in the superhero genre as archetypal storytelling, and very resistant to political interpretations. Talking to him generally isn’t superproductive, in my experience, but if you want to know where he’s coming from, you can check out the link.
Noah, thanks for the link. At least on his own site Gene made an attempt to argue against the essay. You’re right though; given what I read there talking to him probably isn’t superproductive.
For those who don’t know, Noah asserted that he would delete stuff from me that he disagreed with, so I expected to see even that brief comment deleted. There’s no point in going on at length if it’s going to be deleted.
I do agree that our stances are too far apart to make discussion possible. But would you care to comment as to why you would consider a made-up terrorist organization to be “ad hoc?” By the way you Lamb used the term, it could apply to anything in the movie that was made up “for the case of” the movie’s narrative; not just Hydra.
I didn’t say anything of the kind, Gene. I said that anonymous idiots posting to say nothing other than “i hate this!” would be deleted.
I haven’t deleted either of your posts and linked to your blog. Ongoing protestations that you are being unfairly silenced seem pretty ridiculous.
Picking nits over the use of ad hoc does not suggest you have anything substantive to offer, incidentally.
Well, I don’t know who else you could’ve been talking to in the “End of Comics Geeks” when you accused some person of “MRA nattering” and threatened to delete such comments. I had posted a moderate comment about the lack of knowledge about the people who hacked Janelle Asselin. How that could be “MRA nattering” I couldn’t imagine, but I was the only one who’d said anything against Asselin’s essay, so far as I could tell. If you and Kashtan were talking about someone who’d been already deleted, then sorry, but I left my mind-reading crystal ball in my other suit.
The phrase “ad hoc” is just one symptom of a tendency to over-politicize fiction. It bugs me; doesn’t bug a lot of people. Not much else to say.
I deleted another comment in the thread. That was the MRA nattering I was referring to, not you.
Gene, in the quote above the phrase ‘ad-hoc terrorist conspiracy’ clearly refers to the impromptu superhero team-up between Steve Rogers, Sam Wilson, and Natasha Romanov in Captain America: The Winter Soldier. Obviously, I did not refer to Hydra in any sense. That’s the point: Cap and his superhero buddies employ what is best described as terrorism to both cripple Hydra and curtail American foreign policy goals because they elevate their individual moral perspectives above that of the leaders of the country they profess to serve. This isn’t heroism.
Your assertions about my article are welcome; if you have a reasoned critique of my material I’m sure everyone would enjoy reading it. But you misunderstood the sentence above, and given the writing on your site, the entire essay. If you have any further questions, feel free to ask.
J. Lamb,
On the specific point of using the term “ad hoc,” I agree that the sentence as written connotes the teaming of the film’s heroes, not the actual terrorist conspiracy represented by Hydra. I have to say that I might have been thrown off the course by the quantity of prepositional phrases, but it’s still my bad: you didn’t say what I believed you said.
I would still question the use of the term in its actual context, though. Here’s Wikipedia’s description of the action of what is at stake when the three heroes form what you call a “terrorist conspiracy:”
“[the heroes] force [Hydra agent Sitwell] to divulge that Zola developed a data-mining algorithm that can identify individuals who might become future threats to Hydra’s plans. The Insight Helicarriers will sweep the globe, using satellite-guided guns to eliminate these individuals.”
Given that Cap, Widow and Falcon cannot trust anyone in SHIELD, and that there is a clear and present danger to human lives by an organization that has usurped the purpose of the helicarriers, I don’t see that the heroes have any alternatives, nor do I see any logic in deeming their prompt action to be un-heroic. Should they have waited for a congressional investigation to be convened after Hydra’s victims were killed?
I don’t think that any real-world parallel to these actions would have been that of an “ad hoc terrorist conspiracy,” either. If a group of private citizens had stumbled across one of the CIA’s plots to assassinate Castro, and those citizens believed that Castro would be killed unless they intervened in some violent manner, would their actions be terrorist actions?
Early in TWS, it’s made clear that Steve Rogers doesn’t approve of the helicarriers, recognizing them as what you correctly call “gunboat diplomacy.” But in the film I saw, he takes no action against the helicarriers until it’s clear that their purpose has been usurped by an actual terrorist organization. Once this has happened, it doesn’t matter that the weapons were made legal by American policymakers; they are going to be used in an illegal manner by terrorists. In contrast to real life, where comparable crimes actions are often discovered after the fact, the film’s heroes are lucky/skillful enough to discover the plot before lives are lost.
So, while admitting that you did not refer to Hydra itself as an “ad hoc terrorist organization,” I find that there’s still no logic in using the phrase to refer to the film’s protagonists.
Gene, I accept your apology.
What the rest of your comment points out though, is that choosing the most violent option in a superhero movie will always have its defenders. Rogers, upon learning about the Hydra plot, had one simple, life-affirming choice: call Tony Stark. Stark designed and built the Helicarriers; if anyone had a back door into the system, it would be Tony. Barring that, Rogers has to stop the Hydra plot without rendering inoperative the Helicarriers themselves. America’s elected officials invested in these weapons; Rogers has no right to overrule the will of the American people as articulated by their elected representatives.
This is the basic problem with the superhero concept illustrated: one straight White man, augmented with extra-normal physical abilities, exploits that privilege to remake the world in his image, with indifference toward collateral damage or civil order or anything. Hydra’s infiltration means that Rogers cannot trust SHIELD or the government, but he has direct access to the guy SHIELD and the government turned to to build those Helicarriers in the first place. Instead Rogers wreaks billions upon billions of dollars of preventable damage to America’s military with his superhero friends.
Gene. When a small group of people attack an American military installation and cause massive destruction and (probably) innocent death, we have a word for that. Terrorism. The definition does not change just because this cell leader drapes himself in the flag.
I don’t think you’re wrong, necessarily, James, but I’m really tickled at the defense of government property as a moral stance.
I do wonder to some extent if looking at the logic of individual moral choices is necessarily all that helpful in something like Winter Soldier. That’s generally where Gene goes…but the whole thing is so contrived and stupid in the first place, it’s hard to take it seriously. It’s just a transparent excuse to have Cap be the badass fighting the man on behalf of America while doing enormous amounts of property damage. The details seem less important than that particular narrative payoff, which is the same narrative payoff in every movie and/or foreign intervention, pretty much. America loves its cowboys.
“Rogers, upon learning about the Hydra plot, had one simple, life-affirming choice: call Tony Stark. Stark designed and built the Helicarriers; if anyone had a back door into the system, it would be Tony.”
It won’t surprise you if I consider Monday-morning quarterbacking for a Big Loud Action Film to be an exercise in futility– particularly since the screenwriters, had they wished to close off that avenue, could have found any number of ways to do so (Tony’s off fighting trolls in Asgard with Thor, etc.) I also think that this sort of easy fix would obviate the moral stance of the movie, which requires the heroes to put themselves on the line against near-overwhelming forces. It’s certainly your privilege to find that moral stance formulaic and/or worthless. I consider it formulaic, but not worthless.
“This is the basic problem with the superhero concept illustrated: one straight White man, augmented with extra-normal physical abilities, exploits that privilege to remake the world in his image, with indifference toward collateral damage or civil order or anything.”
I’ll probably get around to the (also formulaic) scapegoating of straightness and whiteness later. But to get this point out of the way, I believe you were also critiquing the superhero genre for not remaking the world sufficiently.
“The floating nuclear version [of the helicarriers] at sea today does not enter the debate.”
Remembering that it’s my contention that Captain America does not oppose the fictional helicarriers until they’re taken over by rogue agents, I would also expect him not to oppose American nuclear submarines et al– at least, not physically– unless they too are similarly usurped. Your point in bringing up this real-world parallel is entirely obscure. Since it appears that you would not approve of any superhero remaking the real world through violence, in what way would you have a fictional hero engage with this particular issue of gunboat diplomacy? I mean, it’s a given that no one’s ever going to see a Captain America appears at an anti-nuclear rally to gather signatures to ban nukes. But I’m trying to get a sense of how you think such a “debate” would manifest in a superhero movie, or if you’re simply finding fault that such realistic concerns aren’t the raison d’etre of the genre.
It’s my contention that you’ve overlooked the extent to which TWS’s scripters intend to critique American militarism through the scenario they’ve presented. One may assert that their critique is superficial or ineffectual if one pleases (I don’t, BTW), but it’s nonsense to say that no critique is intended in lines, both spoken by Rogers:
“I thought the punishment usually came *after* the crime.”
“Yeah, we compromised. Sometimes in ways that made us not sleep so well. But we did it so the people could be free. This isn’t freedom, this is fear.”
I deem the first a pretty clear rejection of the Bushco ethos of the pre-emptive strike, and the second as a rejection of Homeland Security fearmongering.
I’ve already answered your definition of terrorism with my reply re: the Castro hypothetical. Your serve.
“particularly since the screenwriters, had they wished to close off that avenue, could have found any number of ways to do so” – Good point.
“It’s a given that no one’s ever going to see a Captain America appears at an anti-nuclear rally to gather signatures to ban nukes.”
Which would be James’ point, I think. Conventions automatically posit militarism as the answer to militarism, which seems like it limits the range of answers considerably. (I could see Grant Morrison’s Animal Man doing a petition drive, incidentally.)
Your argument that the film rejects Bush era ethics would be stronger if Black Widow didn’t explciitly endorse them at the end of the film. (My piece on the movie is here, fwiw.)
Oh, and I don’t think it is really a good point to note that the screenwriters could find ways to make violence necessary if they want. Of course they could. The question is, could they have found a way to make it so violence *is not* necessary? Twilight does. Winter Soldier is firmly in the camp of believing that goodness has to be violent if it’s going to be good. Which is often where you’re at with superheroes.
“I mean, it’s a given that no one’s ever going to see a Captain America appears at an anti-nuclear rally to gather signatures to ban nukes.” Though, given the precedent of the fourth Christopher Reeve movie, Superman might show up. But then, Superman’s always been more of a lefty.
Voting. I would expect any American citizen who found himself unnerved by a decision made by his government to engage the political process. Captain America’s decision to scrap the three new Helicarriers circumvented that process, and replaced the considered decisions of his government’s elected policymakers with his own moral perspectives, at the cost of billions upon billions of wasted federal spending and most likely scores of innocent lives, since we know from the relevant Agents of SHIELD episodes that all manner of SHIELD personnel staffed those Helicarriers when they were destroyed.
Sure, the actual avenues available to regular people are slower and often ineffectual, but unless you’re endorsing the idea that superheroes should set themselves above ordinary citizenship, as Black Widow asserts in that last scene, I think you should reconsider your position, Gene. What’s really troubling about your take on this is that for you, employing violence to change the world appears the only logical recourse for the superhero.
I find that bizarre. Superheroes are the strongest, most intelligent, most technologically advanced beings in their narratives. Since superhero ethics routinely fail to keep pace with their physical and mental gifts over seventy seven years of genre storytelling, it’s no wonder that people like me find them inadequate for meaningful race and gender and sexual orientation discourse.
Gene, you’ve mis-remembered Captain America: The Winter Soldier.
Nick Fury unveils Project Insight, his plan to link three Stark Helicarriers to a global satellite network to enable SHIELD to eliminate any threat, anywhere, and Rogers responds with skepticism and snark, if not outright contempt. You quoted some of Cap’s lines from that scene above; that scene makes clear that Rogers opposes Project Insight and the Helicarriers because he disagrees with his nation’s ability to threaten anyone on the planet with summary execution. Rogers plays a soldier’s idealist against Fury’s general realism: all without any interest in or knowledge of America’s nuclear deterrent. It’s just bad comedy; did Rogers simply not yet make it to the Minutes to Midnight section of the Internet?
So no, Rogers’ opposition has nothing to do with Project Insight falling into the proverbial ‘wrong hands’; apparently no one on Earth wields the right hands for Rogers, including his government. Hydra provides a convenient excuse for Rogers to eliminate a program with which he disagrees, and if that elevates his judgment above the people’s elected policy apparatus, so be it.
This brand of superheroic egotism cannot be morally justified, Gene.
The conversation seems to have gone from inditing superheroes for enforcing law and order (because law and order is leveraged against minorities as a reflection of a system that hurts minorities) to accusing Captain America of being insufficiently dedicated to law and order because he takes action without instead appealing to the “political process”. Isn’t that a contradictory argument?
No. The essay above makes clear that Black superheroes can embrace a punitive, carceral state without difficulty, because Black people can do so without difficulty. Noah often finds the superheroes’ respect for and exaggeration of the ‘law and order’ punitive carceral state a tension for Black superheroes; I do not. The fault line with Gene at present involves his support for a genre convention whereby readers expect superheroes to discard and ignore popular political will in favor of their own personal dictates.
Cap isn’t insufficiently dedicated to law and order, he’s insufficiently patriotic. Cap showed contempt for a modern political system that would invent in a mechanized summary execution threat to every person on the globe, and instead of engaging the political process like a member of America’s body politic, like a citizen, he usurps the process and destroys the tech American taxpayers subsidized.
It’s a clear example of the go-it-alone egotism that informs the superhero genre, and that egotism stands at odds with the possibility of reasoned identity politics examinations in superhero comics, in my view.
I mentioned law and order, Pallas. I think James and I don’t quite agree on that issue—so no contradiction, just different people arguing slightly different things.
Noah said:
“Conventions automatically posit militarism as the answer to militarism, which seems like it limits the range of answers considerably.”
The “range of answers” in the hypothetical film that has Cap stumping peaceably for political reform are just as limited as they are in TWS. They are also no less conventional.
Noah: “Oh, and I don’t think it is really a good point to note that the screenwriters could find ways to make violence necessary if they want. Of course they could. The question is, could they have found a way to make it so violence *is not* necessary? Twilight does. Winter Soldier is firmly in the camp of believing that goodness has to be violent if it’s going to be good. Which is often where you’re at with superheroes.”
Evaluations about the merit of violence in fiction are a separate argument. At present my concern is to show that Lamb’s solution is not necessarily any more logical than the events portrayed in the film. In life as in film, sometimes you don’t get everything to go the way you’d like.
J. said: “Voting. I would expect any American citizen who found himself unnerved by a decision made by his government to engage the political process.”
This makes even less sense than the “governmental investigation” proposition I suggested.
Your position re: ethics continues to lean upon a willful misreading of the film’s situation, which, as I said before, depends on the heroes reacting to the actions of their antagonists, Who Are Planning to Kill Several People Right Away. Not when the voting booths open, or when Congress next convenes.
Now, you can object to that scenario as a “Hobson’s Choice” if you like. But the film’s scenario is not entirely foreign to real experience; situations do arise– not manufactured by politicians or the media– that resolve down to “kill or be killed.” If you reject that possibility, then you have narrowed what Noah calls the ‘range of answers’ far more than the film did.
J said: “Gene, you’ve mis-remembered Captain America: The Winter Soldier.
Nick Fury unveils Project Insight, his plan to link three Stark Helicarriers to a global satellite network to enable SHIELD to eliminate any threat, anywhere, and Rogers responds with skepticism and snark, if not outright contempt. You quoted some of Cap’s lines from that scene above; that scene makes clear that Rogers opposes Project Insight and the Helicarriers because he disagrees with his nation’s ability to threaten anyone on the planet with summary execution. Rogers plays a soldier’s idealist against Fury’s general realism: all without any interest in or knowledge of America’s nuclear deterrent. It’s just bad comedy; did Rogers simply not yet make it to the Minutes to Midnight section of the Internet?
So no, Rogers’ opposition has nothing to do with Project Insight falling into the proverbial ‘wrong hands’; apparently no one on Earth wields the right hands for Rogers, including his government. Hydra provides a convenient excuse for Rogers to eliminate a program with which he disagrees, and if that elevates his judgment above the people’s elected policy apparatus, so be it.
This brand of superheroic egotism cannot be morally justified, Gene.”
If I can get ahold of a DVD or streaming copy this weekend, I’ll be happy to re-view it, but I’m pretty confident that I’ll find my recollections re: “the wrong hands” completely justified. I notice that nowhere in your imputations do you actually cite a scene in which Rogers plans to destroy the Insight Project prior to learning that Hydra has infiltrated SHIELD.
I’ve stated previously that Rogers expresses moral qualms about the Insight project in the lines cited: I don’t get “skepticism and snark” from either the dialogue or the context.
I don’t have any idea what you mean by “all without any interest in or knowledge of America’s nuclear deterrent.” Are you asserting that the character doesn’t know or understand the system of nuclear brinkmanship that’s come about? And even if that were so, how is that even relevant?
Now, I would say that Hydra provides a “convenient excuse” for the SCREENWRITERS to zap something that symbolizes, for them, the extremities of Bushco and Homeland Security. But that’s an extrinsic reading of the script as a whole, so you’re off base to impute such a reading to the intrinsic sentiments of the film-character within his diegesis. That’s why I originally objected to calling Hydra “ad hoc:” it makes no sense to use the term for a fictional organization that has been around for fifty-plus years– and even given the correction re: Hydra, it makes no *more* sense to apply it to a team of heroes who are “first responders” to a clear and present danger, not an organization formed to commit acts of terrorism. Not surprisingly, I disagree with your earlier definition of what constitutes a terrorist act.
Within any fictional context, one could say that *everything* is “ad hoc,” given that any fictional character or situation is designed for a special case and formed for a special purpose. Outside the diegesis, *maybe* one could speak of a scripter whose conceptions were “ad hoc,” but then one would have to go a long way to demonstrating why that was so– which you have not managed to do regarding the TWS scripters.
“The “range of answers” in the hypothetical film that has Cap stumping peaceably for political reform are just as limited as they are in TWS.”
Seriously? Captain America film featuring cap doing a petition drive is totally narratively conventional for a superhero film? What are you even talking about?
Okay I guess; provide me a list of superhero genre projects that involve the hero saying, violence is not the answer, let’s organize.
“situations do arise– not manufactured by politicians or the media– that resolve down to “kill or be killed.””
I call bullshit. These situations arise very, very rarely in most people’s lives, yet they’re ubiquitous on film. Pointing to very rare situations as justification for extremely common narrative conventions is just special pleading. And it’s the same special pleading used to justify war, violence, and the national security state, not coincidentally.
J said: “It’s a clear example of the go-it-alone egotism that informs the superhero genre, and that egotism stands at odds with the possibility of reasoned identity politics examinations in superhero comics, in my view.”
If one could demonstrate that the majority of Captain America adventures throughout media portray him not as going it alone, but as passively accepting missions given him by Nick Fury and other duly constituted authorities, would that preponderance of evidence make him “sufficiently patriotic?” I mean, he would still be accepting missions on which he would dispense lots of skull-busting violence, so would that violence be acceptable as long as SHIELD or the CIA signed off on it?
I suspect you would not be cheering on those adventures, either, which is why I think all of your objections re: the “go it alone” theme are just a cover for your distaste toward the combative elements of the superhero genre. If you don’t like said elements, fine. Nobody has to like everything in fiction. But your arguments to justify your tastes should be intellectually consistent.
The arguments of Frederic Wertham are full of intellectual holes, but I’ll give him this: he hated “the hero as licensed storm trooper” as much as “the hero as vigilante.”
NB: “Seriously? Captain America film featuring cap doing a petition drive is totally narratively conventional for a superhero film? What are you even talking about?”
It would be conventional within the design of the film, which would be an ironic or satiric take on the conventions of the adventure-oriented superhero film. Ironic conventions are still conventions; it doesn’t have anything to do with how many there are overall.
NB: “I call bullshit. These situations arise very, very rarely in most people’s lives, yet they’re ubiquitous on film. Pointing to very rare situations as justification for extremely common narrative conventions is just special pleading. And it’s the same special pleading used to justify war, violence, and the national security state, not coincidentally.”
Whatever gave you the idea that fiction was designed to mirror reality?
Regarding the paucity of superhero films that display the “social conscience” Lamb is advocating, remember that I’m the one who originally said that you *aren’t* likely to see anyone using established characters like Captain America for such a purpose.
I don’t know why someone couldn’t invent a politically active superhero to make some dialectical point, though. And if one did invent a non-violent, politically active superhero, then one would be following story-conventions similar to works in which, say, an author focused on a detective bringing about social change rather than breaking heads. Not that you’ll see Philip Marlowe trying to get people to register for the vote, either, but that would be a character oriented more on social change than on violence.
@ gene phillips “Whatever gave you the idea that fiction was designed to mirror reality?” Ask yourself that question (with or without the unctuous phrasing). You’re the one who defended violence in fiction on the grounds that “situations do arise.” No fair asking why Noah is refuting you on terms you set yourself.
“And if one did invent a non-violent, politically active superhero, then one would be following story-conventions similar to works in which, say, an author focused on a detective bringing about social change rather than breaking heads. ”
Nope, still not making any sense. First, detectives don’t generally bring about social change; they do what superheroes do, which is restore order through defeating bad guys. Second, it’s telling that, while you claim the situation would still be conventional, you are actually incapable of even finding an analogy that fits in genre fiction. I’d say you refuted yourself.
Graham said: “Ask yourself that question (with or without the unctuous phrasing). You’re the one who defended violence in fiction on the grounds that “situations do arise.” No fair asking why Noah is refuting you on terms you set yourself.”
I haven’t said– as Noah *seems* to be saying– that fiction is meritorious only when it mirrors whatever the reader considers to be “reality.” I generally follow the lead of critic Northrop Frye, who wrote that fiction may be defined as extending across a spectrum of realistic verisimilitude and unrealistic “myth.” If anyone can’t stand using the term “myth” in this context, one may use “theme” or “symbolic discourse” or somesuch.
So I’m not opposed to analyzing some aspects of fiction in terms of verisimilitude, and what I’ve said about the violence of WINTER SOLDIER is in response to J. Lamb’s attempt to force the film into an ideological strait-jacket. He labeled the actions of the film’s heroes as a “terrorist conspiracy.” I asked him what he thought the heroes should have done instead of taking action against the film’s villains, and he said:
“Voting. I would expect any American citizen who found himself unnerved by a decision made by his government to engage the political process.”
Whatever failings the movie has with regard to verisimilitude, it isn’t nonsensical enough to suggest that heroes, faced with an immediate threat to human life by evildoers who have hijacked American weaponry, ought to ignore the danger and wait until they can go to the polls and protest the political process that brought the weaponry into being.
This isn’t just moving the goalposts; it’s blowing up the whole dang football field. Since Lamb was attempting to invalidate the film’s violent solution to the stated problem, I stated that “kill or be killed” is a perfectly rational response to this type of threat. Noah then took this specific defense of a specific aspect of one film and started talking about the overuse of violent solutions in films, as opposed to the role violence actually plays in life.
My statement is specific, defending a specific film’s “scenario.”
Noah’s is general, so I respond to it in general terms.
One does not contradict the other.
Noah,
You need to read more detective fiction before you attempt generalizing about it.
And the notion of “superheroes stumping peaceably for political reform” is my response to Lamb’s non sequitur “solution” re: voting. It’s a hypothetical situation for a genre-product that doesn’t at present exist, so no, there’s not going to be a precise analogy. It speaks volumes, the fact that you’re not asking for such an analogy from the person who proposed the idea of superheroes voting problems out of existence.
@ gene phillips tl;dr
“You need to read more detective fiction before you attempt generalizing about it.”
I’ve read lots of detective fiction, thanks.
Also…I sometimes wonder if you read what you write, or even minimally understand it.
James pointed out that superhero genre limits narrative possibilities. He pointed out that it doesn’t allow for peaceful resolution of problems through political action. You responded, bizarrely, that a superhero genre story that resolved problems peacefully through the political process would also be convention bound. Since you seem to think such stories are conventional in the superhero genre, I asked you to name one. You couldn’t, and instead mentioned detective fiction, where such stories don’t occur either.
Edit: removed unnecessary snark at the end there.
“it isn’t nonsensical enough to suggest that heroes, faced with an immediate threat to human life by evildoers who have hijacked American weaponry, ought to ignore the danger and wait until they can go to the polls and protest the political process that brought the weaponry into being.”
Sure; it sets things up so violent heroics are necessary. That’s how superhero genre fiction works.
Just read J. M. Dematteis’ (and Mike Cavallaro’s) very interesting _The Life and Times of Savior 28_, about a longtime conventional superhero who has a dramatic change of heart and becomes a pacifist. It’s not particularly interesting and interested in terms of racial matters (though I think some of DeMatteis’ other work is mores), but it does set up a superhero that rejects/re-examines the entire idea of superheroing (problem-solving through violence). Worth reading.
Gene, I suggested that Captain America should engage the political process (write his Congressional representative, vote, start a petition, whatever) to address his original concern in Captain America: The Winter Soldier, the secret development of three Stark Helicarriers as the martial arm of Project Insight.
Let’s not misstate this: Cap’s original problem was his disagreement with the overwhelming threat Project Insight represented against all humanity; it’s development allows the United States the option to summarily execute anyone it doesn’t like, anywhere. Obvious parallels abound to other longstanding unclassified weapon systems in America’s arsenal today, so Cap’s objection appears both uninformed and unrealistic to Nick Fury and anyone in the audience with minimal exposure to modern American history. In the essay, I reference the nation’s floating nuclear deterrent as one example.
The point though, is that Captain America co-opts the Hydra infiltration to pursue his desire to scrap Project Insight, a call that overruled the entire American policy apparatus, and the stated investment of his country’s elected representatives. Further, Cap does all this in public, thereby informing the entire world of this program, and encouraging other nations to pursue their own flying gunboat diplomacy. All this is treason, and when Captain America: The Winter Soldier treats this as heroism, we should question the “policy change through violence” perspective the film endorses.
To my mind, Gene, the most unrealistic element of this film isn’t the super-soldier serum or the rampant, wanton destruction. It’s the complete indifference to American politics and law in what was billed as Marvel’s attempt at a political thriller superhero movie. At best, Cap’s actions are treason, and this film highlights the ethical incoherence at the heart of the superhero genre.
Short answer to G.Clark: I’m not the one who raised the spectre of realism, I merely pointed out that the way it was being applied was itself riddled with a lack of appreciation for certain “realities.”
NB: “James pointed out that superhero genre limits narrative possibilities. He pointed out that it doesn’t allow for peaceful resolution of problems through political action. You responded, bizarrely, that a superhero genre story that resolved problems peacefully through the political process would also be convention bound. Since you seem to think such stories are conventional in the superhero genre, I asked you to name one. You couldn’t, and instead mentioned detective fiction, where such stories don’t occur either.”
You’re still mis-stating my position. I didn’t say peacenik, political superheroes were conventional in the genre as it currently exists. I said that if someone tried to create peacenik, political superheroes, that creator would be drawing upon literary conventions designed to take a heroic archetype and “peace-ify” it.
Possibly you’ve seen the 1962 western THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE. The film brings together two archetypes found in earlier western fiction: John Wayne’s character Donophon is a tough sumbitch who takes no crap from anyone, while Jimmy Stewart’s character Stoddard is an advocate of the sort of peaceful political action that you and J. Lamb seem to be advocating.
Putting aside the film as a whole, Stoddard’s character is a conventional type, albeit one that has not been used in westerns as much as the badass gun-slinger. Saying that Donophon is a more frequently used convention does not make Stoddard any less of a convention.
There’s no reason someone couldn’t make a western starring only the Stoddard character and find some non-violent way for him to win out, and it’s eminently possible that it’s been done already. And if someone wanted to make a peacenik. political superhero, that creator would probably some if not all of the same literary conventions that John Ford used in VALANCE.
A convention is also not any less a convention because a given reader (a) agrees with the philosophy behind it, or (b) wishes that the convention could become the reality.
J. Lamb: “Let’s not misstate this: Cap’s original problem was his disagreement with the overwhelming threat Project Insight represented against all humanity; it’s development allows the United States the option to summarily execute anyone it doesn’t like, anywhere. Obvious parallels abound to other longstanding unclassified weapon systems in America’s arsenal today, so Cap’s objection appears both uninformed and unrealistic to Nick Fury and anyone in the audience with minimal exposure to modern American history. In the essay, I reference the nation’s floating nuclear deterrent as one example.”
This makes a little more sense than your previous reference to nuclear deterrents, but it’s still fundamentally incorrect. You are taking a political ideal that MAY possibly have been expressed by THE SCRIPTWRITER (for simplicity’s sake I’ll pretend there’s just one) and dumping it on the character of Captain America. There are characters who are virtual mouthpieces for their authors: it’s doubtful that John Galt says anything radically different from Ayn Rand’s belief.
But the scriptwriter for TWS is not giving us a character who functions as his mouthpiece, and every time you pronounce an absolute identity between the writer’s *possible* political views and those of Captain America– who, as I’ve repeatedly said, does not oppose Insight until it’s co-opted by terrorists– you sink your own argument.
On a similar note, Noah says:
“it sets things up so violent heroics are necessary. That’s how superhero genre fiction works.”
All fiction works to critique whatever the author thinks needs correcting. Some authors may equivocate more than others about whether or not they have all the answers, but all of them use fiction to “set up” some problem to be solved or at least examined, and it’s silly to imply that only “genre fiction” can be subjected to this hermeneutic of deceit, of reading a story to decipher its hidden meaning. For that matter, all critics use it too– I include myself, of course– but I disagree with critics who willfully misread a text to make some ideological point. J. Lamb is if anything more one-sided than TWS’ scriptwriter, claiming that the *only* way to fight wrongful political action is through the political process.
Since I said I would touch on the racial topic at some point, I may as well ask J. Lamb if his abhorrence to “policy change through violence” applies to such historical anti-slavery actions as Harper’s Ferry and Nat Turner’s rebellion.
Hey Gene; I’m on vacation, so I think I’m done with the back and forth here. We’ll see if James has more to say…
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