138 thoughts on “What If the X-Men Were Black?”

1. This is great. I’d pay for a full-length series that not only re-colored, but rewrote and re-imagined the X-Men in this way.

   I think the elasticity of the allegory has often worked in the series’ favor as different writers could emphasize confronting difference in different ways, but in addition to eliding the issues of white privilege you discuss here, it has also allowed writers to claim that the allegory was never really there when their problematic takes on the issue meet with resistance in fandom. For example, the backlash against Rick Remender when he had Havok give a stupid speech about “the M-word” in Uncanny Avengers and his desire to not be seen as a mutant, ignoring the fact that since he is a blond blue-eyes white dude it is really easy for him to take the assimilationist path when he isn’t Nightcrawler or someone else that can’t hide it.

2. I like the way you point out that recoloring Wolverine turns him into racist caricature in a lot of ways. I think some folks might argue that since he wasn’t denigrating white people when not black, he can’t be denigrating black people if he’s black. But they’re wrong and you’re right; history of representation matters a lot.

3. Here’s a link to Orion’s site, since I don’t think it showed up in the article: http://www.orionnotes.com/art/category/x-men-of-color/

   That last link is broken, too, just FYI.

   I love this project, Orion – I’d be interested in seeing you take a whole issue/story apart like this. The examples you chose are very compelling on their own, no question, but I’d love your read on how well this exercise would or wouldn’t hold up for more than a select few pages at a time.

4. Links are now fixed. Sorry about that.

5. The color changes are remarkably powerful. Those two panels of Colossus verses the angry mob threw the whole excercise into bold relief for me. I felt a shock of dread when I read that.

6. I honestly don’t think you’ve done very much research on the X-Men.

   Storm does in fact descend from a line of witches. Her white hair is not part of her mutation, but an ancestral mark of powerful women in her family. They were born with white hair and blue eyes. The first time the X-Men visited Limbo, the X-Men met older versions of themselves who had been trapped in a Limbo timeloop. An older version of Storm had lost her mutant powers to age but had cultivated her ancestors’ power and was now a witch. She helped her younger compatriots with her sorcery.

   You claim Storm is a prop, but you use an image of Stevie Hunter, (a non-powered secondary character who happens to have a disability) to illustrate your point. Honestly I have to question your knowledge of Storm once again. She was the leader of the X-Men for decades. She lead them on her own without Xavier or Cyclops for a good while and then co-lead with them upon their return for years after. She is one of the most well-known and respected mutants to the human public. She’s been a Queen, a humanitarian, a Headmistress, a member of the Fantastic Four and a member of the Avengers. She was a mentor to younger female superheroes like Rogue and Kitty Pryde as well as to some younger males such as Cannonball. She even spent years with her mutant powers turned off, learning hand-to-hand combat, being a badass and still leading the X-Men.

   You are factually incorrect about Pyslocke as well. She is not an Asian woman of British decent. She was born a Caucasian British aristocrat. Her twin brother is Brian Braddock. She was blonde, had precognitive and some telepathic abilities. A while after joining the X-Men, Betsy Braddock was involved in a typically convoluted comic plot that resulted in her having her mind and body merged/switched with Kwannon (or Revanche) an Asian ninja. So she’s actually a Caucasian British woman turned into an Asian ninja, not an Asian woman of British descent.

   You claim the X-Men don’t address sexism or ableism.

   It’s known more than any other franchise for having strong female leaders. Multiple squads have been lead by women and most of the secondary squads (New Mutants, X-Force, X-Factor, Excalibur, the student squads) have had female leaders. Storm, Psylocke, Polaris, Rogue, Dani Moonstar (Cheyenne), Jean Grey, Siryn, Domino, Moira, Surge (Japanese), Wind Dancer (Latina), Hope (ugh) and Sage have all lead teams or squads. Dazzler lead a reality-hopping X-team AND co-lead a rebellion in a media-enslaved reality. Mystique lead the Brotherhood of Mutants with her LGBT blind (disabled) life-partner, Destiny. She was even able to get the group government-sanctioned as Freedom Force. Emma Frost is a sex-positive business woman who bankrolled the X-Men for the last decade and is generally known as an economic force of nature able to contend with the likes of Stark, T’Challa, Namor and Marvel’s other super-rich. Karma is a Vietnamese refugee, war and rape survivor, college graduate/librarian, LGBT amputee and a single parent raising her two younger siblings. She’s recently become a billionaire due to a previously unknown evil sister’s inheritance, but she put herself through college and raised children on her own for quite a while. Cecelia Reyes is a Latina mutant and medical doctor.

   Emma Frost was Headmistress of a mutant academy opposing Xavier’s for years. She later when on to be the Headmistress of the Xavier Institute herself. Jean Grey was also the Headmistress for a while. After the school was closed down for a bit, it has been reopened and renamed after the X-Men’s founding female member and Xavier’s first student, The Jean Grey School for Gifted Youngsters. Two of its Headmistresses have been Kitty Pryde and Storm.

   As for ableism: The X-Men were founded by (yes rich and white but still) a wheelchair-bound man. Jubilee is an Asian American girl who suffers from dyscalculia and is bad at math. Again, Karma (Vietnamese) is an amputee. Forge (Cheyenne) is a war veteran and an amputee who designed his own cybernetic prosthetics. Storm herself was in a wheelchair for a while after an injury. The young mutant Hellion had his hands disintegrated in a Nimrod attack and now has prosthetics that he must manipulate with his telekinesis. Destiny and Ruth Aldine are both blind. Martha Johansson had her telepathic brain ripped from her body by the U-Men. She is now a telepathic brain in a floating habitat sphere and deprived of her senses. Stevie Hunter, (the African-American character in the very panel you posted from God Loves, Man Kills) was a famous dance instructor until disabled. The mutant boy called Chamber literally blew off his chin, his chest, and part of his torso when his powers manifested. The mutant boy called Whiz Kid was wheelchair bound. One of the M-Twins is severely autistic. Multiple mutants suffer from mental illnesses/traumas either from natural causes or as a result of their powers.

   The X-Men may have started as four white boys and a white girl, but that version of the series didn’t last very long and was temporarily cancelled. Since the book’s re-launch in the seventies, it has had an exponentially expanding cast rich in diversity. To call a character like Storm a prop is dismissive of nearly forty years of history for the character. She is arguably one of Marvel Comic’s most recognizable female characters.

7. “She is arguably one of Marvel Comic’s most recognizable female characters.”

   The technical term for that is, “damning with faint praise.”

   I think it’s reasonable to point out that the x-men have at various points tried to deal with diversity in various ways. But…are there storylines which, for example, deal intelligently with Professor X’s disability? Or is it just sort of there? The convoluted plot about a Caucasian woman merging with a ninja, for example, doesn’t exactly sound like it’s an especially thoughtful take on race and prejudice (though maybe it is; you could try to convince me.)

8. Cole, this is a helpful list of female and disabled characters, and I would agree that X-Men, more than most Marvel properties, has enjoyed a diverse and range of empowered protagonists. It’s one of its advantages as an ensemble series– the series isn’t carried by one hero who must appeal to the widest common denominator (by representing the most privileged categories of race, gender, sexuality, age, ability, and so on.) Actually, I think I might be taking these words out of Orion’s mouth here, from a conversation I had with him a while back.

   However, presentation isn’t the same thing as a thoughtful exploration of privilege and minorities. As Orion shows, X-Men’s creators subsume the identity of their characters into the ‘more important’ and fictional mutant/non-mutant dynamic, which can also be experienced by the white male characters. These male characters are most often the major, cover-decorating protagonists of the series, and do a lot of the narrative heavy-lifting. And thus are the subject of many of the discrimination plotlines. These characters are privileged because superhero readers are expected to identify with white male characters more immediately than the others.

   So the series burns up time it could be using to explore feminism, or ableism, or even racism, with increasingly cheap allegories, and the visual pleasure of seeing white, male characters discriminated against.

   All I’m doing is echoing Orion’s arguments at this point….

   Also, how many of those characters still exist, after House of M and all?

9. Actually, that “merging with the Asian” thing seems like a decent metaphor for what Orion is talking about here. Minority identities and histories subsumed or absorbed by white people.

10. Cole, that was an impressive listing, but I am not sure you’ve demonstrated how X-Men comics have addressed sexism, abelism, etc. . . except perhaps in the most superficial or perfunctory ways.

    As a teen the X-Men were my favorites b/c I identified with that outsider trope and the confrontation of difference resonated with my experience – but part of growing out of my fascination with the book was realizing that the massive potential never came to fruition and a lot of work towards that was frequently undermined by the rotating writers/artists that are both the hope and detriment of the serialized superhero genre.

    Ultimately, X-Men became all about how bad-ass it was to be an outsider and to brood about that social displacement, which is fine as a metaphor for generalized form of teen angst, but falls apart in face of the social issues the title seems to want to tackle, but frequently only mocks.

11. Thank you for your comment Cole. You are right to mention the background of some of the supporting characters, and you are right that I confused Storm and Stevie Hunter in the image above. It doesn’t change the fact that a white writer is using a person of color to legitimize his comparison of mutantity to race.

    Echoing what Kailyn said, the inclusion of token nonwhite characters does not change the overall theme of the series, and any list of the most popular X-Men will be a list dominated by white men.

    Thanks for the note Jacob. As for your question about what happens if you implement this on a larger scale, it doesn’t work very well because it becomes conspicuous that the X-Men so rarely deal with their identity. For a contrast, the writer I mentioned above, Dwayne McDuffie, started a company called Milestone Media that published comics about black superheroes. It’s great to see a writer really think about what that would mean. In in the first issue of Icon, for example, the police attack the black superhero when he offers to help them.

12. Fantastic piece Orion! I really like how this is both an examination but an experiment…

    I’ll definitely check out Milestone Media’s publications. It’s sad that they’re defunct.

13. Not to mention that Psylocke went from flowy ankle-length hippie-dresses to butt-floss one-pieces once she “became” Asian and her body was fetishized.

14. Also, Kwannon is not even close to being a Japanese name…

15. You accuse the X-Men of failing to address abelism while completely erasing the identity of a disabled African-American figure by confusing her with a different able-bodied African-American character that you labeled as a prop. Since you didn’t know who the character even was, I find it unlikely that you know enough about her to determine how much her disability played into her character arcs.

    Your attitude in your writing about the character of Storm is far more dismissive and erasing than any attitude I’ve ever seen expressed by writers, fans, or even other characters.

    I never said that the example of Psylocke wasn’t racist, just that you were factually wrong regarding WHY her character history is racist. It was indeed insensitive and one of Claremont’s more horrid plot points. Subsequent writers only managed to jumble it further. I feel it’s been salvaged a bit recently, with Betsy having dealt with her identity issues and coming to identify with the body she was now in. Her brother was also shown to do not so well with the race switch at first but they are once again close. Now while this story was racist, it also replaced a Caucasian character with another race/ethnicity.

    I’m not saying that the X-Men are free from ever having had racist plots/stereotypes or racially insensitive writing. It’s just that the examples you used don’t hold up well, I feel. There are much better ones. For instance, the actual story of Psylocke is much more insensitive. Kitty Pryde in her early days was known to throw racial slurs at people she thought were being bigoted toward her. Her use of the N-word was shameful, especially considering that Storm was like a surrogate mother to her and her relationship with Stevie. Storm should have slapped the shit out of her. Banshee, an Irish character, owns a castle that also happens to be the home to inter-dimensional leprechauns. He also becomes a drunk after his girlfriend dies from the Legacy Virus. There was the time that Tom Corsi and Sharon Friedlander were transformed into Native Americans by the Demon Bear.

    There are plenty of racist things one could point out to take offence to. Please, by all means, discuss some of those. However, any broad stroke claim that the X-Men are inherently racist or all white is simply disingenuous, hyperbolic, and doesn’t accurately reflect the history of the franchise at all.

17. http://i65.photobucket.com/albums/h233/hippiecolesablum/kittyprydemutantspeech_zps4e01ea8c.jpg

18. An awesome Xavier speech:
    http://i65.photobucket.com/albums/h233/hippiecolesablum/The_Uncanny_X-Men_294-p14_zpsbc5981a0.jpg

    Emma Frost against slut-shaming:
    http://i65.photobucket.com/albums/h233/hippiecolesablum/emmatigra_zpsb4b7488c.jpg

    Storm on ethnic cleansing and how it doesn’t get on the Western news:
    http://i65.photobucket.com/albums/h233/hippiecolesablum/ztci87_zpsa39d0971.jpg

19. Orion makes it clear in the essay that the character he’s discussing is not Storm. He’s saying this is the way African American characters are often used. I think that’s reasonable.

    Also, he’s not saying the x-men are inherently racist, or all white. He’s saying that the comics use marginal identity without taking into account or dealing with the real world experiences of marginal people. In fact, I take the post to be saying that the X-Men presented an opportunity to deal with racism in intelligent ways, an opportunity that has largely been fumbled. So far from saying that they are inherently racist, the condemnation here is born out of disappointment.

    So…I don’t actually know that you’re disagreeing with Orion all that much? Or at least that’s my sense.

20. That Xavier speech is a nice illustration of Orion’s point, it seems like. It would mean something pretty different if he were African-American, and so directly acknowledging whose liberation struggle that rhetoric is coming from.

21. That Emma Frost on slut-shaming…I don’t know, Cole. It’s not clear she’s not sneering (a), and (b) the ritual validation of more or less completely impractical clothing on women for the purposes of amusing/validating the pleasure of a male audience doesn’t seem especially thoughtful to me.

22. And I need more context for the Storm on ethnic cleansing one. Wolverine as ultimate source of wise insight on African genocide doesn’t necessarily seem especially promising, but Storm talking about African genocide as an African does seem to get at the sort of thing Orion would like to see more of.

23. Here’s a link to a piece by David Brothers on the problem with the X-Men as a metaphor for “Marginal Group _______.”
    http://4thletter.net/tag/rick-remender/
    Basically, he makes the case that the metaphor only works if you don’t think too hard about it, and don’t explore or expand on its implications. Moreover, he does so with an example from the comic in which the metaphor gets literalized.

24. I did want to chime in on the Wolverine hypothetical, though… I think the race flip is tricky given that in at least one of his origins he went savage as the result of a series of torturous government experiments. If he were black it would be Django Unchained sort of thing maybe sort of, though that’s a whole bag of trouble in-and-of-itself.

25. I contend that the author hasn’t actually read enough X-Men to draw conclusions on whether or not the real world experiences of ethnic minority X-Men are taken into account.

    The author completely glosses over the fact that Magneto isn’t just “some old white dude” and in fact was a persecuted minority of Jewish/Gypsy descent and survived a concentration camp. He spent years hunting down old Nazi soldiers and punishing them. That’s a huge part of his background as an ethnic minority.

    Storm is an orphan because her parents died in an Israeli-Arab conflict while they were living in Egypt. A bombing caused their house to collapse and Storm was buried in the rubble with her dead parents. That part of her origin still affects her to this day, as she is extremely claustrophobic due to the P.T.S.D. After that, she was a pick-pocket in Cairo before traveling to Kenya. There she was worshipped as a Goddess before being discovered by Xavier. She has been seen several time since going back to Africa to aide with famine, drought, and other humanitarian efforts. She’s fought slavery rings and corrupt warlords. Storm was born in the U.S. but she spent most of her young life throughout different states in Africa. Storm’s real world early experiences definitely play into her life.

    Frenzy is a woman of color. She’s a reformed villain who has been up and coming for quite a few years. (She’ll be starring in the all female X-Men title within the next few months) Her experiences as a young woman and a sickly child are what shape her. Her father was abusive and resented her for being a girl as well as being born prematurely. Her childhood illnesses were considered a burden on the poverty-stricken family. Sickly and frail, she was forced to take her father’s abuse. When her brother died, her father tried to beat her because he wished she’d died instead. Frenzy finally defended herself, unfortunately her power manifested and she punched through her father’s chest. She became angry and cold and violently dedicated to the mutant cause and Magneto. Recently she has decided she wants to be a hero and is trying to open up and trust again. Frenzy’s socio-economic background and gender real world situations drive her.

    Cecelia Reyes was a Puerto Rican Latina. She and her family grew up in a greatly impoverished neighborhood. When she was six, her father died in her arms after being caught in gunfire presumably from local police or gang activity. After that, Cecelia began to stay up every night reading her older brother’s science text books. She worked hard for years and eventually got herself into school and an internship at Our Mother of Mercy. While an ally of the X-Men, Cecelia has usually refused to join them for long. She would rather be a doctor and help the unfortunate because of where she came from.

    Dust was one of the first Muslim female superheros from the two major companies. She was separated from her mother in Afghanistan and they were sold into a sex slavery ring. Dust’s powers manifested when the soldiers tried to rape her and she killed them. Wolverine and Jean Grey brought her to the X-Men. Dust continues to wear her hijab out of modesty and also out of trauma from previous sexual abuse. The character’s stances and positions on life are directly linked her religious and cultural background. (Dust hasn’t been appearing much, recently, but that’s also due to the X-Men constantly cycling in new classes of students every few years.)

    Forge is a character constantly conflicted by being a man of Science but also feeling cultural obligations as the Shaman of his tribe.

    James Proudstar’s take on mutant rights comes from having grown up on a reservation. His family and neighbors had little to no protection when white doctors exposed them to cancerous materials in an attempt to study radiation on humans. His entire reservation was later wiped out in an attempt to cover up the conspiracy.

    There’s always room for improvement. The X-Men (writers and editors) could certainly do more to seize upon the potential. I, however, don’t think all of the potential has been squandered. I think if one does their research they will find that there are plenty of examples of ethnic minorities in the X-Men being shaped by realworld prejudice or the social/economic/religious effects of it.

26. @Nate A – That page of Alex Summers, yeah, I really hate that speech. I lost a lot of respect for the writer, Rick Remender over that.

    I would like to point out that not all mutants in the comics have agreed with Alex’s speech though or what he said about the label “mutant”.

    The post I showed before of Kitty Pryde is her actually disagreeing with Alex’s speech: http://i65.photobucket.com/albums/h233/hippiecolesablum/ztci87_zpsa39d0971.jpg

27. @Nate A – Sorry, posted the wrong link and I don’t know how to edit.

    Anyway, yes, this is Kitty’s response to Alex’s speech: http://i65.photobucket.com/albums/h233/hippiecolesablum/kittyprydemutantspeech_zps4e01ea8c.jpg

28. I’m not generally impressed with the, I have read lots more of this than you, so you can’t have an opinion, argument. Orion talks about a bunch of specific situation and scenes; I think there’s plenty there to make his point. Talking to him and saying, this storyline seems to work differently than that is totally cool, but the generalized, I’m more of a fan, therefore you can’t talk — I don’t find that helpful or convincing.

    Magneto as concentration camp survivor is…well, there are problems. Jews as the white minority which is no longer a minority doesn’t exactly go against what Orion’s talking about here.

    “There she was worshipped as a Goddess before being discovered by Xavier.”
    You realize that this is basically a racist trope, right?

    None of your other examples really grapples with what Orion is talking about. The fact that there are minority members of the x-men doesn’t change the fact that the relationship between mutants as a minority and the experiences of the actually marginalized don’t work all that well. For instance, other ethnic identities tend to get trumped and subsumed into the mutant identity, right? Storm’s a mutant first, everything else second pretty much (especially through the lens of the x-men comics.) Are there storylines in which Storm talks about the specific difficulties black mutants face? is there ever any discussion about how being a woman and a mutant is different than just being a mutant?

    That’s the point; not that there is no representation of minorities, but that the mutant identity as minority identity tends to erase or deflect a lot of important issues.

29. The Kitty Pryde thing is interesting. Part of what it’s doing is leveraging discourses around anti-semitism to validate the mutants as oppressed narrative, which I’m not super impressed by, inasmuch as anti-semitism is kind of the evil prejudice of evil prejudices in our country, and is often used to club other minorities. A storyline in which mutants are accused of anti-semitism for example, seems like it might be a more interesting way to go. On the other hand, that is a relatively nuanced discussion of identity politics, so not all bad.

30. I never said the author wasn’t allowed their opinion. However, their conclusions can only be so valid if they are not privy to all of the facts. I can have an opinion on thermodynamics or Dr. Who. My conclusions, however, will be very limited due to the fact that my knowledge in those areas is limited. If a Scientist or Whovian tells me they disagree with my conclusions or don’t think they’re entirely valid due to my lack of knowledge, I’m hardly going to be offended.

    “Magneto as concentration camp survivor is…well, there are problems. Jews as the white minority which is no longer a minority doesn’t exactly go against what Orion’s talking about here. ”

    So his experiences don’t matter because his minority is no longer persecuted? How is that NOT dismissive of Holocaust victims or smoothing over ethnic cleansing? I guess it doesn’t matter that his entire family was killed in front of him, because hey, Jews aren’t getting killed NOW.

    ““There she was worshipped as a Goddess before being discovered by Xavier.” You realize that this is basically a racist trope, right?”

    So is the author requesting that Storm be an African witch-priestess not a racist trope? The author basically stated that Storm being a mutant is not enough, but that she should also be the Magical Negro trope, which is a stereotype.

    But of course, let’s not call that out at all.

31. I give up.

    If a character mentions their ethnic identity, it’s appropriation and only to legitimize mutant oppression.

    If they don’t mention their ethnic identity, it’s erasure of their other identities by their oppressive mutant identity.

32. Another thing that bothers me about X-men, minorities do have superpowers and do not fight super-villains. Mutants are not a very good stand-in for minorities for that reason too. Another thing, can you really blame regular people for not being afraid of mutants, when they have powers that can people in a matter of seconds. There is even a terrorist group of mutants out to conquer the. Professor is also not a good stand-in for MLK. MLK wasn’t rich, had his own teams of super-heroes, or god-like telepathic powers.

33. Uh, I’m sorry but there are so many comments in here that are just incredibly ignorant, border-lining on racist. I don’t even know where to start.

    First I agree with Cole Dawson. Thankfully he’s someone who obviously read the books, while the rest of these comments are people who have NO IDEA what the X-men are about.

    Storm is one of my all time favorite characters in comics. Definitely my in my top 3. For her to be called a PROP is disrespectful to the character, the writers who excelled at her, and her fans. She’s one of the strongest female characters in comics period. And she’s an African American female. And they have addressed her skin color multiple times. She’s dealt with both racists and sexists in her day.

    And as Cole said there are many disabled X-Men and characters. We’ve dealt with their struggles. They aren’t glossed over.

    And yes, Jews are still a minority. And they are still prosecuted. Jews have been prosecuted for thousands of years. Just because they aren’t prosecuted as much in America doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist in America. To act as if Magneto’s experiences are somehow marginalized because “Jews haven’t had to deal with Genocide in what, 70 years!” is grossly disrespectful to not only the survivors of the Holocaust but the family’s of those who lost people to the Holocaust.

    And why should a comic about mutants deal with Storm’s skin color before her mutantdom. She’s an X-Men, she’s one of the most recognizable faces of the mutant race and a headmistress of a school. She has to identity as a mutant first, because that’s what the world will see her as first. That’s how it is in the Marvel Universe.

    And let’s not forget, this a comic about mutants, so story/character wise it makes sense that she’d need to identify herself first as a mutant. It’s called “writing”.

    The fact is this article ignores countless women and minorities, homosexuals, Muslims, Asians, Disabled, and yes African Americans to what, make a point that isn’t true? To pretend that the X-Men are misrepresenting a minority? Surpressing a minority? That it would somehow read different, even better if the characters were a different color?

    Maybe if the person who wrote this actually read the X-Men, they’d know that’s all bull. That the X-Men has universal themes. That it’s immensely diverse(currently an all women x-team has – Two black women, two Asian women, an Indian woman and one white woman and heavily features a lesbian teenager).

    Do these characters mention their race all the time? No, but it wouldn’t make sense for them too. Not when they’re literally fighting for their lives and are prosecuted by giant robots because they’re mutants.

    If you want some heavy-handed drama where everyone is constantly defined by their “otherness” and nothing more, watch Glee.

34. “Unlike other characters that Stan Lee created” etc.

    Orion, please don’t buy into the canard that Lee created the original characters; they were co-created with Jack Kirby. This doesn’t materially affect any of your argument, but the history of US comic books is a history of capital and (as in Lee’s case) management exploiting labour.

    I always thought the X-Men didn’t work as a metaphor for minority-oppression, but does work as a (unintended) metaphor for the metaphor of minority-oppression — specifically for the way that angstful adolescents self-dramatise their “struggles”. The fact that it’s Kitty Pryde talking about racism is very much to the point.

35. BTW, you might be interested to know that Claremont had planned to make Nightcrawler’s father transgender (shapechanger Mystique), but that was nixed by editorial.

36. I really think you are all asking this text to do a lot of work that it was never intended nor designed to do. The author’s main point seems to be to “question whether an invented minority is really the best way to understand our country’s history and practice of race-based violence”…well no, clearly not. The X-Men is a comic book about fantastical characters in an entirely fantastical setting…that sometimes (often?) wants to make a symbolic point about difference and prejudice about the world we inhabit. I don’t think it ever set out to be a historical text, nor did it claim to be a substitute for reading actual history. It can inspire one to do those things, but it doesn’t claim to, nor can it, substitute for actually picking up and learning about the reality of race based prejudice in our world.

    While I acknowledge that there is something problematic about how perfect-looking these supposed outcasts are (and how rich they are)…and that an argument could be made that perhaps a series that lauds itself so much on promoting diversity should perhaps have more non-majority folk creators working on it…I’m just not sure how a young kid who looks to the X-Men about their own struggles about their own difference perpetuates racial hierarchies? Loving the X-Men as a kid certainly helped me to question these hierarchies and the assumptions that under gird them…not the other way around.

    One of the things that I love about speculative fiction like X-Men and say Star Trek for example is that they get their message in all guerrilla style…the message gets across and infiltrates the reader’s brain without even them realizing it. I think that’s cool and I think that that will be lost if the subtle (IMO, and yes sometimes not so subtle) metaphor of being mutant gets bludgeoned by putting the ‘message’ up front and hitting the reader with it like a sledge hammer.

    Finally, I’m somewhat bothered by the author’s assertion that the X-Men is really ‘best-suited’ to be a metaphor for ‘invisible dimensions of power’ like say religion or sexual orientation. I find this problematic for two reasons. 1) Assuming that these are ‘invisible dimensions of power’ is highly inaccurate, and honestly borderline offensive. Really? An Orthodox Jew’s or a Muslim woman who covers her entire body are ‘invisible’ markers of difference? Are you kidding me? And of course a gay man would only be ‘invisible’ if he chooses to perform ‘maleness’ in a normative heterosexual way. There’s nothing invisible about being performing your gender identity in a way that is against the grain. and 2) I’m sorry, but who are you to decide what the ‘best’ way is to read a text and how a reader should gain the most value and significance from it? If a black kid reads the X-Men and goes ‘gee huh, this story is sort of telling MY story. AND, that’s cool!’…what’s the problem with that? Is that kid suddenly infected with some kind of false consciousness? Has he been duped by the white power complex? I don’t think so…

37. OH and btws the X-Men do tackle this whole ‘invisible dimensions of power’ nonsense with the whole Morlock business. Which the author would he know if they did more research…

38. “And of course a gay man would only be ‘invisible’ if he chooses to perform ‘maleness’ in a normative heterosexual way. ”

    This doesn’t make any sense. Gay people are no more likely to behave in non-normative ways than straight people are.

    Also, people don’t necessarily have a choice about how their gender is perceived, or how they act. The idea that all gender is performance is somewhat pernicious because it suggests that people’s gender presentation is entirely under their control, which it really is not.

    “One of the things that I love about speculative fiction like X-Men and say Star Trek for example is that they get their message in all guerrilla style…the message gets across and infiltrates the reader’s brain without even them realizing it.”

    I think people are able to pick up on messages without too much trouble, usually. The question is, what are those messages? Are they intelligent and thoughtful handlings of issues of (for example) racism? Or are they stupid? Star Trek is often quite, quite dumb about race (that horrible episode with the half-black/half-white people where the message is, basically, why can’t we all just get along?) There is sci-fi that is more thoughtful (Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis novels, for example, or Philip K. Dick.) But it’s hard to appreciate them I guess if you’re wowed by the mere fact that cultural products have ideological content.

39. “Just because they aren’t prosecuted as much in America doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist in America. To act as if Magneto’s experiences are somehow marginalized because “Jews haven’t had to deal with Genocide in what, 70 years!” is grossly disrespectful to not only the survivors of the Holocaust but the family’s of those who lost people to the Holocaust. ”

    I’m Jewish. Please do not lecture me on what I should think about the oppression of Jews or the way the Holocaust functions in contemporary American discourse. You will make me lose my temper.

    “And why should a comic about mutants deal with Storm’s skin color before her mutantdom. ”

    Because, possibly, skin color is an actual, real, important, ongoing issue, whereas mutantdom is a big old made up fantasy?

    In real life, the way people are oppressed depends a lot multiple factors, including the different ways in which they are marginalized. Making mutants be the uber most important factor of oppression for everybody shows that the creators have very little idea what they are talking about, in the first place. And it also subordinates all oppressions to a fantasy in which white, straight guys are every bit as oppressed as the most oppressed person anywhere. This is problematic.

40. Excellently put, Noah.

41. Jones, I think the X-Men actually work best as a metaphor for adolescence, in a lot of ways. Grant Morrison did some with this.

    The thing is, children really do face oppression in certain ways, so it’s not completely ridiculous to link minority status to adolescent status, or adolescent sub-cultures. However, adolescent sub-cultures often glom on to signifiers of other oppressed groups (minorities, the poor) in ways which are fairly unfortunate. And the X-Men have that problem as well.

42. Argh, I should stop but…I just want to point out that Magneto is not a real person, and that he had no actual experiences in the Holocaust. Questioning the way in which marginally talented writers have used the Holocaust to give their main villain “depth” and “meaning” is in no way disrespectful of people who actually suffered through the Holocaust. On the fucking contrary.

43. @ Noah

    “Because, possibly, skin color is an actual, real, important, ongoing issue, whereas mutantdom is a big old made up fantasy?”

    It’s the made-up fantasy the entire book is based on. It’s fiction. Maybe you should stick to non-fiction if this is such a hard concept for you.

    “I just want to point out that Magneto is not a real person, and that he had no actual experiences in the Holocaust.”

    OMG! MAGNETO ISN’T A REAL PERSON? NONE OF THESE PEOPLE ARE REAL? DO DO YOU MEAN TO TELL ME THAT THEY LIVE IN A FICTIONAL UNIVERSE THAT OPERATES DIFFERENTLY THAN OUR OWN? HOW AMAZING!

    That’s exactly right. These characters are FICTIONAL characters that live in a FICTIONAL universe that is not the same as ours. In this FICTIONAL universe, people with a FICTIONAL gene are in fact persecuted as a whole more so than other REAL minorities are in REAL life. Notice that in the FICTIONAL world nobody is building Sentinels to specifically hunt down people of color, people of Asian descent, Muslims, or gays. They hunt down and exterminate a FICTIONAL minority of mutants. So in this FICTIONAL universe, these FICTIONAL characters’ stances make sense. They would not make sense if this were the REAL world or if they were REAL minorities with these stances.

    You can’t try to apply Out-of-Universe reasoning on characters who are experiencing things In-Universe.

44. According to your logic Noah, than basically this whole argument is absolutely a moot point. If they’re just characters, than Storm is being treated like a prop and this article is just meaningless words.

    And what you said was, “Jews are a white minority they are no longer a minority”…You’ve said you were Jewish, but I’m confused. As a Jew, how can you say you aren’t a minority. I’m Jewish and I’m sure as hell am a minority. I was one of only three Jews in my high school. And yeah, there are heavy populations of Jews in certain areas but in other places? There might be like 20 Jews in Alabama. Jews are marginalized in other countries. They’re(and I guess I should we’re) still a minority. Being a “white minority” doesn’t make us any more of a minority. And also, it might be a majority of white, but Judaism is no way “white exclusive”…dark skinned middle easterns, people of there who’s converted, Ethiopian Jews…

    And the fact is Magneto’s whole mission is, “never again…” because Jews, like blacks, like homosexuals have many parallels to mutants. Mutants have been put in concentration camps, have been asked to register, once gathered together in a “ghetto” like city-area.

    There are reasons many minorities relate to X-Men and yes, they have powers and yes they fight villains, and do amazing things but if you want to look at things beyond the surface, there is so much more to X-Men.

    As a Jew, I love Magneto’s origins. It makes his whole point of view clear. If you lived what he went through and feared it could happen again, wouldn’t you stop at anything to prevent it from happening? Wouldn’t you stand and fight? But how much is too much? When do you become what you hate?

    So much of your argument makes no sense and a lot of just contradicts itself. “Oh Magneto’s past a Jew in the Holocaust doesn’t matter but Storm’s racist should matter” “Oh it’s a fantasy book, so commenting on his minority isn’t a big deal, oh it’s a fantasy book, why is it not concentrating on Storm’s race? Skin color is a big important issue” so what’s Judaism. It too is a racist. It’s not a skin color but Judaism is both a race and a religion.

    Which side of the argument are you taking?

    Being African, being black has mattered to Storm. She never denies her blackness, she never hides it. She has fought racism on both sides but the fact is, in the Marvel Universe she’s seen first as a mutant, second as a black woman. If it was in reverse, it would put a spotlight on “Okay so wait, if people are lining up to burn mutants, if they hate her more for being black, why aren’t they lining up to burn all African Americans?”…The fact is, in this fantasy universe, a mutant is the biggest, scariest other you can be. So in identifying yourself, everyone sees that first.

    You’re acting as if Storm turns her back on her African roots(she was just Queen of an African nation, largely ignoring mutant problems into it became too large of an issue to ignore-the death of close friends, the emergency of the Mutant Messiah, and a bunch of other things)…So how is X-Men ignoring Storm’s race?

45. “Gay people are no more likely to behave in non-normative ways than straight people are”

    Seriously? Are you fucking kidding me? Men having sex with men (at the very least) is now normative? Did I miss that memo? What imaginary wonderland are you living in?

    “Also, people don’t necessarily have a choice about how their gender is perceived, or how they act. The idea that all gender is performance is somewhat pernicious because it suggests that people’s gender presentation is entirely under their control, which it really is not”. Wow essentialist much? So there is something what, genetic, biological about ‘gender’? I think you need to do a Women’s Studies 101 refresher ‘dude’. And no, I never suggested that one can entirely control other’s perception of your gender, and how others would react to it. Read Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble. I mean if you can. It’s kind of hard and dense…

    “I think people are able to pick up on messages without too much trouble, usually. The question is, what are those messages? Are they intelligent and thoughtful handlings of issues of (for example) racism? Or are they stupid? Star Trek is often quite, quite dumb about race (that horrible episode with the half-black/half-white people where the message is, basically, why can’t we all just get along?) There is sci-fi that is more thoughtful (Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis novels, for example, or Philip K. Dick.) But it’s hard to appreciate them I guess if you’re wowed by the mere fact that cultural products have ideological content.”

    Yes, but I think those messages have a better chance of being heard if it isn’t so…oh what’s the word…unsubtle? In your face? Oh right, PREACHY? And what exactly is wrong with asking ‘why can’t we all just get along?’ What kind message about race do you want to send, exactly? Deep Space Nine did a much more blatant piece on race with ‘Far Beyond the Stars’…and dear god was it awful.

    Finally, can you not be a condescending dick? I mean I’m not a dumbass and you don’t need to call me one simply because I haven’t read Octavia Whatshername’s novel. Maybe you’ll get more traction if you a) actually researched what you’re talking about and b) did not insult the people reading your piece and reacting to it.

46. Pingback: Kibbles ‘n’ Bits 12/17/13: Molly Crabapple visits Art Spiegelman and then all hell breaks loose! — The Beat

47. Overall the X-Men doesn’t deal very well with issues of discrimination, unequal and unfair distribution of power or issues of personal identification.

    If one chooses to look at the franchise as nothing more than cheap entertainment then maybe it’s no big deal despite the obvious, and intended, comparisons to the civil rights movement and various forms of systemic discrimination. But the number of times I’ve seen writers refer to it as carrying a political message, particularly a revolutionary one, belie that interpretation.

    In practice the social commentary is frequently heavy handed and superficial. The mere presence of women, minorities, or of the disabled, doesn’t provide them with representation. Even giving them theoretical authority and star billing doesn’t necessarily reduce the level of fetishization they can fall prey to.

    In some ways, at some times, with some writers the X-Men franchise has treated these issues very well. But if premise of the group is that co-existent and mutual acceptance between the fictional minority and the rest of society is the goal, then the entire premise is flawed.

    Admittedly I haven’t followed the titles closely in some time, and even then budgetary constraints limited the number of purchases I could make, but my exposure to most of the titles has largely shown me a series of self-imposed mutant ghettos where minority members can go to hide from humanity at large, sallying forth periodically to thwart the schemes of mutant ne’er do wells. Somehow it never seems to occur to the protagonists that the only face of mutantkind that this approach shows the people they ostensibly want to live among is one of violent paranoia.

    I realize, of course, that not every X-title has been like that, for instance the recent X-Factor series and the X-Man series from the 90s were markedly different in that they both lived among the communities openly, and were theoretically less interested in flashy politics and villainthumping.

    But for the most part the treatment of serious issues seems either over the top, with yet another plot aiming at kicking off a grand genocide; or self-serving strawman arguments that really we’re all the same, and that we should stop treating people like they’re different.

    Even though they clearly are.

48. “Men having sex with men (at the very least) is now normative?”
    Obviously, if you have sex with a man in a room full of people, they’ll know you’re gay. But you were talking about visible markers of difference. Most people don’t have sex in front of others, so when you talk about non-normative gender behavior, you’re talking about other things, like mannerisms. Those are not restricted to gay people, and saying they are is an example of stereotyping and prejudice.

    “Finally, can you not be a condescending dick?”

    Stop being an aggressive jerk and I’ll think about it, I guess.

49. Josh, lots of people are minorities. People who are left-handed are minorities. And people who are left-handed have been discriminated at various times, actually. The question is, which minorities are marked, and what does that mean? Jews really aren’t discriminated against in meaningful ways for the most part in the U.S. at the moment, and, in fact, anti-semitism tends to be used as a club against other minorities. I think it’s pretty important for Jews to think about that seriously.

    How characters are used matters. But getting upset because I’m skeptical of the way Magneto is used on the grounds that he suffered in the Holocaust is like getting upset because I’m skeptical of the way Storm is used because she’s back. It’s not racist to say that Storm is not in all cases used thoughtfully.

    “in the Marvel Universe she’s seen first as a mutant, second as a black woman”
    That’s the point. Being a mutant always trumps everything. That’s not the way oppression works in the real world, where oppressions don’t trump each other, but intersect and add on. Being black doesn’t trump being a woman; being a woman doesn’t trump being back. Rather, being a black woman leaves you with particular oppressions and particular relationships to power. The X-Men doesn’t seem able to deal with that, which seems to me fundamentally unknowledgeable and unthoughtful about oppression and marginalization.

50. and Pat, it’s not my piece, man. I’m the editor of the blog, not the writer. You can see the author’s name up top.

51. When I say “the entire premise is flawed” I mean the notion of superhero teams consisting of the designated hated outsiders living together and external to the larger society, while still trying to work for greater access to and acceptance in that society they appear to have retreated from.

    Not that the notion of co-existence between disparate social groups is a flawed premise. Apologies for any misunderstandings my lazy self-editing may have caused.

52. Here’s the thing about metaphor: They always emphasize one feature at the expense of another… The conceal as they reveal (this primarily from Lakoff and Johnson).
    In this case, “source domain” of the metaphor is a real-world group and the “target domain” is the X-Men. The writer borrows features of the source domain (persecution based on skin color, sexuality, etc.) and maps it onto the target domain (Storm, Wolverine, etc.). When the writer does this, they emphasize the ways in which the character is like a member of the source domain, but they also obscure the ways in which the character is not. Now, this needn’t be a problem. You could very well do a story that thoroughly explores the source domain by way of the target. Unfortunately, the writers of the X-Men rarely do this. Instead, you get a speech that is at best trite (see Xavier), more often problematic (see Kitty), and sometimes straight up offensive (Havok).

53. Wow.

    Handling ideas about race and discrimination thoughtfully is the opposite of ‘being preachy.’

    Presentation of minority characters does not guarantee thoughtful consideration of their perspectives.

    And in a narrative about discrimination, the absence of this consideration is almost criminal.

    It’s like this came out of a Marvel editorial brainstorming session, or something. I can imagine them around a boardroom table saying, “The only way to be the good guy is to be persecuted. We need white men to be the good guys. So, let’s create a prejudice that will allow white men to be persecuted just as badly as anyone else. And will automatically dismiss whatever other prejudices affect the supporting cast.”

    I found Orion’s use of the word prop to be severe at first, but I now feel this extends far, far outside Steve and Storm.

54. Pat, I’ve read Gender Trouble, and written about Judith Butler a fair bit. I generally agree with Julia Serano (who I interview here) that gender as performance is a really problematic formulation. Serano argues that gender is a complex trait, composed of biological and social factors, and that treating it as performance tends to result in accusing people for the way their gender presents (this is a problem in particular for trans women, who are often accused of reinforcing the gender binary.) Refusing entirely the idea that gender is in any way biological is supposed to be progressive, I know; I think it’s simplistic and often used to marginalize folks.

    “And what exactly is wrong with asking ‘why can’t we all just get along?’ What kind message about race do you want to send, exactly? Deep Space Nine did a much more blatant piece on race with ‘Far Beyond the Stars’…and dear god was it awful.”

    The problme with “why can’t we all just get along” is that it begs the question. The reason we all can’t get along has to do with histories of oppression and prejudice and structural forms of discrimination. Saying, “why can’t we all just get along” implies that the answer is (a) about a change of heart solely,and (b) that everyone is equally responsible, rather than acknowledging that some people in particular are getting stepped on, and that if they have a change of heart, that’s not in any way going to stop the stepping.

    The x-men oppression metaphor is really blatant and clunky. Not sure where you’re seeing the subtlety there, or why you think that a smarter take would be more in your face.

55. “When the writer does this, they emphasize the ways in which the character is like a member of the source domain, but they also obscure the ways in which the character is not.”

    Just reread Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, which is super-smart about this. Just a really subtle, weird take on difference and similarity and marginalization.

56. The exercise here bares fruit and the discussion has presented a number of perspectives I like. I have the feeling we maybe trying to fit a round peg in a square hole.

    Stan Lee & Jack Kirby were white Men of Jewish ansestory, members of the “Greatest Generation.” Individualism aside (these two could not be farther apart on a number of issues), they came to this project with quite a few conflicting perspectives. They had experienced the horror of bigotry, but had no first hand knowledge of the reality that comes with external form identifying them as potential victims. They simply changed their names. So the experience of being black or a women in America at that time was, at best, speculative. They also were rushed to get work done in this period, so other then an impression of civil rights filtered through their collective experience could be seen in their comics. Without their Jewish background, I personally doubt they would have had much compulsion to seriously address racism.

    The culture at Marvel Comics is only just recently seeing true signs of change away from sexism and racism. In the past, the efforts for equality has been to serve the bottom line. Actually, the current effort is due to the same bottom line.

    This is not to discredit the X-Men’s place in helping our culture move beyond, Anti-Semitism, Racism and Sexism. We have a long way to go, but having grown up in this era, reading these comics, in a multicultural community, as a Jewish Boy, I felt the X-Men were part of my own path to understanding others perspectives. Regardless of writers and artist motivations, the X-Men at most points in our cultural progress pushing forward in the direction of diversity. From my perspective today, I am particularly frustrated by the depiction and equality for women and minorities, but there are to paradoxical points in the pages of the X-Men. Women have held leadership roles and played an equal part in the story. Storm a Black African Women in particular. However, due to the style and conscious choices of artist, as well as, the narrative choices of artists and writers the characters agency have been often undermined. This has been partly due to the creators background, but also editorial and interpretations of the past plots.

    What is not lost on me is the fact that, had the X-Men been Black from the beginning (perhaps if they had been written and drawn by African-Americans, Men and Women equally) the context and power of the story would have been more impressive. It also would have taken longer to build as large an audience, because of the racism and sexism in America at the time and the racism and sexism we still have. This perspective does not push me to change my love for the X-Men, but it hardens my frustration with our inability to see more equality, diversity and less sexism and bigotry in our comics.

57. Ben, I think there is a difference btwn saying what X-Men is (critiquing how it handles difference) and saying what it should’ve been all along. I can’t speak for Orion, but I know for my part as someone who agreed with his analysis, I don’t think the point is that Lee and Kirby (or even Wein or Claremont and Cockrum or Byrne) should have done something different from the outsets of their runs, but rather to me for a series that has been reimagined many times and has a huge revolving cast that branches off into subgroups and has such lasting popularity, there has been plenty of opportunity to explore these issues of difference as they intersect with fictional mutation. It would be fantastic to use the X-Men’s overwhelming popularity to move its handling of themes into a more sophisticated arena and have more diverse writers and artists. Something more than just “being a mutant is like being black” or whatever.

    I think you are right that the X-Men would likely not had much of a chance to gain popularity if they had been Black from the beginning – but now that popularity has survived many extreme changes – what remains the excuse?

    All this being said, while I don’t follow any X-books (and haven’t since the Mutant Massacre days – save for a brief part of Morisson’s New X-Men run), I still have a soft spot for them and appreciate that as a PoC teen it was basically the only place I could see some difference represented sympathetically. As Junot Diaz’s narrator in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao says, “You really want to know what being an X-Man feels like? Just be a smart bookish boy of color in a contemporary U.S. ghetto. Mamma mia! Like having bat wings or a pair of tentacle growing out of your chest.” This works in his novel b/c he describing difference within a PoC community – outsiders within a group of outsiders – which is flipping the script on the usual metaphor which marks the X-Men against a dominant culture.

58. I agree or always find myself falling into two track of thought. I can excuse the past, and do. However, I am with you on our path forward. It IS disconcerting how under utilized the X-Men are used as an effective narrative for true diversity. The current plot, by the way, has been better then the past 15 years (mostly), but is VERY frustraiting for it’s focus on Scott and Emma. They really need to move on.

59. Has anyone read the all-female X-Men title? Is that any good?

60. I read the first arc and wasn’t impressed.

    And that was before I knew anything about Brian Wood, Uber-feminist! Heh.

61. What did you see as the problems? Was it just blah? Or did it actively handle gender issues badly?

62. Just mostly blah. I don’t recall any obvious gender stuff – but I don’t recall a lot of specifics. It just felt like the way they compensated for having all-woman team was by coming up with the most generic X-continuity related plot. I quickly found it incomprehensible – there was no sense of what was really at stake and the I didn’t really understand how the conflict was resolved. It was all perfunctory and only had meaning in some uber-specific X-context – and wasn’t even fun!

    The only thing I liked about it was that it included my nostalgic favorites (Kitty, Rogue, Storm and Rachel), but that was not enough for me to make sure I collected the issues. I may still have them at home, or may have passed them on. I’ll check.

63. Interesting essay, but I’ve got a few issues with it and a few of the comments.

    “Also, Kwannon is not even close to being a Japanese name”

    It is, actually—it’s an older spelling of Kannon, alias Guanyin, sometimes known as the “Goddess of Mercy.” It’s a dumb joke, pretty much. Her code name Revanche brings to mind vengeance, while her government (for lack of a better) name Kwannon is mercy.

    “Being African, being black has mattered to Storm. She never denies her blackness, she never hides it.”

    She does, she has. There’s an issue where she rejects black Americans for being fallen and grimy, and part of her foundational concept is that she isn’t straightforward black, but a melange of the best of all the races. She didn’t show any solidarity with black Americans until Christopher Priest, Dwayne McDuffie, and Reggie Hudlin—three black men—got a chance to write her at length. That was the late ’90s through the mid-2000s, I think. She’s never rejected her African past (specifically Kenyan), but Storm’s relationship to her blackness is complicated, largely thanks to well-meaning writers who don’t think through what they’re writing.

    On the essay itself: We’ve got to retire the Malcolm X/Martin Luther King Jr. comparisons. They’re rooted in racist and inaccurate portrayals of both men. MLK didn’t have a paramilitary unit of child soldiers in his basement, and Malcolm X wasn’t a genocidal maniac. To further that is to diminish the words, acts, and lives of both men, and to prop up the idea that Malcolm X was a villain and MLK a hero, which is completely and utterly insupportable. I’m probably a hard-liner on this point, but it betrays an ignorance that makes it hard to take the rest of the essay seriously. The comparison doesn’t work, not on any level but the most surface-level, like if you heard about the two men in passing and figured that’s how it worked out.

    I’d quibble with the X-Men being described as “white characters” in the generic sense, but I figure that’s down to “our” preferred eras and versions of the X-Men being different. I dunno that the X-Men have been all that white since Giant-Size or whatever in the ’70s, but your mileage may vary, and that’s cool.

    I understand the impetus behind the coloring, but these kind of 1:1 replacements never work for me. They’re a half-measure, because while skin color is one thing, your race has a tremendous effect on who you are and what you are allowed to do. It’s not as easy as slipping in some new data and then looking at what that means, because all that means is that you’ve changed the equation. The ways the crowd or populace reacts when the skin color is different is interesting, but I don’t know that it’s saying anything beyond “we judge situations differently based on who is involved in them.”

    My ambivalence with the re-coloring makes it hard to buy a few points, and to even figure out what I’m meant to take away from the essay. The point about Wolverine being a black stereotype if you changed his skin color is interesting, something I’d never considered, but we already knew that colored folks are treated different from white folks in fiction and reality, right? Bad behavior for me is powerful for them, and so on.

    “My goal is that by looking at these images people will question whether an invented minority is really the best way to understand our country’s history and practice of race-based violence.”

    The answer to this is obviously no, it isn’t the best way, right? But the X-Men were never positioned as the best way to understand anything. It’s an adventure comic that borrows or steals from genuine oppression to get grist for the mill, and the generic, multinational, multicultural cast makes it easy for anyone to find solace or strength in the work if they choose or need to see that. This goal presumes a level of thought, care, and planning that simply can’t exist in the franchise, thanks to disparate influences (writers, artists, accountants, marketers).

    “Re-coloring the X-Men so that all mutants are people of color not only makes the themes of discrimination more relevant, it also introduces hundreds of non-white characters who are complex and fully realized.”

    It doesn’t, though, does it? These are palette swaps, not actual characters. They’re still White(ish) Psylocke, White Wolverine, Black Storm, Chinese-American Jubilee, and so on. Their ethnicities may not be front and center in the text, there’s not a lot of “I, (attribute), feel this way,” but they still matter. Black Wolverine’s life would have been drastically different from White Wolverine’s, and the odds of them ending up the same person are vanishingly small, right? Professor X debuting an all-black team of teenagers with wildly destructive powers (and I guess wings, sorry Angel) in the ’60s would have been stopped dead in the water on several different fronts.

    And I think that’s why the re-colorings don’t work for me. They posit a surface-level thought experiment for something which requires more than a surface-level appraisal. I’m all for starting a conversation, but what conversation is this starting?

    Also, to the point that the X-Men rarely address the various -isms: they’re rarely addressed in-depth, or to the extent that “Oh no Stryfe is back, let’s mask up and go get him” is, but they do show up. Jubilee used to remark on the fact that all of Wolverine’s female friends were impossibly busty and tall, and talk about how it made her feel. Bishop’s early arcs were very much of the “is this angry man trustworthy?” variety, and a lot of interesting stuff was done about love, self-loathing, and knowledge of self that I would argue addresses -isms in an oblique manner. It’s almost better they don’t go full-bore direct, honestly. Whenever the X-Men, whenever any superhero, addresses those head-on, it comes off stupid and unrealistic.

    Thanks for an interesting read, even if I can’t quite get into it.

64. Weird, I watched the X-men cartoon sometimes as a kid and I had no idea (or didn’t remember) until this moment Jubilee was chinese-American rather than white. (In all fairness, it’s not like I remember the old cartoon that well, but still…)

65. First of all, I want to recommend again the Neil Shyminsky article that I mention in this essay. It’s great reading for anyone looking for a thorough discussion of how race functions in the X-Men.

    https://www.academia.edu/226078/Mutant_Readers_Reading_Mutants_Appropriation_Assimilation_and_the_X-Men

    I’m struck by the attribution of personal agency to fictional characters. Storm isn’t a real person. She’s a construct that writers use to tell a story, and the stories they tell vary dramatically over time. This is how Storm can be a strong female leader in one issue and a token in another.

    Another question that struck me from this discussion was what role the X-Men, or other works of fantasy, should have in our society. Although there are few direct discussions of race or other privileges in mainstream fantasy, there’s no shortage of fantastical dimensions of privilege. I guess I’m just skeptical about whether, as Pat says, the “message gets across and infiltrates the reader’s brain without even them realizing it.” More often, it seems that writers simplify or misrepresent issues that they haven’t truly thought through.

    On the other hand, I know that readers bring their own experiences to the pages with them, allowing for new understandings of the characters and their meanings. I find the implicit comparison to Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X deeply upsetting, but that’s not to say that readers haven’t looked past that and found truth in the stories.

    More than anything, it feels like a wasted opportunity. In the House of M alternate reality, the X-Men are all celebrities and humans are oppressed. This is a story that would have dramatic implications if the X-Men were something other than rich white folks. But contrary to the statements of many X-Men creators, they’re not an oppressed minority, and the House of M premise falls flat because of it.

66. I’m only skimming the article, but it looks excellent, thanks for the link.

    I was pretty grossed out by this (relevant to what David Brothers was saying): In an interview with Premiere Magazine, director Bryan Singer explains that Magneto and Professor Xavier should be read properly as analogues of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr.: “They both embrace mutantkind. Magneto has a very separatist view. Professor X believes that all men and mutants are created equal” (Meigs 1997:55).

    The article rightly points out that this is idiotic.

67. You know, an interesting point of comparison might be Grant Morrison’s Doom Patrol. The initial team there is a full-body amputee robot (who talks explicitly about phantom limbs and trauma associated with disability), a woman with severe mental illness, and a bi-racial hermaphrodite. They’re presented as marginalized not because of their powers but because of the things that would marginalize them in the real world; disability, mental illness, queerness.

    It’s been a while since I read it, and I’m not sure exactly how it plays through, but it seems like a smarter take on this sort of thing (and I believe the Doom Patrol was originally an x-men knock off, so perhaps a direct response to the issues raised here in some ways.)

68. Actually, X-Men 1 came out a couple of months after the first appearance of Doom Patrol. Arnold Drake suspected a freelancer in the DC office passed the idea along to Lee (who would have seen it as tit for tat since Doom Patrol is indebted to Fantastic Four.) There are other suspicious nigh-simultaneous appearances like that: Swamp Thing and Man-Thing, Red Tornado and the Vision.

69. David,

    Point taken– I was thrown by the “Kwa” phoneme which is no longer– as far as I am aware– a part of contemporary Japanese phonetics.

    I think you and Orion are on the same page with Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr.– this isn’t a neutral, or helpful framework to view X-Men as much as a very problematic one that has been reinforced by X-Men’s creators. There is that quote in the article he cites above, and appears in Jacob C.’s comment just above. Finally, this false, ahistorical dichotomy of Malcolm X vs MLK exists, and while it would be nice to see it less often, accusing a writer of perpetuating it when he is rather calling out its appearance in a comics series with a much, much, much larger readership seems wrongheaded.

    Final note– I hope you’re well and have been enjoying your blog!

70. Back in the ’70s, I showed a bunch of X-Men to a fellow student. He professed to dislike them because they struck him as being fascistic. I was a bit taken aback, while at the same time seeing his point.

    I mean, look at the species name Marvel came up with for mutants: “Homo Superior”. Constantly the refrain was that here was a new race that would supplant humanity one day.

    It was only in the ’80s that Claremont started his revisionist take on mutants=Jews and other minorities, that Magneto morphs from crypto-Nazi to Holocaust survivor.

    I agree with the article that this adolescent SF fantasy can’t bear the weight of analogy — and I wish people would stop inferring same.

71. @Kailyn: Hey! Yeah, you’re right on the X/MLK point. Definitely my bad there—I don’t think I realized how much of a pet peeve it was until I sat down to write that comment! And the ‘kwa’ threw me off originally too. From what I’ve read, it’s from an older romanization, before it was standardized for the west. I figure it’s like “knight” or something, something that’s spelled one way and pronounced another because of disparate grammar rules being forced to coalesce into one.

    I like that you’re writing here, too! I read more than I comment, but it’s nice to see what’s on your mind.

72. Hallo. I don’t usually feel compelled to comment, though i always enjoy reading the blog ( bring back James Romberger!)
    Being of a minority myself, i read many an x- men comic as a kid, i don’t know
    if i took pleasure or solace from identifying with mutants, mostly because i was never aware that
    i was, in fact, part of a minority; i had not been, i’m afraid, raised to think that way.
    Rather, i bought the New Mutants for Sienkewicz’s art, which opened my eyes to Gustav Klimt, Art nouveau, art in general, which in turn gave me something far larger, older
    and more mysterious to connect with than the niche of comic-bookdom.
    However, i know at least one person, this one a minority, and a draughtsman like myself,
    who to this day will testify that the xmen comics gave him a sense of self- worth and
    confidence.
    Is he deluded for having taken so much from the brightly-coloured entertainments he read as a kid? Should i go and tell him that?
    Also, i cannot fathom the logic of this piece ( although i appreciate the sentiment)- if this comic book were done like so, it would
    have stated such, and therefore it fails as the comic book it is, because the comic book it is not doesn’t hold up to critical scrutiny. I am confused.

73. ” i know at least one person, this one a minority, and a draughtsman like myself,
    who to this day will testify that the xmen comics gave him a sense of self- worth and
    confidence.”

    People can interpret art in lots of different ways, and get lots of different things from them. That doesn’t mean they’re deluded, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that the work of art is especially intelligent or liberatory either.

74. Hey Noah, I so I reread those Brian Wood X-Men issues – let me know if you ever plan to really do that X-Men roundtable and I’ll write something up. They were just about as blah as I remember, but this piece gave me new insight on reading them.

75. I have a follow up post to this here, if folks are interested.

76. “Neil Shyminsky argues persuasively that playing out Civil Rights-related struggles with an all white cast …”

    It’s not persuasive at all because the entire premise is laughable: the all white x-men lineup fell on it’s face and was replaced by a cast where 2 of the more popular characters were strikingly non-white and that cast is the one where x-men exploded in popularity. You can call Storm a prop “to legitimize the idea that the X-Men are an oppressed minority” but (1) that excessively trivializes arguably one of the more interesting characters during the title’s peak popularity and (2) what’s wrong with using these characters to help drive home this point? It seems to me that if you were writing a comic about a super-team and wanted to use their struggles, in part, as an analogy with racism/facism/imperialism/homophobia then you might want some characters who had suffered through such things around in order to drive the point home to your perhaps not all that savvy audience of teens.

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79. Hi, i’m late to the discussion, but also fresh from having read it.
    As it has been voiced by several posters, i agree that the xmen series do showcase variety and open up on issues, and i would only further the thought by adding “for a marvel tittle”.
    This is really where i don’t really get the premice of this discussion.

    I started my comic book experience 30 years ago with “any” tittle available to me.
    I was really drawn to super heroes, but through the decade that ensued found most of the tittles to be shallow and even counter productive to my development or satisfaction.
    However, i never thought this of the xmen until much later, when i had wised up to Emost of cheap tricks used.
    The reason for setting the xmen as “special” was because it is. Humour me a minute please. Comic books can be great, but they most usually not.
    The incentive of its authors is for it to turn around itself and never end, not unlike the “same but different” saying attributed to movies.
    In the case of Marvel products, this is most painfully obvious, and has becomed (from this side of 30 years of reading them) ridiculous if not insulting by now.
    Admitedly i stopped following almost everything but “extraordinary gentlemen” for a decade, but i still buy a dozen every two years just to see it “growing” (more like devolving).
    So, while i agree that few marvel comics are worth more than a “pass the time” possibly counter productive fiction aimed at kids (and i know, i was one of those, still clinging to being one even as i type these words), i feel compelled to defend this particular branch of the rotten tree.

    Why was it that, in the midst of reading VforV or Watchmen or others, still engrossed in other byrne or claremont subpar excuse for litterature, i started down rating everything but the xmen?
    After ronin, darknight miller crush, watchmen or v had floored me forever and a day (as far as northern american comics were concerned, and i do mean “aimed at” not “done by”…)
    I never read another comic without dishing it, but kept along a fondness for the xmen lore, why?
    The reason is really simple, you typed it yourself quite a few times (possibly as a mark of elitism, but maybe not?) : people react differently to stuff, this has no bearing on the stuff’s quality.
    Of course most of the earlier stuff is racist and mysoginist: stan lee for one is one of the worst writer in comic book history, but he is a part of said history… these traits were deliberate and patronizingly spoonfed to the audience (just to be clear, i’m not codoning their bad actions and the decenies of effect they had, just stating it).
    I firmly believe that “as a business” xmen 1 made sense for them to be all white, how doesn’t it make sense for you?
    You wish to denounce a prequel to watchmen done in 2010ish with 2010ish standards, that makes sense to me, however, the xmen critiqued in your recent post, and indeed in this one do not belong to the same century.
    To put it as plainly as possible, Lee is as bad as you can get, and to think his editorial chaperoning has/will ever stop is naive.
    If in the 1980ies Lee had decided that doing in depht stories would sell, he would have tried, but that was never the case, and it possibly will never be the case.

    The xmen had adventures where minorities were mentionned, where many things were mentionned, this with a sort of clan like mirror stood up in front of them.
    (Angel / nightcrawler is the reference every one seems to have omitted i feel!)
    Arguably, no other lore in Marvel reached this level of trivial complexity (number of characters, number of time the same issues were mishandled (yes) but mentionned ; number of times it was rebooted for money with no real change in its storytelling motto and axioms without a dip in sales etc).
    The reason is that, while possible counter productiveness may be argued, the issues of a “recompossed family” facing prejudice because of something we call race was present on the scene at all.
    I am white, and yes i needed the characters to be white to see myself part of it at the time, making me sink what little money i had to buy these sore excuses for litterature. But that opened my eyes nonetheless, on the issues that you say were “misstreated”.
    Historical content does not excuse racism or genderism or other isme s, but why try to displace the context?
    Seeing the list of “minorities characters” childlishly displayed made me want to type this comment, but the comments about Mile high comics made me post (and yes i did read most of the Mile series).
    The reality of the industry, most definetly when xmen “2” (storm thunderbird collosus NIGHTCRAWLER wolvie and ariel first incarnation) came out, but possibly still today, would have made it impossible to have a team of black or asian, hispanic.. team. To think otherwise is weird.
    But then, it has clearly paved the way for mavericks such as Moore to slip in, and it could not have done much more.
    The fact that the xclan survived was because of its variety, not its depht.
    God loves man kills is an exellent exemple of this. It shows that at the time, the medium and its viewers are akin to get depht, but the producers were not (the risk of not selling enough, the risk of being bothered by lawsuits, the Lee … etc).
    And possibly they will never be.
    This century has invented a new name, which i find offensive, graphic novels.
    Xmen 1 was a graphic product, however many xmen issues warrant the “graphic novel” terminology bestowed upon history’s graphic novel litterature.
    Re contexted in their time they made was is today, whose to say they might have done more?
    In closing, i really need to reiterate that after reading the Mile comics, you check out their circulation dates and numbers.
    The medium at the time, as Moore puts it, was a product that producers marketed to a target group, .. Sadly it still is.

80. Kudos on a well-written article and insightful approach to the topic. You raise excellent points. I do no disagree. And I’m glad someone at NPR noticed.

    Might I suggest another perspective? This does not negate what you’ve written, but rather provides an alternative interpretation…

    It’s always bothered me how the X-Men’s writers/editors always miss the mark on what a “species” or “race” is — Anyone could wake up and find themselves transformed into a mutant some day! We all carry the potential for genetic change! But then I realized that The X-Men have always been about how exceptional people, people with extra personal resources, are hated by the average person. And I’m not even playing with metaphoric substitutions to raise this point – it’s a literal portrayal throughout the history of the comic. What’s troubling about that is how it speaks to the economic divide and the myth that nearly anyone can be rich some day. The X-Men, the epitome of oblivious super heroic potential, have massive power and resources, and yet they never do anything to change the world for the common man; sure, they *believe* they have good intentions, but really only to the extent that they want to be able to eat dinner in public without being reviled. X-Men’s narrative is about wealth, not about race.

81. Addendum: Individually, yes, the characters are often crafted to speak to racial stereotyping. The meta-narrative, however, can be interpreted as a narrative about hating the wealthy. In some of the more recent stories, the world falls apart when *everyone* can be wealthy or when *no one* is wealthy. We need exceptional people like the X-Men to protect us!

82. This very blunt interpretation has been hidden for decades because the reader is distracted by the first proposal of “genetic differences.” We get stuck arguing at that level and ignore how the X-Men’s wealth affords them special access and tech and membership in a unique clique.

83. The NPR story on this is here.

84. That’s a great point Brian. I’d never thought of that.

85. Interesting that in the NPR article they totally miss the point made both by Orion and in the comments here about the idiotic MLK vs. Malcolm X comparison.

86. I have to disagree with a lot of this. There is nothing “disturbing” about the structure of X-Men. Three words for you, Target Market Audience. If you wrote a comic book about a thirteen year old Mexican girl who gives birth in a ditch, you bet your sweet aspercream I’m NOT going to read it. There are/were plenty of all black comic books, look where they went (yeah, I bought them and they sucked). If I was an unsuccessful comic book producer/writer/artist, I’d probably want to blame outside forces as well. Reality is, the writers get to decide who they’re targeting, and not everything is a gawdang (pitiful attempt to bypass potential censorship) race conspiracy.

87. Jefe, lots of black people read superhero comics. The idea that white people can’t enjoy a comic in which black heroes are featured seems like a fairly unpleasant slur on white people. I’m not against such slurs in general, but in this case I think it’s unwarranted.

88. (I still miss the original Milestone imprint books.)

89. If the X-Men were black, it would still be hampered by insulting writing that has occurred throughout the history of the series. Changing the color of Havok doesn’t change how offensive his speech is. Changing the X-Men’s color doesn’t change the narrative. The quality of writing is going to vary based on which artistic team was writing the comic.

    “The best way to understand our country’s history and practice of race-based violence,” is going to be to open a history book. Pulp fantasy coming from a company concerned with monthly quotas rather than quality of writing will barely scratch the surface when it comes to reflecting real-life issues.

    Lastly, the statement, “Some characteristics of white characters also become negative stereotypes when applied to non-white characters,” is non-sense. I realize that this is Bronze Tiger from the CW Arrow series, but appearance-wise he’s close to Wolverine: http://static2.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20131003234628/greenarrow/images/d/db/Bronze_Tiger_Michael_Jai_White.jpg. By indicating these types of characters could only be “white” were you referring to the actor’s last name?

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91. “The best way to understand our country’s history and practice of race-based violence,” is going to be to open a history book. Pulp fantasy coming from a company concerned with monthly quotas rather than quality of writing will barely scratch the surface when it comes to reflecting real-life issues.

    Jason, a lot of people are making comments like yours, but I don’t really get it. We’re talking about race and the X-Men specifically because the creators of the X-Men have and are constantly invoking race, and insisting that the X-Men are a progressive stand-in for the “oppressed other,” with a specific focus on civil rights and racial equality. If anything, by making statements like the one above you’re agreeing with Orion – you’re right, the X-Men comics are pretty shitty at dealing with issues of race. That’s what this article is exploring.

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93. My thoughts on the subject in the link; Diversity Is More Than Skin Color http://www.jckphnx.tumblr.com

94. Jack, not sure if you read the original post. Orion didn’t randomly decide to discuss diversity in terms of white/black. He pointed out that the X-Men have often been touted as addressing this issue. He then went on to explain why they do it poorly.

    Noting that the X-Men have included folks from Russia and Canada is beside the point, since people don’t tend to tout geographic diversity as something that makes the X-Men special or relevant. (Though it’s perhaps worth pointing out that Colossus’ Russianness, as just one example, was neither especially nuanced or thoughtful.)

    Also, while race is not the only kind of diversity, it is uniquely important in the US. Which is why that’s the issue that is often dragged out to validate the X-Men.

95. I was addressing what was in the article and the work of the referenced academic, not just the art project. But I feel that the art is nitpicking. “The X-Men can’t represent equal rights issues or be compared to the fight for civil rights because it’s not 100% perfect.”

96. Well, it’s more than that it’s not 100% perfect. The argument in the article is that the comparison as it’s often made (professor x is martin luther king, etc.) is shallow and offensive.

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98. The similarities are there, whether they were intentional written or not, because, ultimately, the ideas that Dr. King and Malcolm X were fighting for can be applied to, and have been fought for, many disenfranchised groups throughout history. Of course readers are going to notice them. Just because the X-Men books fumble dealing with issues that relate directly to the American black community’s experiences, doesn’t mean that they are being ignorant, and to take such offene indicates hypersensitivity. The books are dealing with the themes of intolerance and inequality on a broad scale that MANY groups of people can relate to. The words of the two historically figures, particularly Dr. King, though they were absolutely, specifically fighting for the black commmunity, can and do speak to all kinds of people on a universal level. The comparisons are only natural.

99. Sorry for the typos, difficult to type on a phone.

100. Hey Jack. You might want to read back up through the thread?
     Many of these issues are addressed there. But to summarize; Martin Luther King did not form a posse of black people to go beat up other black people who stepped out of line. Malcolm X did not try to take over the world. The comparison is a massive simplification, and a dunderheaded insult, to two very complex, very thoughtful people. It doesn’t generalize their insights and work; it bastardizes and parodies it.

     Martin Luther King and Malcolm X absolutely speak to many people. That has nothing to do with whether or not the X-Men comics think intelligently about their legacy.

     You’re reproducing some of the problems in your comment, incidentally. You’re suggesting that the black struggle for liberation is somehow less universal than the mutant struggle for liberation, and that removing those ideas from their context makes them more important and applicable. I’d argue that that’s so confused as to end you somewhere that is borderline offensive. Other people’s liberation struggles aren’t yours to whitewash and repurpose as you would, erasing the original source. Black liberation without black people isn’t liberation at all, for anyone.

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102. From the beginning of this Discussion, I had the feeling that I wrote long ago a simiar articel to the topic. Now I found him again.

     http://sequart.org/magazine/3201/x-men-is-not-an-allegory-of-racial-tolerance/

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110. Yes the X-men has many characters of color but which ones are the most popular and mainstream? The number of White characters out number the characters of Color that author Orion Martin Definitely did his research, some of you are really derailing the point and your not adding anything. Learn the difference between oppression versus privilege and what Orion Martin was discussing. Omg ur people are so stupid.

111. The ‘feared and hated’ trope eventually got old. Why would people accept the FF and the Avengers, but hate the X-Men? That fear and hatred would likely make more sense if the mutants were minorities. I could relate more with Grant Morrison’s reasoning that mutants would be admired as a sexy and powerful subculture, with their own fashion, language and groupies. Milligan took it even further in ‘X-Statix’ with mutants as reality TV celebs. The fact that Marvel recently killed Xavier indicates that even the white male creators no longer believe in the civil rights metaphor.

112. The X-Men franchise (both in film and comics) will always be limited by their creator’s biases. Just look at the recent most X-Men film. The major roles are occupied by white dudes and one blue lady. In the meantime the people of color are outside getting their asses handed to them in order to let the important mutants (Xavier, Magneto, Wolverine, Kitty) alter the space time continuum. We learn absolutely nothing about Blink, Bishop, Sunspot or Warpath, which is ironic because the comics I grew up reading went out their way to give each character a voice. In X-Men:DOFP, Storm’s role is even thinner than the earlier films and then she is killed unceremoniously. It’s pretty apparent that Bryan Singer and his co-creators only want to focus on the popular (ie white mutants), because those are the character they relate to and feel will bring the money back to the greedy studios. Sorry to rant, but as much as I loved the film, I could help but notice the irony

113. Wow…. there is just so much wrong here. But since I don’t want to spend 3 hours writing a post let me focus on this “X-Men of color” thing

     I find the exercise of recolouring mutants to be black to be… wrong. Just plain wrong. Let me list some of the reasons why.

     1) Black people are not the only minority that suffers discrimination. I myself have suffered police brutality, have been fired and have suffered numerous other difficulties because I am of a certain minority. When my mother was young, she had to cut her hair off to be less attractive and avoid being raped. To see why this is relevant:

     2) X-Men revolves around variety, universality. It’s part of its strength. anyone can view it as a metaphor for whatever oppressed group they might belong to. A black person, an Arab, a Jew, a Muslim, a homosexual, transgender etc can all look at it and identify with it. Because of the various backgrounds it becomes about being human and that is what binds us. Shared humanity. And that’s what we need, if we want a future where people wouldn’t look at our skin colour, our ethnicity or our choice or lovers.. Yes it’s not really that deep most of the time. But it allows people to see themselves in it and that’s important. That’s probably why some people look at Storm and see a prop, and I see majesty, strength, grace. Because as a society we still look at race too often.

     3) It doesn’t grandfather fully developed characters, it erases them. Xavier being a rich white handsome male is part of his character. It’s because he is so privileged that other mutants point at him living in his lovely mansion and say he’s so far off from the real world his ideas don’t touch reality. If they grew up black many of them would have had a different past.

     4) Last, but in some ways the most important. It’s poorly done. this “art” basically put shoe polish on white people. They still have white backgrounds, white facial features etc. As a final argument I shall show you how it can be done. I can’t change their backgrounds but.. you must admit the following picture is better then putting shoe polish on white people:

     [IMG]http://i59.tinypic.com/15z5xs8.jpg[/IMG]

114. It’s interesting that you think “universality” somehow means “white”. Why couldn’t people of various backgrounds identify with black people? Why is blackness a barrier to cross-identification, but whiteness isn’t.

     Storm has sometimes been used well and sometimes not. Recognizing that she isn’t always written well is not some sort of failure to be sufficiently post-racial.

115. See, where you see white people, I see people. But, even if we do talk about races, the x-men are not just white people. In the original (and failed run) with the original 5, yes. But these days they have Muslims, brown, black, blue, Asians etc amongst their number.

     And while they have made race an issue at times (for example in the epic “God Loves, Man Kills” story) I like the thought that Storm being black and Jubilee being Asian isn’t brought up that often. It’s nice to know that they decided they (in character) have decided to unify in broader labels, being mutant AND human (you never see X-Men claiming that they’re not human, they are human AND mutant). Perhaps it’s because I’m (for the most part) race blind but I like that.

     The short version: I said “universality” because the X-Men are not just white people. and if you look at the link in my post, you’d see how you **should** do it if you must. I’m more offended by it being done poorly than it being done at all

     ———————————————————-

     While I’m writing, let me share my own vision. So you’ll get more of a picture of where I’m coming from.

     See, I’ve noticed something. People are seldom against oppression in general. They are foremost interested in oppression vs certain groups. there was a time that I hung around very gay circles. Why? Because people seemed to have something against homosexuality and I wanted to know why. So I went to the gay places and hung around for a year. As one might expect there were the usual talks about how gay people are oppressed in some fashion. However I noticed something else, despite what I originally thought, gay people were just as bigoted as the normal population. Non-white gays were in different places of the cafe because the white people weren’t interested in them. There were bisexuals who were afraid to come out as bisexuals because it the general consensus about bisexuals was not a kind one. Slutty and untrustworthy were two popular opinions in an anonymous study done at the time. Despite suffering discrimination in their life most had learned **nothing**. They were just as bad as their next door neighbour.

     I’ve observed similar patterns. Even when I see people promoting tolerance, it’s always for a certain group. It’s this very thought pattern that promotes the thought that we are all in groups that are in opposition to eachother. And it is so far in our nature that we cannot quite get rid of it. But I have a plan to weaken it. One already underway.

     I am going to gather a group together. It will consist of as many groups that deviate from the normal somehow. People who differ in skin colour, ideology, religion, neurology, sub-culture, alternative thinkers etc. I am going to gather as many of them together. We will hold public displays where we break bread together. We will show as many examples of mans diversity. flash dances, imprompt art displays, tea parties, speeches etc.

     I want to show the world that the Satanist, the Muslim, the Artist, the Autist, the Pagan, the Homosexual, the Lesbian, the Transgender can all break bread together. Not because we all like eachother, or even truly accept the other. It will be a show that we can all live side by side tolerating each other, and perhaps even learn from each other.

     And that those in power cannot turn us against each other.

     It wouldn’t very big (probably no more than 50) but enough to send a message. If it works, we can only try. Because that’s what we truly need, a celebration of diversity.

116. Where I see white people you see people? That’s my point. You’re treating “whiteness” as the default.

     Erasing Storm and Jubilee’s races in favor of the singular oppression of mutantness is deeply duplicitous or else (more likely) extremely ignorant by the X-Men creative teams about the way oppressions actually work and intersect.

     There have been lots of alliances between lots of individuals and groups who are marginalized in various ways. Sometimes there are tensions there too. Reducing those tensions, or those successes, to a blanket condemnation of people for not being sufficiently tolerant doesn’t seem either attentive or helpful to me.

117. You really should stop projecting on me.

     If I saw that when I see white people, I see people, it does not automatically follow that when I see black people or Asians that I do not see people as well.

     I said white people, because I was answering to your post where you believed that when I said “universality” I meant “white people”.

     This whole thing reminds me of a quote:

     “You wake up in the morning, your paint’s peeling, your curtains are gone, and the water is boiling. Which problem do you deal with first?

     None of them, your house is on fire.

     And as mutants, that’s what they have to deal with. They can’t worry about their curtains (being a woman) or the paint peeling from the wall (being non-white) but they have to worry about the house being on fire (being a mutant). Because sexism, can hurt, racism, can hurt as well. But being becomes more important because unlike gender and race, being a mutant will make people want to kill you.

     To put it closer to home, if you were a Jew or a Gypsy in Germany during the holocaust, would you be more worried about gender politics or about being a Jew or Gypsy? The latter, because while sexism hurts it wouldn’t get you sent to the gas chambers. You don’t worry about how they get entwined.

     I myself belong to certain groups that are discriminated against. I can tell you from experience, I’m more involved with the one that will cause people to beat me up in an ally.

     And that’s why I think it’s not duplicitous. They are acting as people would in a similar situation. And frankly as a comic book that’s where their responsibility should lie. With good characterisation.

     And my vision, is a precise reaction to ongoing politics where I live. It’s not a global thing. It’s a precision strike to provide a counterpoint to current political development. In small countries, it has more effect. I would not use this approach in America for instance where the size, demographic culture and political situation is different.

118. Gender politics are actually extremely important to what happens to people during genocidal violence.You might read Adam Jones’ Gender Inclusive, or look at his website Gendercide Watch. You could read Susan Brownmiller’s book “Against Our Will” as well.

     There’s very, very little about anything that happens in most iterations of the X-Men that suggests even passing knowledge of, or interest in, the experiences of actual marginalized people.

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120. Hi! Thank you for this article—it’s really important! What is the title of the Shyminsky article you’re quoting?

121. I believe the Shyminsky article is here:

     http://www.academia.edu/226078/Mutant_Readers_Reading_Mutants_Appropriation_Assimilation_and_the_X-Men

122. Ive read through all the comments so far and feel most all points on both sides have been thoroughly argued. The only thing bugging me is the repitition of people saying the xmen are all rich white men. The only rich ones are xavier, angle, and emma, the rest just kinda mooch. Something i relized after reading this article is i have trouble naming more than 4 white male xmen. Most xmen and or students of the xavier or jean grey school are either women, homosexual, a non white minority, or matated to the point where u cant tell what ethnicity they are, like with beast. In regaurds to roster diversity (which isnt really wat this article about, but it came up so much in the thread i felt compelled coment on it.) the only argument is that the most popular characters like wolverine and scott are white men and dominate peoples idea of the xmen. While i can see the intention of this article and its comentary on how much deeper the stories would be if they were black, you could say that about alot of things. Write your own story if its that important to you, painting logan and kitty black is just hestetic fanfiction.

123. “painting logan and kitty black is just hestetic fanfiction.”

     Almost all x-men stories are just fan-fic. They’re not written by the original creators. Why should Orion’s versions be less authentic or whatever than the films? Because he’s not a massive corporation? Surely that should make his work more authentic, not less.

124. Well in fairness, anybodies rendition of the xmen would be more valid than the films renditions, those things are messes. But in the comics these are established continuity and characters with fictional histories and events, you cant just photophop some panels flip the races and call the xmen anthology a failure like it was that simple. And at least comics as an industry makes strides for divesity and are flexible as far as publishing options that anybody with a good idea willing to pursue it can get published. It wouldnt be impossible for this guy to write something along the lines of what he says the xmen fail to do and get published, what is it helping to recolor some old comics. While the xmen are sometimes trotted around like a deep metaphor, this article gives far too much wieght and responsiblity to what xmen is suposed to be about. Anything that old given that much responsibility to represent minorities is gonna seem like a faliure. But know who dosent have pre-establishe characters with fictional backgrounds and a continuity to uphold? Hollywood. If you wanna get into minority underepresentation, thats a much better place to start.

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133. If the X-Men had been black, we’d be getting article after article talking about how disgustingly racist X-Men was for portraying blacks as freaks despite the strides taken in the Civil Rights Movement, and accusing white people of using the horribly offensive Magical Negro stereotype.

134. Because that’s exactly what’s happened with characters like Ms. Marvel and Black Panther.

     It’s such a burden to be asked to not only include black characters, but to avoid stereotypes and racism, I know. Pity the poor comics creators. Woe is them.

135. Word

136. Don’t want to be a privileged white guy troll nerd, but we may be over thinking this a little bit. Can’t you just enjoy (or dislike) the X-men for what it is? It’s a super hero comic written for kids. Of course it doesn’t offer a nuanced take on the civil rights movement.

137. current superhero comics are aimed at 20-40 year olds mostly.

     Also, the X-Men is constantly praised for being a metaphor of marginalization. it’s something that’s expressed explicitly by numerous writers on the comic itself and through numerous storylines. So, one of the things the X-Men is, is a conscious metaphor about marginalization, directed (mostly) at adults.

138. You guys know about the comic BLACK that just came out that tackles this exact subject?

     http://www.blacksuperpowers.com

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