Gene Yang’s American Born Chinese: A Few Observations

Posted on November 5, 2009 by Ng Suat Tong

(Black and White and Startlingly Offensive All Over – Part 5)

Readers looking for reviews, synopses and reading guides pertaining to Gene Yang’s American Born Chinese should head straight to the links above.

(1) Gene Yang’s comic concerns an American-born Chinese boy called, Jing Wang, and his journey of self-discovery through the largely white American landscape of his new high school. It has been described as a personal though not autobiographical work, the creation of which helped the author work through a number of problems.

I asked an Asian American friend who collects Yang’s art why he enjoyed American Born Chinese. He wrote back saying:

“For me, growing up Chinese in the US (and specifically, a very white town), I could relate to Gene (as the story is somewhat autobiographical). I enjoyed everything about the story: I’m a sucker for Monkey King, I liked how the three stories converged at the end…even the horrible racist caricature, something I would normally take great offense to, I thought worked well in the context of the story…I think the book resonates with anyone who has felt like an “other”…so it’s not necessarily specific to ABCs. I’ve met Gene and had some nice talks with him…Derek Kirk Kim said that ABC is a book he wish was around when he was a kid…so I’m happy for all the kids now, like my daughter, who have a book like ABC as part of their library”

I should add here that I found Yang’s book largely unprofitable both emotionally and intellectually speaking when I read it a few years back and my impression has changed little following my current reappraisal.

It is, however, notable for its close examination of the complex relationship between Asian Americans and their Eastern and Western heritage. Yang’s alteration of a famous segment from Wu Chengen’s Journey to the West (to fit in with his Catholic faith) is probably representative of this aspect of his comic. Kristy Valenti’s interview with Gene Yang in The Comics Journal #284 explains some of his motivations:

“There have already been a lot of adaptations of the Monkey King story…it’s almost like a genre in and of itself, adaptations of Journey to the West. When I was doing research on on the Monkey King, I realized this and I thought I couldn’t bring anything new to the table…I decided to approach it from an Asian-American outlook. And the way I decided to do that is by combining the two foundational stories from these two different cultures: the Monkey King story and the story of Christ…I would say it’s more C.S. Lewis-y than what you would find in medieval Catholicism.”

and later…

“…in the final scene, Jin is still speaking in English even though Wei-Chen’s speaking in Chinese….for me personally a lot of it is about finding who you are, having the definition of who you are be informed by both Western and Eastern cultures and making something new out of it. I think that’s what Asian-Americans are in the midst of doing right now…I think for Asian-Americans the temptation is to completely deny the Asian side, the Eastern side. And when you do that, you make the legends and the mythologies and the culture of your parents into these stereotypes. So that’s why I had the Monkey King become Chin-Kee.”

I don’t know if Journey to the West can be described as “the” foundational story of the Chinese people but it is certainly one of the most important works of classical Chinese literature. Here are some scenes from Yang’s comic juxtaposed with corresponding episodes from a famous adaptation:

[The following images are from a low quality English-Chinese bootleg translation. The original comic was published by the Shanghai Fine Arts Publishing House.]

Over the course of his comic, Yang not only relates his slightly altered version of the origins of the Monkey King (otherwise known as the Monkey God in many parts of Asia) but also transforms Monkey into a distant cousin of his protagonist – a caricature of all things Chinese.

This cousin, Chin-Kee, represents Jin Wang’s grotesque view of his Asian heritage as well as his acceptance of various stereotypical views promulgated by Western society. It is only following Jin Wang’s epiphany at the close of Yang’s comic that Chin-Kee’s true and more illustrious identity is revealed.

(2) As would be expected, the liberal use of racial slurs (“chink”, “nip” etc) by Asian Americans and white Americans (both in Yang’s comic and in reality) is something which occurs rarely in Chinese majority nations. The former group probably feel they are in the process of reclaiming such terminology in the way African Americans have sought to reclaim the word “nigger”. I can’t say that I find this approach particularly useful but then again, I’m not Asian American. If anything, it’s a bit jarring for me to hear these terms strewn about generously in conversations or in on-line chat rooms.

In Singapore (where I live), the racial slurs are directed at other minority races (Caucasians, Malays, Indians and even mainland Chinese). Singapore is an ethnically diverse country where the lingua franca is English and the population over 70% Chinese. Approximately one third of its population of 5 million has foreign citizenship, a factor which has led in recent years to growing social tension. It has to be said though that the situation is considerably less acute than the discrimination directed against foreigners in South Korea (which is more racially homogeneous) as described in a recent New York Times article concerning a South Korean woman and her Indian boyfriend.

For better or worse, Singapore has long had strict laws against racial incitement as demonstrated by the recent arrest of a number of bloggers for racist content on their websites. The bloggers were Chinese and their targets Malay (who constitute 15% of the population).

For some, this would be justification enough for William Gibson’s somewhat exaggerated and completely unrelated article on Singapore for Wired magazine (“Disney Land with the Death Penalty”) where he writes, “…and you come to suspect that the reason you see so few actual police [in Singapore] is that people here all have, to quote William Burroughs, “the policeman inside.” Of course in this case, the police were having a ball of a time on-line.

Singapore’s Minister for Law reiterated this stance in a Q & A at the New York State Bar Association (NYSBA) Rule of Law Plenary Session in October 2009:

“Freedom of choice must include the right to make bad choices. But where it impacts society, and where it impacts on key aspects, say for example, stability, society should have a right to have a say. Let me explain that by specific reference to an illustration. Let’s say, hate speech on the internet or publications. If anyone stood up and said I am expressing or I am exercising my right of free speech by saying that “all Jews are hateful”, or “all Muslims are bad’, we will arrest and charge him. Because for us, that freedom of expression does not extend to this sort of hate speech where violence against a particular ethnicity or religion or belief can be encouraged. And we have charged people for putting up such notices. We are particularly sensitive about it in our Chinese, Muslim, Hindu context. People have been charged for putting up notices against one or the other ethnic communities where it goes beyond some expression of opinion to incite them towards violence.”

(3) These are moves which would meet with strong resistance in a liberal Western society. While Yang directs a large amount of his ire at Patrick Oliphant in the pages of his book, there is no indication that he would deny Oliphant the right to disseminate his brand of “racism”.

Over the course of American Born Chinese, Yang not only names his racially challenged high school after Oliphant…

…but also quotes directly from one of Oliphant’s offending editorial cartoons.

Oliphant is of course well known for using racial caricatures in his cartoons. In this case, his animosity was directed at the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

Oliphant’s cartoon is objectively offensive and designed as such. In fact, the only adequate gauge for its effectiveness lies in its ability to draw a response from its target (in this case, not so much the CCP which could care less but Chinese in general). Its ability to draw the knowing nods of the majority of Americans who have a deep antipathy towards the CCP is of course important but hardly newsworthy and hence only a small measure of its success.

Controversy is mother’s milk to the political cartoonist. This is amply demonstrated in an article for the New York Times by Francis X. Clines who writes:

“Mr. Oliphant feels that the ”confrontational art” of political cartooning needs a boost from provocative work like Mr. Genn’s if it is to survive the homogenizing pressures of American culture. ”We are drowning in political correctness and somebody’s got to kill it,” he said. ”It’s the ruination of my business,” he added, citing individual newspapers that withhold his more controversial work or quickly apologize for it when the first complaint is lodged.”

And later…

“Mr. Oliphant’s inclination is to pick on everyone and never apologize for what he does. ”You have to get mad in this business, work yourself up to a boil once a day,” he said, as if this precious work dynamic can only be dulled by trying to keep in mind the multiple sensitivities of his variegated audience.”

It must be said though that such cartoons are as demanding on the satirical and artistic abilities of the cartoonist as drawing a large, beautifully cross-hatched penis on the editorial page of the New York Times.

It is not too difficult to see why Oliphant’s cartoon was seen to be threatening by some Asians living in America – that is, individuals with a vested interest in making the U.S. a more accommodating place for Asians. For the majority of Chinese throughout the world, however, Oliphant’s cartoon may simply confirm deep seated prejudices against Caucasians and the West.

[Not a political cartoon but a famous soap advertisement poster.]

With the passage of time, such cartoons may come to be seen as a marginally useful cultural and historical markers. Just as the Africans in Tintin in the Congo or Ebony in Will Eisner’s The Spirit continue to provide silent rebukes several decades down the line, such cartoons highlight the failings of a significant number of modern day political cartoonists. This is a form which consistently elevates superficiality and sensationalism over depth and intelligence. I for one will not mourn its passing.

[A positive image by a slightly more enlightened cartoonist, Thomas Nast.]

______________
Update by Noah: The whole racism roundtable is here.

I Demand More Patriotic Comics, Damn It (Black and White and Startlingly Offensive All Over)

Posted on November 4, 2009 by Noah Berlatsky

We’ve had a lot of interesting comments on the race and comics roundtable, some of which point in similar directions — so rather than going through and saying the same thing over and over, I thought I’d try to hit some main points in this post.

So to start with, I thought I’d address a point Uland brought up:

lso, we live in a Western Republic, founded by Europeans and still majority European ( not for long, I know). That entertainment and art follow, I don’t think we should be surprised by.

It’s not like we’re willing to go to Ireland and demand that they adapt the way they tell stories to make Eastern European immigrants feel more culturally powerful than they are.

This is more or less, I think, a variation on Pat Buchanan’s, “Traditional Americans Are Losing Their Nation, (though without the apocalyptic vision and the implicit clal to arms that makes Buchanan’s stance here truly execrable.) Basically, the argument is that we, as a nation, are white; that’s our cultural heritage, our true American European self, and so it’s natural to focus on that. Other traditions, or people, are extraneous to who we really are.

Andrew Sullivan had a fine rebuttal of this position:

From its very beginning, after all, America was a profoundly black country as well.
This took a while for an Englishman to grasp upon arriving here, because it’s so easy to carry with you all the subconscious cultural baggage you grew up with. England, after all, is deeply Anglo-Saxon. It makes some sense to refer to England’s roots and ethnic identity as white, its language as English, its inheritance as a deep mixture of Northern European peoples – the Angles and the Saxons and the Normans and the Celts. And superficially, English-speaking white Americans might seem in the same cultural boat as white English people, dealing with a relatively new multiculturalism in an increasingly diverse and multi-racial society. And at first blush, you almost sink into that lazy and stupid assumption, especially if you arrive in Boston, as I did, and carried all the usual European prejudices, as I did.
The English, lulled by their marination in American pop culture from infancy, and beguiled by the same language, can live out their days in this country never actually noting that it is an alien land – stranger than you might have ever imagined, crueler than you realized, but somehow also more inspiring than you ever thought possible. This is the America I am trying to make my home, after 25 years. It is not the America of Pat Buchanan’s or John Derbyshire’s fantasies.
It struck me almost at once, if only in the music I heard all around me – and then in so many other linguistic, cultural, rhetorical, spiritual ways: white Americans do not realize how black they are. Even their whiteness is partly scavenged from the fear of – and attraction to – its opposite. Even something as stereotypically white as American Catholicism, I discovered to my amazement, was also black from the very start. (Yes, those Maryland slaves. If you’ve never been to a Gospel Mass in an ancient black Catholic parish, try it some time.)

And it’s not just that America’s black. America’s also Amerindian. And, of course, and very much so when you’re talking about comics, Jewish. In short, America is it’s own culture — and what’s most distinctly American about it is its syncretism. There’s nobody more American, as just one example, than Rosa Parks. Hers is a tale of the plucky salt of the earth overcoming the unjust vagaries of the fascist state. What’s more American than that?

So the plea for comics to stop being so unutterably, lamely pale isn’t a plea for them to be less American. It’s a suggestion that they be *more* American.

So why does it matter if comics are more American. Who cares? Uland puts it this way:

I know black comic fans. They’re nerds, just like a lot of white fans. I think to suggest to them that they require a black superhero, or a black creator to feel some kind of connection to that material is pretty insulting, and it’s just not evident. You can’t say that if comics were more minority friendly, more minorities would be involved. By that logic, white people, as a rule would be far more interested in comics than they are. They’re not. Comics are for children, slightly fucked up adults, or slightly pretentious fucked up adults.

Ed Howard comes at it from a different place, but arrives at a similar conclusion:

Modern superhero comics, with few enough exceptions, are pretty dismal affairs that don’t really address anything of substance, and where any kind of risk-taking or experimentation is pretty soundly discouraged, for all sorts of economic reasons. Why should race be any different? I mean, if we’re talking about Supergirl, as the last post in this roundtable did, doesn’t a book like that have broader limitations and failings than just the failure to represent ethnic diversity properly? It’s rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

For both Uland and Ed, comics are essentially debased and irrelevant. Talking about race is therefore pointless, because only a select few fucked up individuals are going to read them anyway.

But…if everyone agrees that mainstream comics are an (ahem) ghetto of mediocrity…how did that happen? Why are they like that?

Let’s take a brief detour, and talk about another extremely white genre — country music. It’s not a secret especially why country is largely white. It’s because of systematic racism and segregation in the early part of the 20th century, when the genre was formed — and of the split between hillbilly and race records which was explicitly segregationist. It’s persisted because of genre coherence, white populism, and (I presume) black alienation because of white populism. It isn’t about dictats handed down from on high, necessarily, but it is about racism, and a history of racism.

Now, even though country was born out of segregation, it wasn’t actually European. It’s roots were as much in the blues and jazz as in Irish or European folk song, and even it’s instrumentation and vocal styles (from the banjo to Jimmie Rodgers) were integrated. And that’s where a lot of the genre’s energy came from; form a mixing of white and black styles which produced western swing and bluegrass and hillbilly boogie and rockabilly. After rock took over most of the syncretic energy of white pop, though, country kind of flailed, turning more and more to nostalgia, unable to assimilate the changes in black music (like rap) that were leading the way for pop. And as a result you got a lot of really shitty music (country is kind of trying in various ways now to make peace with black pop, and I think country radio is more listenable at the moment than it’s been in some time.)

The point of all that, I’d argue, at least, is that comics aren’t so insular that any discussion of race is irrelevant. Rather, they’re insular because they have, for a really long time now, more or less deliberately cut themselves off from vast swathes of audience and inspiration.

Steven Grant in his contribution to the roundtable says:

white male heroes must be heroic at all times. I never got that pressure when writing minority or female characters; they were “allowed” (mainly by lower editorial expectations, I think) to make more human decisions for more human reasons. It wasn’t that editors were either specifically racist or felt those characters should have greater emotional latitude.

Steven’s point is that expectation are lower for non-white characters, which is no doubt true. But I wonder if part of what he was experiencing was also just the kind of opening up of possibilities you can get when you start having conversations or interactions with other folks. Writing about somebody who is not all white all the time isn’t a big step, but it is a step towards the kind of cultural interplay that gave us bluegrass, and jazz, and fusion, and graffitti, and blaxploitation, and manga, and, for that matter, in many ways, Superman. That’s where the most exciting American creative endeavors have come from, always.

In this sense, Uland is precisely and staggeringly wrong when he claims that if people liked their own culture best, then there would be more white people reading comics. On the contrary, white Americans don’t read comics because *it’s not their culture.* It’s too white; it’s too boring; it’s too irrelevant and male and stodgy. White Americans, like all Americans, prefer things like, oh, say, pop music or rap music — art that mixes and matches influences and perspectives in exciting ways; that uses that mixing as a spur to the imagination.

In short, comics appeal to nobody and are irrelevant because they appeal to nobody, and are irrelevant. They sit there staring at their navels, and, as a result, the only folks who want to engage with them are people who want to sit around staring at their navels. This isn’t a problem for the culture at large — it’s not a “oh, no, comics are racist — it’s unjust!” On the contrary, it’s a problem *for comics.* When Vom Marlowe talks about being turned off by the blinding paleness of mainstream comics, she’s not talking as a member of the PC police, spoiling everyone’s fun. She’s talking as *a potential fan*, someone who has an interest in the medium and who feels excluded because the world she lives in and cares about and likes to interact with is being gratuitously ignored. And you know what? Most people feel like that, which is why comics are continuing their ongoing downward spiral into ever more pointlessly insular clusterfuckery.

Racism: Two-Fisted Solutions in the Mighty Marvel Manner (Black and White and Startlingly Offensive All Over)

Posted on November 4, 2009 by Richard Cook

Superheroes solve problems by hitting them very hard. This strategy works will enough when they’re fighting mad scientists, robots, or radioactive dinosaurs, but it doesn’t seem particularly well-suited for persistent social ills like racism. How are superheroes supposed to deal with a problem that has no specific face to punch? The answer, of course, is to give racism a face.

By the 1960s, the Civil Rights Movement had gained a great deal of political and social influence, but racism was still widespread. With so much national attention focused on race relations, it was only a matter of time before Marvel attempted to address the issue within the pages of its superhero books. Marvel had prided itself on publishing the superhero stories of “our” universe, completely unlike the silly, fantastical universe of DC Comics. And since many of the staffers and creators at Marvel were Jewish guys from New York City, it’s not surprising that they were firmly in favor of racial equality.

The first Marvel comic that specifically dealt with racism was Fantastic Four #21 (1963). Co-written by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, this story pitted the FF against the ruthless Hate-Monger!

It’s not a bad costume for a racist: there’s the KKK pointed hood, some chain-mail (racists love references to the Teutonic Knights), a torch for lighting crosses, and a gun for shooting minorities. All set! The story begins with the FF up to their usual hijinks, but their fun is interrupted by the Thing who’s pissed that a mysterious figure known as the Hate-Monger is stirring up racial tension in New York City. Invisible Girl doesn’t think the FF should get involved because she’s a selfish jerk who’s never heard of Martin Niemöller. But she gets overruled by the boys and off they go to confront the Hate-Monger, currently mongering hate in Manhattan.

Racist he may be, but you have to admit he puts on an elaborate outdoor performance. The crowd is instantly swayed by his words, and they begin to attack nearby foreigners, though given the limitations of Kirby’s style, I’m not quite sure how they can tell this guy is a foreigner.

Maybe only foreigners wear bright blue suits? When the FF intervenes, the Hate-Monger blasts them with his Hate Ray, which causes them to start fighting amongst themselves. Apparently, hate isn’t so much a product of a bad upbringing as a product of evil science. The Hate-Monger plans to keep the FF busy with their in-fighting while he foments an anti-American revolution in the made-up country of San Gusto.

Obviously, anti-Americanism has to the be the product of vile evil-doers using Hate Rays. It couldn’t possibly be blowback from years of American interventionism. Speaking of which, Colonel Nick Fury comes up with a convoluted scheme to get the Fantastic Four to San Gusto so they can crush this hateful uprising. After beating on the rebels for a bit, Mr. Fantastic stumbles upon the Hate-Monger’s base and figures out the bad guy’s master plan (it involves bouncing hate beams off the moon. Yes, really.) and then he cures himself and his teammates with anti-hate pills (Yes, really). Then the FF and Nick Fury kick the crap out of the Hate-Monger’s stormtroopers. When the Hate-Monger tries to use his Hate Ray, the Invisible Girl forces him to blast his own men, who immediately shoot him dead. Poetic justice strikes again! But there’s one last question to answer: who is the Hate-Monger?

So let’s recap: Adolph Hitler survived World War II, reinvented himself as a super-villain named the Hate-Monger, and used his Hate Ray to start an anti-American revolution in a banana republic so he could use that country as a base to beam hate to the rest of the world. And by killing Hitler, the Fantastic Four solved the problem of racism … for three years.

Marvel dealt with the issue of race relations again in Avengers #32-33 (1966), by Stan Lee and Don Heck. The story begins with a hate group called the Sons of the Serpent, an obvious send-up of the KKK, viciously attacking a foreigner in a dark alley. And because I read Fantastic Four #21 first, I know that this man is a foreigner because he wears a tacky suit.

Meanwhile, Goliath has increased his size to ten feet tall but he’s now stuck at that height. Needless to say, this makes relations with his girlfriend the Wasp somewhat difficult. After several pages of whiny self-pity someone gets the bright idea to call another scientist to see if he can help. And so Dr. Bill Foster is introduced to the Marvel readership, and he’s black! At first, I thought it was cool that Marvel would introduce a black scientist and not comment on his race, but a few pages later that’s exactly what they do. While walking home from Goliath’s laboratory, Dr. Foster is ambushed and beaten up by the Sons of the Serpent. This leads to the obligatory righteous indignation from the hero. The dramatic pause before announcing the name of his team is a nice touch.

After sending Bill Foster home, Goliath meets up with the Avengers and they decide to investigate the Sons. At the same time, the sinister General Chen from an unnamed country that’s clearly China is arriving in New York, where he plans to give a speech at the United Nations. Issue 32 wraps up with Captain America captured by the Sons of the Serpent.

On a side note, some of you may have heard of a certain comics blogger, who shall go unnamed, with this crazy notion that old superhero comics were kinda queer. But I dare him to find anything homoerotic about the opening splash page of Avengers #33!

Okay, so maybe Captain America is pinned spread-eagle against a wall while a serpent-themed villain gloats with orgasmic glee while holding a phallic-shaped object. But other than that, where’s the gay?

With Cap as a hostage, the Sons of the Serpent plan to force the Avengers to speak out in their favor, knowing that the fickle public will immediately do whatever C-list heroes tell them to do. Meanwhile, the inscrutable General Chen plans to use the activities of the Sons to discredit the United States at the UN.

Note that the American diplomats are not so much concerned with the actual crimes of the Sons as they are with the fact that the crimes make the U.S. look bad to the rest of the world (over a decade earlier, the Justice Department expressed similar worries when it submitted an amicus brief to the Supreme Court when it was considering Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka. The brief cited a statement by then Secretary of State Dean Acheson, who asserted that racial discrimination “gives unfriendly governments the most effective kind of ammunition for their propaganda warfare, … and jeopardizes the effective maintenance of our moral leadership of the free and democratic nations of the world.)” (The full amicus brief can be found here).

Getting back to the story, Goliath and the Wasp arrive at the big press conference where they’re supposed to offer allegiance to the Sons, but they stall for time while fellow Avenger Hawkeye goes to rescue Captain America. The story gets a bit wonky for a bit, but it eventually ends with the Avengers beating the crap out of the Sons and capturing their leader. And who is the leader of America’s worst hate group? It’s the nefarious General Chen!

So the Chinese are to blame! Some of you may be thinking that it’s nonsensical to blame Asians for the racial conflict between whites and blacks, but you’re forgetting that the Chinese are Communists. That means they’re bad.

After reading these two stories back-to-back, I noticed three common factors in how they approached racial conflict. The first is that they are exclusively concerned with how progressive white men respond to violent racism. After all, both the Fantastic Four and the Avengers are composed entirely of white guys with one token girl apiece. The only notable minority character is Bill Foster, but he’s little more than a Noble Black Men who gets assaulted, thus providing a motive for the Avengers to get involved. The comics also draw an unambiguous distinction between the law-abiding, racially tolerant (white) heroes and the racist villains.

Both stories also portray the source of American racism as foreign. In Fantastic Four, racist violence is sparked by none other than Adolph freakin’ Hitler. In Avengers, a general from Red China foments racism to make America look bad. This leads naturally to the conclusion that racism itself is foreign to America. Now I’m sure that Stan Lee and friends were well aware that racism existed in the U.S. long before Hitler or Red China came along. But it’s not a part of what they portray as the “real” America. To put it differently, as a rule America is tolerant and equal; racism must be an exception to this rule because it’s inherently un-American.

Another factor in both stories is that crowds display racist behavior only after they’ve been influenced by external forces. In Avengers, the Sons of the Serpent attempt to sway the public through a popular superhero team. In Fantastic Four, the external manipulation is technological. There’s an implicit rejection of the argument that racism can arise from ideas held by the majority. Instead, the public in Marvel America is fairly tolerant unless a foreign group manipulates them. This reinforces the idea that racism is alien to American society.

To sum up, these comics create a dichotomy between the majority of white Americans, who are tolerant and law-abiding under normal circumstances, and a minority of violent racists. The white superheroes, in particular, embody the highest values of America. The racists are fringe extremists, linked with hostile nations and totalitarian ideologies.

I think most people would agree that this treatment of racism is simplistic, at best. But the target audience for these books is children, and an argument can certainly be made that concrete examples of heroes beating the crap out of racist villains discourages racism in young, impressionable readers. And if racism really was limited to violent loudmouths, then there would be nothing wrong with these comics at all.

But these comics are problematic exactly because racism is a far more ubiquitous than mob violence and secret societies. Racism is a system that permeates numerous institutions and social structures, and an individual doesn’t necessarily need to have racist attitudes in order to perpetuate racial inequality. Take housing segregation as an example. American neighborhoods remain deeply segregated along racial lines. Yet most white homeowners (and realtors) are not card-carrying members of the KKK. They participate in a system that excludes blacks from white neighborhoods due to indifference rather than hate. And because many whites rarely come into contact with blacks on a regular basis, they aren’t even aware of any racial injustice (check out Noah’s review of “Sundown Towns” for more on this).*

Comics that associates racism exclusively with Nazis or similar extremists while ignoring the far more significant impact of systemic racism are not providing a valuable moral lesson. Rather, they encourage readers to pat their own progressive backs while doing nothing to actually challenge a system that sustains racial inequality. According to these comics, if you condemn hate groups and don’t go around assaulting immigrants, then you’re not a racist. And if you’re not a racist, then somebody else is to blame for the pervasive effects of racism. And when the vast majority of Americans refuse to assume any responsibility for problems like segregated neighborhoods, these problems never get addressed.

Superheroes solve problems by hitting them very hard. But when it comes to racism, Captain America might have to smack around a lot more people than usual. It’s much more comforting to just blame it all on Hitler.

*Thanks to Noah for the links

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Update by Noah: You can read the whole roundtable here.

Black and White and Startlingly Offensive All Over, Part Three: The Ambivalence Trap

Posted on November 3, 2009 by Steven Grant

It’s easy enough to rake comics over the coals for their viciously racist past, for all the loinclothed cannibalistic African savages with bones through their noses rampaging across jungle stories, for the puffy-lipped google-eyed Ebony “Mistah Spirit”ing this and “Mistah Spirit”ing that. (Ebony’s replacement, the parka-garbed, spear-toting Eskimo tot Blubber was hardly an improvement, though he was quieter, nor can replacing both with white kid Sammy exactly be seen as a step up.) Certainly there are mountains of that material littering comics history – jeez, Winsor McKay, practically the father of comics, whose whole worldview, at least as expressed through his work, can be summed up as whimsical, turned out a considerable body of appallingly racist material all by himself, from his first strip Tales Of The Jungle Imps through the odd support character Flip in Little Nemo In Slumberland – and from our vantage it’s easy to ignore the cultural context. Ebony originated as a horrific stereotype but Eisner, embarrassed by the character in his twilight years, was correct in reminding critics Ebony was largely the best of a bad lot. Hitler may have given comics their key supervillain, but the pulp magazine delivered comics’ key conspiracy, the Yellow Peril, a compartmentalized edition of the greater paranoia, fear of the Non-White Races.

If anyone thinks I’m inventing this conflation, I direct you to Robert E. Howard’s 1929 pulp novel, Skull-Face, whose eponymous Atlantean wizard rises from an eons’ long sleep in the ocean depths to be

“the leader and instigator of a world-wide movement such as the world has never seen before. He plots, in a word, the overthrow of the white races!

His ultimate aim is a black empire, with himself as emperor of the world! And to that he has banded together in one monstrous conspiracy the black, the brown and the yellow… When it comes, I look for a simultaneous uprising, against white supremacy, of all the colored races – races who, in [World War I], learned the white men’s ways of battle, and who, led by such a man as Kathulos and armed with white men’s finest weapons, will be almost invincible.

… I know not… what power Kathulos has that draws together black men and yellow men to serve him – that unites world-old foes. Hindu, Moslem and pagan are among his followers. And back in the mists of the East where mysterious and gigantic forces are at work, this uniting is culminating on a monstrous scale…”

And on and on, feverishly describing how western civilization and all its achievements and advances out of superstition will be wiped from the earth, and what few white men remain will be made slaves while white women become sex toys etc. (Much of the Yellow Peril’s unspoken appeal was this thrill of illicit, if vicarious, sex.) This was hardly original with Howard, who wrote Skull-Face as a Fu Manchu pastiche, and Fu author Sax Rohmer inspired multitudes of pulp writers a lot more garish than Howard, and Rohmer was only expressing the paranoid undercurrents of imperialism, the impossible, unthinkable fear that inferior peoples might reject the “gift” of westernization and someday rise up against their imperial masters. We’re not exactly free from those undercurrents even today; the national (or cultural, if you want to include western Europe with America) horror of Muslims in the wake of 9-11 was out of all proportion to the event, pulled off by a miniscule and not especially influential Muslim splinter group if they can be considered “true” Muslims at all, and the specter of the “destruction” of Western Civilization is pretty common these days in right wing literature. The idea of the “non-white peril” is so much a part of our current political background noise that most of us now only hear it as, no pun intended, white noise.

Neither Howard nor Rohmer were likely frothing racists; if you assess his output collectively, Howard seems to have been rather ambivalent toward race. Whether he scorns non-white races or praises them, and he’s no stranger to either, depends almost entirely on plot necessity. (In fact, he tends to praise more often where it serves no specific plot purpose but fleshes out characters.) By and large, pulp magazines were no place for progressive social views, and comics inherited that along with a lot of other pulp baggage, less an agenda than an acquiesence to the “white noise” of the day. The heyday of the Klan wasn’t that far behind Depression era America, and while a few Americans looked with trepidation at the rise of Nazi Germany, many more fretted over a militarized Japan. Race paranoia made for useful political ploys; to facilitate public outcry against it in 1937, hemp was “officially” renamed marijuana specifically to evoke images of Mexican drug dealers seducing virginal white womanhood with it at the same time pot was being reimaged as a “Negro” narcotic, for the same basic allusion. While I wouldn’t doubt there were flagrantly racist (meaning beyond the “white noise” systemic racism of the era, with specific intent to do harm to one or more minorities) editors and publishers involved in pulps and comics, it strikes me as likely, given my own experience, that ambivalence was the controlling factor in their portrayals of race.

Ambivalence is the great underwriter of systemic racism, found at every level of pop culture, and it’s particularly effective because it shifts the blame and transforms the enforcers into helpless victims of the process. Mainly, stereotypes are enforced not because it’s easy or because anyone involved in the creative process necessarily likes the stereotypes, but because the audience would be offended by any digression from the stereotype. In pop culture, the consumer is king – except the consumer has no direct input into content. Not “offending” – ie. challenging the preconceptions of – the consumer is standard operating procedure in media even today. While the logic flaw is that editors (and, by extension, the talent creating the work for the magazines they edit, whose real audience is the editor) begin from a preconception of what audience preconceptions are. That they’re frequently not wrong is where the vicious circle principle cuts in: editors make editorial decisions based on preconceptions of what consumers want, the material reinforces consumer preconceptions, and the purchase of the material reinforces editorial preconceptions.

When it came to race in comics, positive portrayals generally caught a lot more flak than negative ones. How many complaints did all the quasi-naked cannibals in jungle comics generate over the years? But when the astronaut in a ’50 EC Comics science fiction strip- integration/racial tolerance metaphor took off his helmet in the last panel to reveal he was a black man the Comics Code tried (unsuccessfully, fortunately) to get his race changed. DC’s early ’70s introduction of John Stewart as “the black Green Lantern,” the company’s first prominently displayed black hero, prompted a major distribution chain to dump the book, tailspinning it to cancellation. I doubt it’s accidental the Black Panther, Marvel’s debut black hero and briefly The Black Leopard when his original name became politically hot, was racially concealed head to toe on covers, while Kirby’s original design featured a revealing half-mask. His primary black foe, the feral Man-Ape, an almost perfect rendition of the voodoo/cannibal African stereotype, appeared prominently on covers without raising a retailer eyebrow. Really think the lesson most editors would learn from that is to buck the system?

I have to say I didn’t give a lot of thought to matters of race when I began writing comics in the late ’70s. (Then again, I had a rather sheltered childhood; the only time I ever heard the N word was in reference to stable boy statues – and all those where I grew up had white skin. That’s Wisconsin for you.) But it didn’t take me long to figure out minorities and women were more interesting characters to write, because unlike with white male heroes editors didn’t demand they be heroic at all times. This occurred to me after I wrote a Spider-Man story where he gets involved in a fight he really has no stake in besides pride, and when he realizes he can continue the fight or catch his cross-country flight home, he takes the flight. It got published, but I was thereafter told in no uncertain terms that no matter what Spider-Man does not run away from a fight! There was no use in arguing that when I grew up on the Lee-Ditko Spider-Man, he was no stranger to running away from fights. AKA white male heroes must be heroic at all times. I never got that pressure when writing minority or female characters; they were “allowed” (mainly by lower editorial expectations, I think) to make more human decisions for more human reasons. It wasn’t that editors were either specifically racist or felt those characters should have greater emotional latitude.

They were just ambivalent toward those characters, without thinking about it one way or the other, and they weren’t ambivalent about white male heroes. Corporate think was that audiences expected their heroes to be heroes. It’s just their heroes were white. It’s no secret that white heroes (though not all white heroes) outsold minority heroes; the question’s why. Because white readers refused minority characters? Because minority readers had no interest in minority characters? Because the writers, artists and editors handling those characters perpetuated stereotypes that miffed the minorities they were intended to appeal to? All of the above?

Bear in mind this was in the late ’70s/early ’80s when comics and American culture in general were finally willing to at least pay lip service to the notion of multiculturalism. (Nascent MTV was still unwilling to scare off viewers with “black” videos, though.) Things like early white writers having Luke Cage deride himself as “just a big dumb monkey,” though appalling, usually weren’t even vestigial racism. They were mis-transplanted Sgt. Furyisms. Then there was the “big picture” syndrome, perpetuating racism as counter-racism: Fu Manchu and the Yellow Claw can still dress in Mandarin drag, having fifteen inch fingernails and a string beard to match, and concoct hideous giant venomous spiders in their labs while preaching the destruction of the decadent West, ‘cuz, see, here’s heroic gi-clad (half-)Asian Shang Chi heroically defending our way of life, and there’s heroic American superspy Jimmy Woo, who looks just like us. If that’s not balance, what is?!

Jimmy Woo’s a key figure here, not because he’s a heroic Asian but because he’s a bland heroic Asian. In comics, the opposite of racism isn’t anti-racism but genericism. The problem, again in American pop culture across the board, is that middle class white America has always been the baseline. In comics in particular, with its natural emphasis on iconography, the appeal of racial stereotypes in most instances is less racist agenda than departure from the baseline to spice things up. Steve Englehart’s reconstruction of The Falcon as a superflyin’ pimp transformed into just the sort of Sidney Poitier wannabe to pluck Captain America’s liberal heartstrings is merely acknowledgement that pimps are more interesting than social workers. But that’s an underlying problem of minority characters in comics. To the extent they skew toward the baseline, they’re dull. To the extent they skew away from the baseline, they veer toward stereotype. (In comics, we call stereotypical characters “iconic.”) A side effect of multiculturalism is the wider variety of stereotypes, “good” and “bad,” we now have to choose from.

The baseline is its own curse. White males don’t bear the onus of “white issues”; minority characters are rarely considered “real” unless they confront issues pertinent to their race or sexuality. (Even most gay characters identified in comics eventually get an After School Special confronting gaybashing or AIDS, like those are the most overriding elements of gay life.) To the extent minority characters behave like white male characters, or don’t confront their identifying issues they may as well be white male characters. It’s a catch-22 of dealing with race and gender, again not restricted to comics. But in that strange way it reinforces the baseline and identifies it as “normal,” the same way the tumult of American life over the past 50 years has widely reinforced a flawed perception of ’50s America, which was in no way free of tumult, as “normal.”

As others have mentioned, we now look at The Spirit’s Ebony White, Tarzan’s black cannibal warriors, yellow-skinned Ming The Merciless slavering over Dale Arden’s porcelain beauty, and a million bloodthirsty redskins in a million cowboy comics, roll our eyes, wistfully shake our heads and write it all off as (collectible) products of a “simpler” time. But though the product has adapted to the times the market forces that produced all that and more are still with us, and as long as iconography is the main selling point of comics they’re going to be. The logic loop of “the Market” is driven not by hate but by ambivalence, swinging whichever way the wind blows at any given moment in pursuit of sales, of tapping into the zeitgeist, but in practice ambivalence is only half a step up from hate, and not necessarily preferable just because it means no harm.

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Update by Noah: You can read all posts in the roundtable here.

Update2 by Noah: Steven is too much of a gentleman to promote himself, but if you are not reading his column at CBR, you’re missing out.

Black and White and Startlingly Offensive All Over: Part Two, Mainstream Comic Breakdown

Posted on November 3, 2009 by vommarlowe

I’m going to be talking today about race in mainstream comics. Not all of them, just the handful I’ve picked up and read, and blogged about.

Before anyone protests that I haven’t read enough of the story to know about the level of racism in the comics, I’d like to explain that I’m not looking for personal racism. I’m looking at institutional racism. Institutional racism is very different from personal racism. In personal racism, a creator’s beliefs about another group of people’s inherent inferiority come out in racial slurs, whacko depictions, and so on. There is usually (not always but often) a level of consciousness about the racism. Black people are evil Nazis! (See Noah’s post on Wonder Woman.)

Institutional racism is not like that at all. Oh, there can be instances where small cogs in the wheel add to the overall racist nature of the machine, but it’s mostly about the grinding pattern of racism. That pattern becomes a paradigm, a way things are, a view of the world. Sometimes that view of the world colors things so sharply that it blocks out reality.

That’s what I’d like to look at today.

By and large, our media industry has a white point of view, regardless of the color of the creators or even its recipients (yes, there are exceptions). This includes comics. By point of view, I mean that the main character, through whom we view the story, is presumed white. White is the default point of view, in the same way that the default point of view is male. Yes, there are exceptions, which is why the term ‘chick flick’ came about. People call them chick flicks to designate that they are not normal. There’s no gender labeling of summer blockbusters. We don’t call the latest Exploding City and People With Guns PG movie scheduled for Thanksgiving Day release a ‘guy film’, because that would be pointless. In the same way, we have Blaxploitation movies, because white movies are the default.

Again, I would like to assert that I am not accusing any comic creator, be they artist, writer, colorist, inker, letterer or editor, of personal racism. I don’t know them and have no idea of their own race, political views, or personal actions. I assume, instead, that they are good people doing the craft to the best of their ability.

What I’d like to look at today are the comics that I have read or that I have picked up to read. These are current releases, picked because I thought the covers were pretty or they sounded good. They were not chosen on the basis of writing a column about racism in mainstream comics. They are, in short, my normal reading material. This is important, because what I want to look at is not whether these comics are racist in the sense that Noah’s beloved Wonder Woman was, but whether they are institutionally racist.

Does the white point of view (regardless of its origin) color over the reality, the accuracy, of the worlds that these comics inhabit?

I don’t know, although I have my guesses.

So let’s start with Supergirl (#44 October 2009). This takes place in Metropolis, and thus the analog is Chicago (I grew up near Clark’s stomping grounds, and the big city is Chicago.) Chicago’s demographics are roughly: 42% White, 37% Black, 4% Asian, 14% other races, 3% two or more races. 26% are Hispanic, of any race. This is from the 2000 census. The nature of the census makes counting Hispanics difficult in some ways, but I am assuming that some of the percentages of Whites and Other races make up the some of the Hispanic numbers. It would be unusual in my experience for Hispanics to count themselves as Black unless they were of mixed parentage that includes Black.

The demographics of Supergirl are as follows:

Scene 1

Whites: 10 (83%)

Blacks: 1 (8%)

Hispanic (a benefit of the doubt guess): 1 (8%)

Scene 2

Whites: 13 (100%)

Scene 3

Whites: 5 (83%)

Blacks: 1 (17%)

Scene 4

Whites: 6 (100%)

Scene 5/6:

Whites: 19 (100%)

Well, allrighty then. Not exactly reality is it? The city is totally inaccurate.

Let’s switch to the X-Men (X-Men Legacy issue 226). This episode takes place in San Francisco. I’m going to quote Wikipedia on the demographics, because they write it very well:

Like many larger U.S. cities, San Francisco is a minority-majority city, as non-Hispanic whites comprise less than half of the population. The 2005–2007 American Community Survey estimated that 45.0% of the population was made up of non-Hispanic whites.^[116] Asians make up 33.1% of the population; people of Chinese descent constitute the largest single ethnic group in San Francisco at about one-fifth of the population. Hispanics of any race make up 14.0% of the population. San Francisco’s black population has declined in recent decades, from 13.4% of the city in 1970 to 7.3% of the population in 2007.^[116]

For this episode, I’m going to skip counting any person who is a non-natural color (e.g., green, crayola toned, etc).

Scene 1:

Whites: 4 (100%)

Scene 3:

Whites: 34 (97%)

Blacks: 1 (3%)

Note: a crowd scene

Scene 4:

Whites: 5 (100%)

Scene 5:

Whites: 37 (81%)

Blacks: 7 (19%)

Note: Also a crowd scene

You think San Francisco is 97% white? Really?! And again at 81%.

Note that there were no Asians that I could find, despite two distinct crowd scenes that showed faces. Two. A full third of the the city, and yet none were there. NONE.

Both cities depicted here should have had a majority of people of color, because both cities—like most cities in America—have a minority of whites.

I was going to keep going and do this with several more comics, and if anyone really really wants me to, I might, but it’s too damn depressing.

If anyone doubts the importance of portraying the world accurately-that is to say, with a wide variety of faces and skin tones and body types-I’d like to point you to this excellent speech.

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Update by Noah: You can read all posts in the roundtable here.

Bound to Blog: Wonder Woman #19 (Black and White and Startlingly Offensive All Over)

Posted on November 2, 2009 by Noah Berlatsky

This is the first in a roundtable on race in comics titled Black and White and Startlingly Offensive All Over. It’s also the latest in a series of posts on the Marston/Peter run on Wonder Woman.

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William Marston indulges in the occasional vicious asian or Jewish stereotype during his run on Wonder Woman. He doesn’t, however, tend to have many black characters. Wonder Woman 19, therefore, is something of a departure. But, as is their way, Marston and Peter make the most of it. Practically every comics creator from Herge to McCay to Crumb, has retailed offensive black stereotypes. But how many of them have done this?

No, you’re not seeing things. Those are primitive African natives with swastika’s on their loincloths. The Nazis have allied with some evil natives, y’see, and the natives have, as a gesture of subservience, placed the Nazi symbol on their persons to demonstrate that they hold to the ideals of Hitler, including, presumably, the genocidal cleansing of both themselves and their entire continent. Really, it’s a kind of genius; the stereotypical, gibberish-spouting, African native has to be one of the most viscerally offensive images our quaint pictographs offer. You might think that there wasn’t really any way to take that and make it decidedly more vile. But I think Marston and Peter have managed it. Way to go, fellas.

I guess I could, at this point, go through the entire issue pointing out some of the more egregious incidents of racism — but I’m not sure there’s really a point, exactly. Marston and Peter buy every stereotype you’d imagine they’d buy. The natives think white people are gods; they have rhythm (Etta and the Holiday girls distract the natives by playing band music, because Africans can’t resist dancing when they hear indifferently-played college march tunes.) And, of course Africans are superstititious — WW mocks them for believing in voodoo, as opposed to in, I don’t know, invisible planes, (and, of course, voodoo is a syncretic New World phenomena, not based in Africa at all — though I guess maybe that’s pretty far down on the list of things to complain about at this point). In short, while Marston’s wackiness does shine through in certain ways (the swastika’s on the loincloths; his resolute refusal to sideline his slavery fetish no matter how hideously inappropriate it is in this particular context), he spends relatively less time on his own crackpottery and relatively more on the familiar crackpottery of racial prejudice.

In fact, in some ways the most surprising thing about this issue is not that Marston is a big old racist, but rather the extent to which he has to, or is willing to, compromise his own vision in order to accommodate that racism. As I’ve mentioned a time or two, Marston isn’t shy about indulging his obsessions. One of his standard plots/fantasy scenarios involves societies of more-or-less subhuman men paired with parallel societies of beautiful/enslaved women. I’m thinking particularly of the mole men (from Wonder Woman 4) and the Seal Men (from Wonder Woman 13).

In both of these stories, Marston uses the split between animalistic men/lovely women to work through his fetishes and his feminism. The bestial men enslave and dominate the women (which is fun, obviously); then the women turn the tables, conquer the men, dominate them, and make them fully human (because men can only reach their full potential when they’re ruled by women.) It’s a narrative near and dear to Marston’s kinky, kooky heart..

This issue of Wonder Woman initially seems like a perfect forum for him to break out those old tropes one more time. After all, the African men here are explicitly portrayed as animalistic:

Moreover, they are portrayed as almost exclusively male. When women are shown in the background, as here

they fit the standard Marston/Peter formula you’d expect; that is, they look more human and appealing than they’re bestial mates. There is even one panel where Marston toys with the idea of giving these women a more prominent (and dominant) role:

This comment denigrates the chief in some sense (suggesting he’s in thrall to his wife.) But within Marston’s framework, men are *supposed to* be dominated by their wives. In the normal course of a Marston story, this would be the moment to bring out that wife, and have her influence transform and save her mate, turning him not only into a good man, but into a human being.

But while that can work for Mole Men and Seal Men, it can’t work for Africans. Marston is chary about portraying African women with good reason. Women for him are always superior; Africans are, and have to remain, inferior. A major role for an African women in a Marston comic is, therefore, literally unthinkable — in the sense that he doesn’t seem to be able to think it. Not only his feminism, but his interest in gender politics seems to buckle under the pressure of his racism.

It’s perhaps interesting in this regard that WW #19 includes one of Marston’s most explicit elucidations of romantic female friendship. For most of the adventure, Wonder Woman is aided by Marya, a giant Mexican woman who idolizes WW, referring to her as “My preencess!” Trina Robbins summarizes this relationship nicely in her essay Wonder Woman: Lesbian or Dyke?

Another story deals with Marya, a beautiful eight foot tall “Mexican mountain girl,” who definitely has a crush on Wonder Woman. She calls Wonder Woman “brave princess” and “beautiful princess.” When the two women are captured in nets, Wonder Woman, ungraciously considering only her dumb blond “boyfriend,” Steve Trevor, tells her, “I’m sorry for you, Marya, but at least we’ve saved Steve…” Marya, with the selflessness of true love, replies, “I care not what happen to me if I help save your friend, Preencess!” Finally, Marya is encased in cement up to her chest. But when the amazon princess is about to be killed, “Driven desperate by her great love for Wonder Woman, Marya wrenches savagely at the solid cement which encases her legs.” Leaping from the cement she shouts, “My preencess — I come!” Finally, Wonder Woman freed and the villains vanquished, Wonder Woman declares, “The credit goes to the biggest girl and the bravest — my little friend Marya!” Marya kneels at the amazon’s feet, clutching her hand rapturously, saying, “Oh Preencess!”

Female-female relationships (bordering on, or more than bordering on, lesbianism) are important throughout Marston. But it seems telling that one of the most explicit appears in, and takes so much space in, this particular issue. It’s interesting too that Marya is essentially a white Latina marked as racially different (her size, her accent) and yet also as white (the “natives” call her white repeatedly.) It’s as if Marston started, say, the Seal Men story, suddenly realized he couldn’t run variations on his women-dominating-men fetish, and so instead backed-and-filled in order to run variations on his lesbian fetish.

The thing about the lesbian fetish, at least as represented here, is that it doesn’t have any political or social implications. The WW/Marya story is of personal friendship and love; in this case Marston doesn’t connect his fetishes to broader social ideals the way he does in the Seal Men and Mole Men stories. Marston can’t think of African women having power; therefore, though he can imagine individual examples of sisterhood, he can’t, in this particular comic, imagine a collective feminist movement. Marston’s racism, in other words, actually and actively gets in the way of his feminism. Reading this, I was reminded of the fate of numerous civil rights struggles after Reconstruction failed — basically, when the U.S. abandoned its commitment to equality for black people, it also abandoned its faith in social justice generally, with the result that women’s rights, for example, were set back for generations. This comic maybe provides an insight into why that might have been; to the extent that you don’t believe in equality, it becomes difficult to imagine, or to work for, equality.

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Update: Again, the rest of the roundtable on race is here.

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