Beware My Ambivalently Black Power

Posted on July 17, 2015 by Noah Berlatsky

John Stewart’s first appearance in comics, in 1972, involves him challenging a police officer. Some blond cop is harassing two guys playing dominoes on the street, and Stewart tells the pig to back off. “You want trouble,” the cop sneers, and Stewart replies, “I kind of doubt you’re man enough to give it—even with your night stick!” The cop is about to do something more…when another cop comes up and tells him to back off. “Fred, respect has to be earned. The way you acted, you don’t deserve a nickel’s worth!” End of parable.

That parable strains credulity even more than a magic wishing ring—and perhaps for that reason, it needs to be retold, on a broader scale. Denny O’Neil and Neal Adams want to talk about racism—but they need to do it without in any way implicating systems. Racism is caused by bad people like Fred the cop, who fail to act respectfully. It is thwarted by individual bravery (a la Stewart) and by the forces of law and order themselves (like that second cop.) The forces of authority and justice, the folks with the uniforms, are the good guys. Doubt them not.

And so the plot grinds on. John Stewart learns he’s to be the back-up Green Lantern to Hal Jordan, and, in the space of a page, he goes from defying cops to being a super-cop himself.

A new bad apple authority figure is quickly introduced in the person of a racist Senator. Stewart (like that bad cop) disrespects the Senator, and is punished by good cop Jordan, who insists that Stewart become the Senator’s super-bodyguard. Stewart is also reprimanded for calling Jordan “whitey”. “Something in that reminds me of that bit about “he who is without sin casting the first stone” Jordan huffs testily. On the next page, Jordan says that the Senator’s racist diatribes are protected by free speech. Mild epithets against white people are anathema; but the black guy has to be told that the Constitution ensures politician’s ability to encourage actual racist violence.

A black person tries to assassinate the Senator, and Stewart refuses to stop him, which pisses Jordan off. But then it turns out Stewart had deduced that the assassination plot was a false flag operation; the shooter was meant to miss, and then another shooter was going to shoot someone else, and the Senator would use the ensuing chaos to bring about race war. Jordan admits that he was put off by Stewart’s “style” but he now recognizes that the back up Green Lantern is a good egg. “Style isn’t important any more than color!” Stewart says, couching the lesson in terms which carefully dance around the possibility that whitey Jordan’s initial prejudice against Stewart might have something to do with race.

Not coincidentally, the plot here precisely mirrors that of X-Men: Future Past. In that film, the heroes must save the establishment officials who threaten them in order to prevent a backlash in the form of a race war. And so too John Stewart has to act to prevent a guard being shot in order to prevent the racist Senator from starting a second “Civil War.” In both cases, the stories are about marginalized heroes threatened by the establishment. And yet, the plot tergiversates about in order to allow those superheroes to do what superheroes always do — protect the status quo.

And what happens to the Senator himself? He is implicated in attempted murder, but the heroes don’t even bother to arrest him. “I’m certain your colleagues in Congress will bounce you back where you belong!” Jordan declares. Stewart, who you’d think would have to be somewhat skeptical, tacitly endorses this naive and surely extra-legal approach to criminal accountability. But ensuring equality before the law is less important than assuring the reader that the people in power aren’t all bad, whether they be police, congresspeople, or the white Green Lantern. There can be a black superhero, it seems—as long as his main focus is saving white people’s self-image, and not black lives.

The Neverending Battle Made Easy

Posted on July 8, 2015 by Donovan Grant

The July 2015 issue of Action Comics (vol.2 #42) has garnered instant praise from critics. In the current storyline, Superman has his secret identity revealed and his powers severely dampened. In a further controversial and news-making development, cops and SWAT teams confront local Superman supporters and engage in a violent attack that prompts the Man of Steel not only to defend the neighborhood from the onslaught of police, but to end the conflict with a right cross to the chief officer’s face.

The images of a riot instigated by police naturally conjure up memories of Ferguson Missouri. As a result, the issue has led such online publications as International Business Times and Business Insider to label the story “gripping”, “breathtaking” and “compelling”.

So why is it so lousy?

I’m unsure what’s worse, the lazy storytelling or the mindless praise for it. It’s as though the aforementioned websites happened upon Google images of the issue and quickly churned out a glowing recommendation for the benefit of appearing both pop culture savvy and socially conscious.

In the sotry, the denizens of the local neighborhood in Metropolis, calling their block “Kentville”, are showing their support of Superman, now publicly known to be Clark Kent. While Superman is away battling a giant monster, a SWAT team arrives to break up the assembly, and within minutes fire an errant canister of tear gas into the crowd. One of the citizens knock it back towards the police, and the neighborhood resigns to sit on the ground and commit to a silent protest, welcoming the oncoming march of the cops who are more than willing to beat everyone to a pulp. Superman arrives with a giant chain held over his shoulders, standing between the SWAT team and the crowd. The lead cop named Binghamton announces that he and the other police will beat everyone on the block including Superman, and then proceeds to do so.

With the Ferguson analogy inelegantly at the forefront, let’s describe how this doesn’t work and what makes its evocation of recent events improper.

1. The SWAT team is brought to disrupt the gathering for Superman without the presence of any sort of protest to disrupt. Unlike in Ferguson, where at the very least tensions had built over an already ever-present sense of racial profiling, the cops are only arriving due to the mustache-twirling machinations of the lead policeman Binghamton.

2. Binghamton’s problem isn’t portrayed as any sort of prejudice or distrust towards Superman because he’s an alien. He openly admits that he’s sick of the praise and adulation Superman has gathered over the years at the expense of the public’s recognition of regular police and firefighters. The conflict isn’t borne out of systemic and long-held prejudices; it’s created by one man’s jealousy of a fictional character.

3. As a result, the conflict between the police and Superman and the protestors is nothing more than a bad guy and his army attacking innocent civilians. It makes the conflict into a too simple case of good vs. evil, removing any semblance of reality. The situation makes the police into supervillains, so that they’re easy to recognize and easy to fight.

Thus any resemblance to tensions in the real world is removed, and the conflict can go down as easily as any other superbattle. Moreover the way in which the storyline uses the imagery and context of racism is nothing short of appalling.

For one thing, the image of Superman holding a gigantic chain to put himself between the police and the crowd is quite blunt. It’s no doubt supposed to represent shackles of oppression imposed by white authority, but in the hands of a white superhero, it ends up coming across as unearned cultural appropriation. A figure of super-authority such as Superman, powers or no, can’t subsume himself in the community of the subjugated masses when he has traditionally aligned closer to that of a policeman for most of his life. It rings hollow and condescending, as if the story is parodying the resistance to police brutality.

Worst of all is the fact that the overwhelming majority of the people the police are attacking, the ones Superman is defending and the ones that serve to match the Ferguson protestors in this analogy, appear to be white. The firefighter who puts herself at the front of the crowd is recognizably black, but the neighborhood consists of a veritable “who’s who”, or “what’s what” in ethnic diversity. Folks young and old with large noses and middle class clothing make up the whole of the group, with black people ironically the minority of the whole block. This shows that the policemen’s grudge is really no more than a plot necessity that has no bearing in reality. A line by a Hispanic character reads “This is America! This is what I fricking fought for! I’m not gonna let them take that away!” which is answered by the firefighter “If you fight, people are gonna die. Our people. Is that what you want?” This would resonate so much better if both characters were black, not to mention if a majority of the crowd was. As nice as multiculturalism is to see in mainstream comic books, it doesn’t make sense within the context of the story this issue is trying to tell. The police are shown to have such a blasé disdain for the citizens they’re about to brutalize that it makes the story come off as anti-police propaganda more than anything. There’s no nuance, no sense that this could at all take place within the real world.

Superman is supposed to be a Champion of the Oppressed as evidenced by his original Golden Age adventures and later stories as well. He is most effective when battling real world society ills that his readers face every day. So what’s the point in making a story where there’s no actual ill of society or systemic oppression for him to overcome? Was the writer Greg Pak too gun-shy to actually engage in the topic his story’s imagery advertised? The connection between police brutality and racism is not a very difficult concept to grasp, and who better than the world’s first superhero (other than black superheroes) to tackle it head on.

Ultimately the story serves to say “Superman’s one of us!” in a way which doesn’t actually say that. He, like many other costumed heroes, is just like us presuming that we too have a specific and unrealistic villain to face and defeat, rather than the innate problems in our society. As much as people like to lambast the Denny O’Neil/Neal Adams Green Lantern/Green Arrow series, that comic at least had the respectability to tackle the problems it saw head on without thinking of misrepresenting it. It named what it saw as what it was and didn’t ignore difficult conversations in a bid for misplaced solidarity. I believe that super hero comics can truthfully engage in contemporary topics—that they can be relevant and contribute to a national conversation. It’s so unfortunate that when it comes to the most pertinent conversation in our nation today, the best superheroes can offer is Action #42.
_______

This is part of our ongoing series, Can There Be a Black Superhero?

“But They’re Ours”— John Jennings Talks about Black Superheroes

Posted on June 8, 2015 by Noah Berlatsky

John Jennings seems like he’s got superpowers himself, he’s involved in so many projects. He teaches at the University of Buffalo. He’s involved as a curator of the Black Comix Arts Festival. He collaborates with Stacey Robinson on the Black Kirby Project; he’s just co-edited a new book about black identity in comics called The Blacker the Ink, and he’s got about a bazillion other comics projects he’s working on.

And as if that’s enough, he took time out to talk to me about black superheroes, Jack Kirby, Blade, Power Man, and Captain America’s black sidekick (not that one). Our conversation is below—part of HU’s ongoing roundtable on the question of Can There Be a Black Superhero?
______

‘Night Boy’ created by ‘Black Kirby’ (John Jennings and Stacey Robinson) and Damian (Tan Lee) Duffy

Noah: What do you like about Kirby, and what are you less fond of?

John: I think it’s more liking than disliking. I remember being a kid and not being attracted to the work and all. I felt like he was destroying the characters that I love so much. Because, his work on Captain America, as a kid, it looked blocky and crazy looking and abstract. But for some reason you notice the work and you’re attracted to. And as I got older I started to realize, this guy was actually creating some of the conventions, as far as how superhero comics are done.

And then when we started working on the Black Kirby project, we started to realize how experimental it was. I remember reading this interview about the Black Panther. And he said he felt like his friends who were black should have a black superhero. And he did create a character who was African and not African-American. Instead of creating a black character that would be from his own country. And also the fact that Wakanda doesn’t actually exist.

I thought Don McGregor’s run on Black Panther was in some ways really progressive, and then we turn back to Kirby and it becomes this weird cosmic odyssey thing with this monocole dwarf guy. It’s really strange. It’s this odd thing to happen after a story grounded in progressive ideals. Because McGregor had him fighting the Klan, and he was in Africa helping out his people, which was great. But I think Don McGregor as a writer has always been a lot more connected to the ideas of the black subject.

If you look at something like Sabre. Sabre was centered in a post-Apocalyptic world, and the main character was an African-American man. And he was in an interracial relationship with a beautiful white woman. Most of it was about him trying to protect his family. It’s interesting because the character —he looked like he was loosely based on Jimi Hendrix. He was very swash-buckling, always musket and sword in hand. Had this pirate feel to it. It was a funky book, and this was Don McGregor.

Paul Gulacy and Don McGregor

Yeah, I’ve been trying to read his Power Man. Which, I feel like he’s much more conscious of racial issues. He has a hooded Klan like supervillain attacking a black family who’s trying to move into the suburbs. The writing’s just hard to get through. It’s not written very well.

Right—as far as—that era. If you reread the Essential Power Man, it’s bad.

It’s overwitten and it doesn’t make any sense and the dialogue’s a mess.

Have you seen Jonathan Gayles documentary White Script, Black Supermen? Gayles is a cultural anthropologist. The impetus for him creating the documentary was this one story where Luke Cage tries to get $200 from Doctor Doom. And he was totally disgusted by the fact that this guy was just a hustler. And that was part of the dissonance. You have a black reader, and this is the first African superhero to have his own book. He is also an ex-con. And he is not necessarily really a superhero, he’s a mercenary. And he’s working in the hood primarily, adn his villains aren’t really well thought out.

Steve Engelhart and George Tuska

They didn’t really understand what they were talking about with that particular character.

Race in superhero comics was really strangely handled early on. Because it was directly related to blaxploitation films. Superhero comics are very reactive and they are a business and they see trends and they try to jump on top of them. And that’s pretty much what happened. That’s where you get characters like Shang-Chi, who was pretty much Bruce Lee.

So, I’m wondering, given the inauspicious start with black superheroes, why are black superheroes important. Or why do you still care about them?

It’s interesting, because the superhero as a structure, it’s an old idea. From the 1930s. I think it’s important for people who participate in society to see themselves as a hero of some kind, or to see themselves in a space where they feel that they can connect with popular culture.

Because popular culture is our culture. That’s a lot of times the first time you see or recognize yourself is through the popular media you watch. I know it affected me as a kid coming up, watching pulp fantasy stuff and reading these things.

And honestly there’s a lot of serious issues with superheroes as a genre. It’s hyper-violent, it’s misogynist, it’s just very sexist, it’s kind of homophobic. But it’s ours; it’s our thing. It’s an American construction. And I understand why it exists—and it does mean something when you’re not there. I think that’s the thing; there needs to be representation, as far as a diverse array of representations. And written from the right standpoint as well.

And honestly I think it’s more important to have black creators working than it is to have black superheroes. Because there’s a handful of black writers in the mainstream. One of the most important books —I don’t know if it’s going to get canceled, but the new Ghost Rider book. A Latino character, a Latino superhero, written and drawn by two African-American men. That was unprecedented; I don’t think people really knew that that was happening. And it’s Marvel.

I think there’s something about just how dominant the superhero is right now. As I think it really is as popular as it was in the 30s. It’s just not in the comics.

One of the thing that bothers me, is that people say what kicked off the trend was the X-Men movies. But it was in actuality the Blade film. It was 1999, and that predates the X-Men movie.

How was the Blade film? I haven’t seen that.

Blade is awesome. You know why I like Blade? Because it’s a Blaxploitation movie with vampies.

That sounds pretty good!

It’s a fun movie. I don’t know how much of this is legend and how much is truth, but Wesley Snipes, he wanted to be Black Panther. But they wouldn’t let him do Black Panther, so he was like, what else do you got?

So they gave him a C-level character. No one knew who Blade was. I knew who Blade was because I used to read the reprints, but he was kind of a lame character. He had these green goggles, it was a dumb character.

But he translates really well to the screen. THe’s pretty much a martial artist, and Wesley Snipes is an amazing martial artist, he’s a 5th-degree blackbelt. So he choreographed the entire movie. It looks great. It’s out of control crazy.

My friend Sundiata Cha Jua, a historian, says that after Blade was successful, Marvel began to take over the franchise. When you watch the first film, it’s a very “black” movie. He relies on this serum to prevent him from becoming fully a vampire, he’s a daywalker. And if you look at the first movie, he gets his serum from this Afrocentric incense store. And he’s in a community of black people and they know who he is. And I thought that was really important.

But when it starts making more money—because Blade made a lot of money. They start to dilute his connection to the black community. And they start erasing him from his own movies. And as I recall, I think Wesley Snipes took them to court over the third movie. Because he’s barely in it. It’s Ryan Reynolds and Jessica Biel because they were trying to create a spin-off to Midnight Suns or something like that.

Or you look at Stan Lee’s movie, his documentary, which I enjoyed. But again they don’t mention Blade as the jump off for the Marvel scene. Or for the Marvel franchise. Stan Lee did not create Blade. Gene Colan and Marv Wolfman created Blade. So it doesn’t make sense for him to be in Stan Lee’s movie. But it’s false to say that the X-Men jumped off this franchise.

I saw a couple of articles, like, hey, don’t forget about the Blade movie.

Is part of the problem with getting more black characters and more black creators is that the superheroes are so centralized in Marvel and DC? There’s so much energy and interest in the big two, that the only way to get a black superhero is to make Captain America black, or something like that.

I have to back up a little. I’m interested in the mainstream characters. As an exercise, I think Black Kirby works because it’s making fun of the superhero genre, and bringing in black power politics. It’s celebrating Kirby but also critiquing him. And it’s interesting as a visual exercise, or as a critical design project. But honestly I don’t have that much interest in mainstream superhero comics as far as black expression. I’m really not satisfied with what I’ve been seeing.

Or the characters who I really like, they screw them up or they do something wrong with them. Like, Mr. Terrific, I love Mr. Terrific, but his book was awful. I think the more interesting things around diversity are happening in the independent black comics scene.

Because it’s not just superheroes. It’s all these different types of genres; there’s action adventure, like Blackjack. There’s stuff like Rigamo, which is magical realism gothic fantasy.

Che Grayson and Sharon De La Cruz

So with mainstream comics there’s issues around nostalgia. Nostalgia is a very powerful thing. So not only do they want to be accepted by the mainstream, but they want to make a monthly comic book. It’s very difficult to do that when you’re flipping burgers or you’re teaching a class here or there trying to make ends meet. It’s a very differnt model. I want to tell them, no, make books about your expeirence, and put them out when you can, because you’re not DC.

It seems like there’s a problem with nostalgia and superheroes for black people, since black experience in the past was often one of oppression.

The 1930s when the superhero were created, the first black characters were extremely racist. You had characters like Whitewash who was Captain America’s sidekick, and his superpower was that he always got captured and had to get rescued. He was in blackface and he had on a zoot suit.

Whitewash Jones was created by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby. His dialogue was often written by Stan Lee

And of course guys like Ebony White from the spirit. They’re based off how the black image had been constructed in minstrelsy and other racist propaganda. Even advertisements and products that were being generated had these extremely derogatory, hyperbolic stereotypes. So illustrators when they draw the pantomime of a black image, they’re drawing from the Jazz Singer directly.

I’m curious about what you think about the fact that one of the things for the superheroes is it’s about law and order.

I think it’s about justice. That’s the thing—my favorite superhero is Daredevil. I totally related to this kid. Because I was bullied, and i was poor, and I thought I was smart—I was pretty smart. I just related to that character, and he was a fighter, and I liked that about the character. More than anything, I just loved the fact that he was too stupid to quit. I loved that. That’s his real superpower, and that’s an interesting life lesson to pick up. Don’t give up. I’ve seen many stories where Daredeivl would have died if he just gave up. But he couldn’t because his father taught him not to. I thought that was awesome.

Yeah there’s this thing about law and order, but they’re vigilantes, and they’re saying, in this resounding voice, I have the power to make things right. A lot of people were really upset when they saw Captain America punching Hitler in the face back in the day. They’re violent characters. And they’re reifications of a particular type of jingoistic urge. But they’re ours and they love them.

I love superheroes. And I hate superheroes at the same time.

I think that most folks who don’t understand how these problems in our society actually manifest think that if I do this “one thing” then the problem is fixed. It’s a very Western way of thinking. We are taught to think about the “object” and not the “system”. So, making one African superhero is awesome but, what about the systemic issues around the disparity in the first place? It’s the same problem with integration in our country historically. Our country would put “minorities” in a white space to prove a point or to illustrate a law. It hardly ever thinks “once they are in this space have we really provided a place where they can grow and flourish”. It needs to have this token example to say ” Yeah. It’s messed up in our country but, look at this ______________. See? We got that issue covered.”

So now. We have a black writer (David Walker) on a black superhero at DC (Cyborg). Let’s see how it pans out. David’s a good friend and great writer. Should be exciting!

Art by Ivan Reis and Joe Prado for the new Cyborg series

Can There Be a Black Fantasy Hero?

Posted on May 28, 2015 by Noah Berlatsky

The most famous black sf/fantasy writers, Samuel Delany and Octavia Butler, are both on the high art end of the genre, leaning towards literary fiction, feminist utopia, and high art bona fides. Their peers are people like Joanna Russ, Urusla Le Guin, and Philip K. Dick, rather than, say, the solidly middle-brow Neil Gaiman or page turning sci-fi young adult fare like the Hunger Games.

N.K. Jemisin’s novel The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms is more in the Gaiman/Hunger Games camp; there is plot, there is a heroine, there is little in the way of complicated semiotic play, body horror, or high concept. To the extent that there is genre drift, it’s not towards literary fiction, but towards romance. You don’t have to squint much to see that, Nahodeth, the Night Lord, the most powerful being in the universe, is a dead ringer for Edward, and Christian Grey, and all those other wounded, violent, seductive super-patriarchs who hold out the promise of apocalyptically violent, yet mystically safe, romps/relationships. There’s even a bed-breaking scene a la the one in the last volume of Twilight (Jemisin might even have been directly inspired by Twilight; the timing seems about right.)

This isn’t to denigrate Jemisin’s book; I like Twilight quite well, as regular readers know, and while this isn’t as weird as Meyer’s book, its substantally better prose makes up for that to a good degree. The bed-breaking scene is cute, and in general the novel does what it sets out to do—which is to say, it bounces along at a readable clip, providing an enjoyably imagined world and a suitably fleshed out and determined heroine.

The novel is also concerned, in various ways with race. As we’ve mentioned a time or two on the blog, race in some genres, like superheroes, can be an extremely thorny issue to navigate.Even black creators often have a very difficult time incorporating black heroes in a meaningful way into superhero comics, as James Lamb has argued. Category fantasy has been perhaps even more overwhelmingly white in terms of creators and protagonists than the superhero genre has been. Given that history, and given Jemisin’s determination to write a category fantasy, rather than (like Butler or Delany) a meditation and subversion of the genre, you might expect some strain. Black superheroes are a mess; why should black fantasy heroes be any different?

But, at least in Jemisin’s handling, they are. Fantasy allows you of course to build entirely new worlds and cosmologies, and Jemisin uses that freedom to create an a reality in which race functions differently than, but with meaningful parallels to, our globe. Yeine Darr, the heroine, is from a backwater; she’s the child of the heir to the throne who gave up her legacy to marry a barbarian. Since she’s from the periphery, and because of her mother’s betrayal, Yeine is stigmatized. She’s also black—and while being black doesn’t function exactly the way it does in the modern U.S., it is still part of why she’s marginalized among the ruling Arameri, who are pale-skinned. Without much fuss, then, Jemisin manages to do what has so often eluded X-Men writers; she metaphorically references a history of anti-blackness without whitewashing it.

So what about fantasy’s white supremacist take on good and evil. Creators like Tolkien and C.S. Lewis linked virtue to a white British identity, casting the enemy as dark-skinned and/or, in Lewis’ case, as Muslim in all but name. Defenders of order and light fight the chaos of the dark; that’s how fantasy works — much like, not coincidentally, superhero stories.

Superhero stories have an awful lot of trouble switching around that law and order logic. But Jemisin inverts it almost casually. In her world, the evil is the white god of order, Itempas, who has enslaved his dark sibling, Nahadoth, god of chaos, and therefore of creation. The link between whiteness and enslavers is certainly not accidental. Nor is Yeine’s rumination, upon witnessing a particularly painful piece of hypocrisy:

This was the sort of thing that made people hate the Arameri—truly hate them, not just resent their power or their willingness to use it. They found so many ways to lie about the things they did. It mocked the suffering of their victims.

That’s pretty obviously a quote not just about bone-white Arameri self-delusions, but about Anglo-white American-European self-delusions. And again, those self-delusions are not necessarily the same, but are parallel enough to resonate—and not to themselves mock the suffering of victims by, for example, making a fantasy in which the bone-white ones are the main victims of slavery.

Again, Jemisin makes this all seem easy; why not have a black protagonist? Why not have a fantasy world very different from ours in which black historical experience, rather than white supremacist fantasy, remains recognizable? Part of the deftness is certainly due to Jemisin’s skill. But I think the fantasy genre itself deserves at least a bit of the credit. Imagining another world gives you more flexibility in dealing with race than the demand to imagine heroes operating in a world similar to ours, which they are not allowed to change.
______
Update: I actually talked to N.K. Jemisin for a separate interview, and she very kindly and gently told me I had misidentified the races here. The sun God is black; the god of darkness is white, and Yeine is half white and half Incan, or something close to Incan.

It doesn’t really change the thesis here very much I don’t think, but interesting for the way reader responses or visualizations can differ. Especially since a number of people who have read the books talked to me about this piece, but nobody else seems to have caught the errors either.

The Possible Black Superhero

Posted on May 15, 2015 by Donovan Grant

Editor’s Note: Donovan had a number of comments on James Lamb’s recent piece about the impossibility of superhero diversity. I thought I’d highlight the first one here. I’d encourage folks to go read the whole thread…and of course, James’ original piece, if you haven’t yet.
______

I have to say that while I agree with Osvaldo in that the summations of the superhero genre’s origins and continued practices of white supremacy and racism (and sexism) are totally sound…the conclusion of the black superhero as a contrariety feels too defeatist, too fatalistic to justifiably apply in accordance to real world history and in the face of actual social change. Because at no point are the instances of progressive comic work, however inefficacious or vain in their attempts, ever brought up beyond the naming of a number of black heroes. Did Captain America: TRUTH or Green Lantern/Green Arrow #76 or Icon or Ms. Marvel just not happen? The industry has a long, long way to go in order to achieve true diversity and by doing so it will most probably have to upend the very foundation of defining what a superhero is and what their stories should be about. But I can’t see that as an impossibility in today’s fandom. There are too many outspoken fans and too many ambitious creators, however small their steps are being taken in, who are working and commenting on the works to be more progressive and are conversing about race to write off the whole of the medium as immovably white supremacist.

To me, it speaks to a larger myopia of our nation’s history in general. Yes, we still have a nation built on slavery that currently sanctions government to target black Americans, but that’s being directly confronted with right now as we speak. We’ve been through segregation and we’ve been through Jim Crow and we’re still going through those injustices in some institutions, but is the suggestion at the heart of this essay speaking towards a larger resignation of combating a socially destructive industry rather than working to make it better?

I almost hate to do this, because it’s the ultimate cheese-card, but I’ve gotta quote Dr. King in this instance as I feel he sums up the situation perfectly:

“The inevitable counterrevolution that succeeds every period of progress is taking place. Failing to understand this as a normal process of development, some Negroes are falling into unjustified pessimism and despair. Focusing on the ultimate goal, and discovering it still distant, they declare no progress at all has been made.

A final victory is an accumulation of many short-term encounters. To lightly dismiss a success because it does not usher in a complete order of justice is to fail to comprehend the process of achieving full victory. It underestimates the value of confrontation and dissolves the confidence born of a partial victory by which new efforts are powered.”

Figures of Empire: On the Impossibility of Superhero Diversity

Posted on May 12, 2015 by James Lamb

“But before I be a servant in White heaven, I will rule in a Black hell.” Killer Mike, “God in the Building”, I Pledge Allegiance to the Grind, Vol. II

Promotional poster for Belle, directed by Amma Asante

Early in Amma Asante’s socially conscious romance Belle (2013), audiences spy a British nobleman walk with purpose through a lower class section of an unnamed port city. Humid, overpopulated streets obstruct the uniformed Royal Navy Captain’s passage. The nobleman enters an attic dimly lit by a small window and sparse candles where a middle aged Black woman waits for him. Dressed in everyday homespun and a worn apron she stands alongside a quiet tan child with brilliant brown eyes. Prepared and dressed by the matronly woman, the silent girl holds a simple doll and stands impassive, unmoving, and observant; her simple hairpin struggles to contain an infinite cascade of light sienna locks. After the untimely death of her mother, the nobleman plans to whisk the little brown girl away to his family, to her birthright. To privilege. The nobleman kneels, and offers chocolate. Reluctantly, the girl accepts. The year is 1769.

“How lovely she is,” the nobleman exclaims softly. “Similar to her mother.”

It’s easy to regard the nobleman’s plan as obvious and uncontroversial given today’s standards. Leaving for the British West Indies on a navigational expedition, the Captain intends to leave the child in the care of his uncle, William Murray, 1^st Earl of Mansfield, and Lord Chief Justice of the British Empire. With family. However, late Eighteenth Century Great Britain revolves around its slave economy; colonial procurements replete with agricultural wealth, exotic goods and slave labor revolutionized British high society. Propriety, refinement, culture — these were the watchwords of an Enlightenment where civilized humans were encouraged to exert the “freedom to make public use of one’s reason in all matters”, according to Immanuel Kant [i]. Kant and his enlightened contemporaries judged persons of African descent incapable of higher order reasoning; animalistic Blacks offer stark counterpoint to virtuous White humanity. British nobles viewed Africans as subhuman beasts, unfit for culture, education, or reason. As slaves, Africans lacked any capacity for aesthetic sensibility, according to Enlightenment thinking. Slaves were property, and property does not think, feel, or reason. Given this, the nobleman’s request runs afoul of his homeland’s strict social order; a global empire that demanded unfree labor for economic stability could not conceptualize Black humanity. One locates diasporic Blackness during this period on balance sheets, cargo manifests, and maritime rapists’ salacious reports, not within British mansions’ gilded contours.

Sir Joshua Reynolds, Charles Stanhope, third Earl of Harrington, and a Servant (1782),
Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection

Lord and Lady Mansfield reservedly accept the little brown girl, Dido Elizabeth Belle Lindsay, into Kenwood House, a massive estate in Hampshire Village, London. Left alone soon after her arrival, Dido walks among Kenwood House’s massive portraits, and through her wary brown eyes viewers spy a visual synthesis of Enlightenment individualism and slavery apology. Painted by preeminent portraitist Sir Joshua Reynolds, a founder and inaugural president of the Royal Academy, exhibited at the Academy in 1783 as Portrait of a Nobleman,[ii] and housed today within the Paul Mellon Collection at the Yale Center for British Art, Charles Stanhope, third Earl of Harrington, and a Servant (1782) welcomes all to eighteenth century British machismo.

Stanhope, encased in unblemished armor, stands upon an active and sweltering Caribbean battlefield, sword in hand, both preternaturally calm and oddly petrified. An adoring brown youth holds Stanhope’s plumed helmet and gazes above, awestruck at his master’s magnificence. Reynolds paints Stanhope as desperate to impress all with martial skill earned in the slick red mud of the courageous and the damned but enhanced in an elite art studio; this oil-on-canvas press release asserts virility to contemporaries and whispers vulnerability to posterities. Stanhope, barely a man, plays at war. [iii] Below foreboding clouds Stanhope’s pale, effete visage peers above glistening golden armor; his pointed, boyish chin, hairless face, and perfect, Proactiv complexion force modern viewers to regard English nobility as special, refined, comfortable, free from want or struggle. Contrast this against the adolescent Servant shoved against Stanhope’s left, against guileless brown smiles trained by the lash, against another Marrakech rich in human capital but poor in civic defense, and Stanhope’s serenity approaches incredulity. Under Reynolds’ direction Stanhope does not stand with us, but above us; there’s no sweat upon his ghostly brow, no dirt under his manicured fingernails, no blood on his thin steel blade.

Bartholomew Dandridge, A Young Girl with a Dog and a Page. (1725)
Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection

One can easily imagine Reynolds’ conversation with Stanhope upon completion of this commissioned work; the abject flattery, the direct reassurances, the stroked ego, the payment for service rendered. With this portrait Reynolds both thunders Anglo-Saxon dominance and whispers sly rejection of that fantasy, a noble veteran revealed as farce without his helmet. Modern criticism of this object centers on the anonymous Black Servant whose illiberal assistance literally frames Stanhope’s polish. Similarly, in Belle, Dido’s inarticulate frustrations with her uncle’s desire for a commissioned portrait of herself and her cousin Elizabeth Murray is centered on her silent disapproval of the dark servant shadows who frame British portraits during this era, contrasting White civility with Black servitude. Paintings like Bartholomew Dandridge’s A Young Girl with a Dog and a Page (1725) and Arthur Devis’ John Orde, His Wife Anne, and His Eldest Son William (between 1754-1756) typify Enlightenment prejudice against Black personhood; baby-faced background slaves assist blanched central figures who thoroughly enrapture the pitiful anonymous with sophisticated British grandeur.

With dark, curly hair and infantile wonder, the Servant in Sir Joshua Reynolds’ Charles Stanhope, third Earl of Harrington, and a Servant anticipates every cute Black child ever seen in Western popular culture, from Keisha Knight Pulliam and Raven-Symoné on The Cosby Show to Noah Gray-Cabey on Heroes and Marsai Martin on Black-ish. Cherubic and brown, servile and friendly, these children of the darker nation deflect others’ revulsion toward their melanin with youthful gaiety and infectious innocence, and Reynolds co-opts this to both parallel the untested manhood on display and show Stanhope’s privileged freedom as natural and moral.

The peculiar institution’s American apologists often invoked the artless Sambo stereotype to justify their generational plunder of Black labor, wealth, and self-determination; it is easier to justify the transatlantic slave trade’s depraved criminality when we consider those reduced to beasts of burden emotionally underdeveloped and cognitively deficient.

“Comparing them by their faculties of memory, reason, and imagination, it appears to me, that in memory they are equal to the whites; in reason much inferior, as I think one could scarcely be found capable of tracing and comprehending the investigations of Euclid; and that in imagination they are dull, tasteless, and anomalous. But never yet could I find that a black had uttered a thought above the level of plain narration; never see even an elementary trait of painting or sculpture. … I advance it therefore as a suspicion only, that the blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind.” — Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, Query XIV (1784)

Arthur Devis, John Orde, His Wife Anne, and His Eldest Son William. (between 1754 and 1756)
Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection

Art historians speculate wildly about the Servant’s life, and the lives he represents. Whether colonial acquisition or indentured employee, the Servant signifies Great Britain’s longtime human trafficking and exploitation; modern viewers experience Stanhope as majestic, proud, and free, largely because history’s judgments identify the barbarous subjugation and domestic terrorism behind the Servant’s awestruck gaze. Mouth agape, eyes wide, the angelic brown face registers wonder at a life without whips and chains and commands and fear; a life lived free. Liberated. The Servant illustrates lifelong submission to chattel slavery; Reynolds’ otherwise unmoving portrait appropriates the systemic plunder of Black bodies and the bureaucratic corruption of Black labor to establish and augment Western global hegemony. White dominance. Notice the intricate detail attended this secondary, unnamed, background figure. Regard the Servant’s cowering awkwardness and unsure social position, both justified by the coerced assistance he renders. Compositionally, the patient attendant holds the viewer’s gaze and conscripts recognition of the static central figure. The Servant’s immaterial, indiscernible, questionable humanity fascinates, today more than yesteryear; because the Servant is inferior, Stanhope is superior. Because Blackness cannot equal freedom, Whiteness approximates divinity.

Sam Wilson and Steve Rogers. Man and Superman.

The intended narrative of Sir Joshua Reynolds’ Charles Stanhope, third Earl of Harrington, and a Servant operates as an eighteenth century White male power fantasy. Modern superhero comic media fans easily recognize this dynamic; mainstream superhero comic companies publish cartoonish variations on this worn, well-traveled groove ad nauseam to meet monthly operating expenses. Whether as friendly bystanders, costumed sidekicks, everyday henchmen or caped vigilantes, race and gender minorities exist in superhero comic media to validate and define the normative Whiteness central to the genre’s narratives.

Take Captain America: The Winter Soldier: early in the film we watch an athletic Black man sprint effortlessly around the National Mall in Washington, D.C. Wearing exercise shorts and a shapeless grey sweatshirt on a crisp spring day, viewers indulge athleticism, defined. Landscape shots capture republican majesty at the Washington Memorial and the U.S. Capitol. Suddenly a blurry blonde humanoid whizzes past, and frenetic limbs pump faster than the naked eye can detect. Comical frustration darkens Grey Sweatshirt’s expression: once, twice, thrice, the splendid blond beast laps the public track while Grey Sweatshirt bellows disbelief at his strained cardiovascular system’s futile effort. Played for laughs, this scene introduces viewers to Sam Wilson, the cheerful brother with an easy smile and Marvin Gaye on standby who extends friendship to a man living outside his era and outside his war, and who reminds viewers of the extra-normal abilities experimental industrial steroid injections granted this Greatest Generation throwback. “Blessed are the meek; for they shall inherit the Earth,” Jesus Christ teaches in Matthew 5:5; Marvel Studios’ Captain America: The First Avenger imagined that inheritance as tactical perfection augmented with avant-garde biochemistry and electroshock therapy. Doubtless, the screenwriters and producers of Captain America: The Winter Soldier applaud their intentional rejection of Black male stereotype, but to watch Steve Rogers literally run circles around Sam Wilson establishes a questionable on-screen dynamic that complicates this superheroic bromance at conception. In Captain America: The Winter Soldier, viewers experience the White protagonist’s superior physicality in contrast to a Black inferior, Charles Stanhope on creatine painted by Industrial Light and Magic. All this, to deify military service.

Superhero comics employ violence to establish justice. To ensure domestic tranquility in Gotham or Hell’s Kitchen or Space Sector 2814 jackbooted vigilantes adorned in colorful, form-fitting leather and Kevlar ground and pound the criminally confused outside all legal authority. The superhero concept appeals to the adolescent desire to compel order through brute force, to define peace as the absence of credible threats. No matter how intellectually gifted or technologically adept or physically remarkable or preternaturally perceptive or unabashedly godlike, superheroes use violence to solve problems, foreign and domestic. The depictions of Charles Stanhope and Steve Rogers mentioned above show unsophisticated, immature White males who wrest manhood from their military experience, who telegraph masculinity by glorifying war. Yesterday’s crude colonial plantations and human trafficking syndicates drained profit from a world order enforced by eighteenth century British naval expenditures; today’s multinational technology conglomerates and global financial institutions wring fortunes from American guaranteed global stability. In this unipolar world, where the American hegemon assumes responsibility for political and economic stability from Minneapolis to Medina, from Seattle to Shenzhen, from Albuquerque to Addis Ababa, superhero action figures like Captain America argue the Athenian position in the Melian Dialogue; Rogers’ very existence symbolizes undisputed American technological supremacy. Of course, Rogers is not Cable, or Magog, or the Punisher, all logical extensions of the super-soldier concept updated for modern, antiheroic eras where callous scribes and tragedy pornographers painted scarlet horror in rectangular comic art panels while illiterate dealers and nihilistic gangsters sprayed arterial abyss on letterboxed nightly news broadcasts. Frozen in the cheery bombast of the last just war, Rogers’ outdated moral binary and Franklin Roosevelt phonetics convince comic fans that the extra-normal abilities he exploits service peace; given this conceit, we watch Rogers conscript Sam Wilson and Natasha Romanov into an ad-hoc terrorist conspiracy in Captain America: The Winter Soldier to incapacitate and scrap three floating, flying aircraft carriers authorized by American policymakers, funded by American taxpayers, staffed by untold hundreds, worth untold billions, because he alone determines the strategic advantage of perpetually aloft gunboat diplomacy counterproductive, an existential threat to world peace. The floating nuclear version at sea today does not enter the debate.

)Su•per•he•ro (soo’per hîr’o) n., pl. – roes. n., pl. – roes. A heroic character with a selfless, pro-social mission; with superpowers, extraordinary abilities, advanced technology, or highly developed physical, mental, or mystical skills; who has a superhero identity embodied in a codename and iconic costume, which typically express his biography, character, powers, or origin (transformation from ordinary person to superhero); and who is generically distinct, i.e. can be distinguished from characters of related genres (fantasy, science fiction, detective, etc.) by a preponderance of generic conventions. Often superheroes have dual identities, the ordinary one of which is usually a closely guarded secret. superheroic, adj. Also super hero, super-hero. — Peter Coogan, Superhero: The Secret Origin of a Genre, ©2006, pg. 30

Cyclops & Wolverine dismantle Sentinels. Comic unknown.

The superhero is a deceptively simple concept. The reactionary militarism, the thoughtless violence, the binary morality, the unquestioned righteousness, the colonial sociology — all of the superhero genre’s boyish charm reinforces the Western imperialist impulse to control, to order, to rule. The superhero genre does not promote fantastic Western imperialism alone: science fiction, espionage fiction, and medieval fantasy win popular culture’s hearts and minds with similar power fantasies designed for adolescent White straight males, sold globally. Still, every Wednesday, carrot-topped Caucasian perfection dons skintight primary colored lycra to unleash energetic ruby strobes at giant purple killing machines crafted in man’s image while a hairy Crossfit junkie with indestructible metal claws hacks and slashes fundamentalist cannon fodder amid blasé exurban spectators numb to repetitive superhuman brawls but unnerved all the same. Every Wednesday, superheroes seduce the innocent with disturbing commentaries on justifiable public conflict, acceptable casualty rates, and unspoken racial hierarchies. Superheroes are White male power fantasy distilled to narcotic purity, blue magic on white cardboard wrapped in clear polypropylene to show variant cover art. Consider Jim Lee as Frank Lucas.

Peter Coogan, founder and director of the Institute for Comics Studies, defines the superhero through a narrative triumvirate: selfless mission, amazing ability, and secret identity, all symbolized by a special moniker and distinct costume that elevates the new extra-normal persona to cultural iconography. The Batman’s elementary school ambition to channel elemental fear and unspeakable tragedy into a personal war on crime impacts everything about the character, from his costume’s shadowy color swatches, morose blue-grey later rendered midnight black, to his scalloped cape’s predatory motion silhouette, to his variable but always recognized centrally placed Bat-logo. Like Michael Jordan, we recognize Batman in profile with nothing more than dark cranial contours as evidence. Everything Bat-related identifies with a central simplicity: punish the bad man who killed Mommy and Daddy. †Law and order, uncomplicated.

“Despite what you may have heard, Superman is not a complicated character. He’s an extremely simple idea: A man with the power to do anything who always does the right thing. That’s it.” — Chris Sims, “Ask Chris #171: The Superman (Well, Supermen) of Marvel”, ComicsAlliance.com

This is the problem. For nearly eighty years, superhero comics etched the world in bright Crayolas, without emotional nuance or political complexity, to display imagined realms where the mundane and the fantastic coexist without incident. When the soapy X-Men adventure in the Savage Land’s meteorological impossibility, when the stately Justice League intercept planetary conquerors unfazed by Earth’s gravity or thermonuclear weapons, everyone drawn and colored and inked and lettered in panel conducts themselves in accordance or in conflict with mainstream, middle-class White American social ethics. The ‘right thing’ Chris Sims believes Superman insists upon remains a moral good defined in panel by rural Midwestern Protestants, and the superhero concept’s resultant normative Whiteness enjoys broad, international appeal. Most superhero comic fans regardless of race or creed or national origin judge Superman and his compatriots as truth and justice’s universal avatars, Golden Rule morality made myth. Because of this fantasy, fanboys and fangirls of color imagine themselves as living Kryptonian solar batteries who ignite still, unmoving skies with chaotic blue flame as they race through lower Earth atmosphere trailing angry pyrotechnics and leaking ozone while millions watch breathlessly, transfixed at an ungodly spectacle where petrified cosmonauts expect certain death after heat shield failure during reentry only to meet a scarlet and navy blue blur branded with hope’s own chevron in the upper stratosphere. The darker nation also wants to play the hero; they too, wish to be redeemed.

Make no mistake: this is a redemption song. The desire for full inclusion in superhero comics both behind the cowl and before the camera by patient progressive integrationists yearns to humanize those dismissed as unfit for heroism by superhero comics’ irrepressible identity indifference. Race, gender, sexual orientation: hashtag activists and comic bloggers clamor for more representation of all these political identities in superhero comics, television, and movies; whether straight-to-Blu-Ray animation or tentpole summer blockbuster, non-traditional superhero comic fans cajole, threaten, and shame mainstream superhero content creators into diversifying superhero and villain properties. Everything’s appropriate — racebending established heroes when franchises jump from print to live-action, with unconventional character origins that discard existing character history, cross-racially casting superhero protagonist roles, even cowl-rental, the shift of established major superhero properties from White male classics to new-age minority sidekicks — so long as nerds of color and their progeny revel in superheroes who approximate their phenotypes. I charge that this desire for inclusion — this need to see oneself in the corporate culture one consumes — is not ethical. When applied to the superhero concept, this inclusion is not possible.

Coogan’s definition is incomplete. To craft a superhero, add Whiteness to the mission-powers-identity troika; coat liquid latex and electrostrictive polymers onto the White body, code the costume design with identifiable brand marketing, apply catchy appellation. Done. Artistic license and open casting calls nurture false hope among nerds of color desperate for private sector social approval; these patient progressive integrationists forget that characters who wear their faces but forget their cultures do not promote their interests. These nerds of color also neglect history. Professor Derrick Bell, civil rights lawyer and intellectual progenitor of critical race theory in legal scholarship, wrote in the landmark “Serving Two Masters: Integration Ideals and Client Interests in School Desegregation Litigation” (Yale Law Journal, 1976) on the widening interest divergence between Black parents who sought high quality educational opportunities for their children, and the civil rights attorneys who fought to dismantle state-sponsored Jim Crow segregation with legal remedies applied to public education. For the lawyers, the grand revolutionary movement to desegregate American classrooms secured with Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, KS (No. 1.) the right to ensure “equal educational opportunity” in government funded public schools. Equal educational opportunity meant integrated schools, because for the lawyers only racial integration could guarantee Black children and White children received identical instruction. A generation after Brown, when public school districts needed forced busing to achieve numerical racial parity and angry middle and lower income White parents took to the streets to protest social experiments that designated their children test subjects, national civil rights attorneys from the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund held firm to the conviction that integration alone prophesied American race relation nirvana. This ignored, in Bell’s view, mounting social science evidence that chronicled forced busing-imposed student difficulties, class discrepancies in American integration experiences, and the ethical quandaries presented when civil rights attorneys routinely disregard or rebuff client perspectives.

An ahistorical pretense argues that integration presents the only salvation for an American experiment plagued in infancy by torture, rape, and genocide; chattel slavery and rampant land theft are not ‘birth-defects’, to paraphrase Condoleezza Rice, but cornerstones. From bondage on, Black political thought’s enduring fault line debates separation versus integration; from the titanic Frederick Douglass (“This Fourth of July is yours, not mine.”) through Booker T. Washington’s glad-handing industriousness and W.E.B. Du Bois’ pan-African intellectualism, through Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Birmingham fury at White liberalism and Malcolm X’s snide disdain for White patriotism, through the uneasy synthesis of partisanship and revolution from post-Civil Rights Movement Black elected officials and the criminalized irrelevance of Black Nationalist counterculturalists, the darker nation continually questions American citizenship’s lofty promises and David Simon realities. Casting integration as the sole pathway to postracial Eden in public education, superhero comics, or any other grand American tradition substitutes race visibility for race uplift, and confuses simple appearance with documented progress.

“To sum up this: theoretically, the Negro needs neither segregated schools nor mixed schools. What he needs is Education. What he must remember is that there is no magic, either in mixed schools or in segregated schools. A mixed school with poor and unsympathetic teachers, with hostile public opinion, and no teaching of truth concerning black folk, is bad. A segregated school with ignorant placeholders, inadequate equipment, poor salaries, and wretched housing, is equally bad.” — W.E.B. Du Bois, “Does the Negro Need Separate Schools?” The Journal of Negro Education, Vol. 4, No. 3, The Courts and the Negro Separate School. (July 1935), pp. 328-335

Fevered battles over forced busing ripped bare Northern antagonism toward civil rights advocacy; center-left White parents who nominally tolerated nonviolent civil rights activism responded to federal desegregation orders with the same massive resistance found below the Mason-Dixon. Casting the neighborhood elementary school as a ëWhite space‘ where John Q. Public easily sidesteps racial difference strikes cosmopolitan citizens today as antiquated, backward logic, like Salem’s witch trial groupthink or Cold War domino theory. Still, nerds of color walk behind enemy lines every Wednesday to stay abreast of Jonathan Hickman’s Avengers or Geoff Johns’ Justice League; for many the local comic book shop’s mainstream customer base mirrors the standard-issue suburbia within biweekly superhero stories. Progressive integrationist comic fans poorly navigate the irony around which Disney and Time Warner craft business models: regardless of race, gender, or sexual orientation, superhero comic fans wholly accept the antebellum identity politics of both the superhero concept and its target audience. Diversity does not sell superhero comics — nostalgia does, and this nostalgia hearkens back to postwar America, with its effervescent, bubbly nationalism, cleanly delineated racial hierarchies and obvious, unquestioned gender roles, even in private. For this reason, superheroes maintain their appeal to adolescent straight White males; everything in superhero narratives is designed to make Whiteness comfortable, to intensify the power of the privileged. Even nerds of color marvel when Captain America orders Sam Wilson to serve as his personal air support; computer generated scenes where Anthony Mackie’s sepia tones flit across Washington airspace spraying submachinegun rounds at unmasked Hydra agents while the winged brother evades rocket propelled death with hairpin banks at upchuck velocities satiate those who devolve superhero social justice into a Black actor’s screen time. Progress, for the superhero integrationist, requires nothing more than a regular census: survey the number of non-White, female, gay, lesbian, and transgender superheroes, and count the number of non-White, female, gay, lesbian, and transgender writers, artists, inkers, editors, and executives within the superhero comic industry. Tweet results with practiced outrage. Rinse and repeat. Qualitative analysis of minority portrayals violates the chirpy bluebird’s one-hundred forty character limit and does not engender comment.

Sam Wilson as The Falcon, played by Anthony Mackie, in
Captain America: The Winter Soldier

The only reputable progressive position on the superhero advises abandonment. The superhero concept’s narrow simplicity cannot possibly render human difference with substance or nuance. Corporate superhero fiction cannot dramatize the adrenal fear and visceral loathing police officers’ feel during traffic stops, sidewalk detentions, and no-knock warrants any more than it can judge the abject terror and furious anger the darker nation conveys through candlelight vigils, ‘I Can’t Breathe’ t-shirts, and Chris Rock’s unfunny selfies. “America begins in Black plunder and White democracy, two features that are not contradictory but complementary,” writes Ta-Nehisi Coates, senior editor of The Atlantic, in his landmark feature “The Case for Reparations“; in contrast, superhero comics lack all political theory more intricate than the Powell Doctrine. When Noah Berlatsky, writing at the Hooded Utilitarian on Static Shock, notes that the easy synergy between superheroes and law enforcement transforms Black superheroes into unwitting avatars for a modern mass incarceration state that translates public criminal justice into prison conglomerate profit, he should recall that urban post-Civil Rights Black elected officials championed draconian drug possession sentences with tough-on-crime rhetoric usually associated with Richard Nixon or Rudy Giuliani.

According to Yale Law School professor James Foreman, Jr., incarceration rates from majority Black cities “mirror the rates of other cities where African Americans have substantially less control over sentencing policy.” Black people, in the pulpit or the ballot box, can support robust and militaristic law enforcement initiatives deployed against their communities without tension, and those members of the darker nation with the financial stability and leisure time to engage electoral politics represent Black America’s most established, integrated, and conservative elements. What patience can veterans of color have with the dope pushers and domestic batterers and petty thieves and flamboyant pimps within their communities whose criminal enterprises depress already anemic property values? These old-school race men, with military precision and patriarchal inflexibility, assume the uplift of the race as personal responsibility; taught to kill by a country that hates them, taught to overcome prejudice with hard work and determination, the Black veterans who constitute the core of the Twentieth Century Black middle class personify bootstrap conservatism to chase economic inclusion, not revolutionary overthrow. This Black middle class, perennially called to account for a dysfunctional, systemically impoverished Black underclass left uneducated by dropout factory public education and unemployed by Silicon Valley’s outsourced manufacturing, loses its patience with both neighborhood criminals and municipal White political structures who concentrate drugs and violence and death in urban communities. Given this, Black elected officials these men chased the same militarized solutions to combat rising crime statistics during the 1970’s and 1980’s as their White counterparts, and municipal city councils stocked with pious Morehouse men and holy Spelman sisters proved no sturdy bulwark against dreaded million dollar blocks, no matter their local political success or state budget dependence. Unfortunately, when mostly non-Black superhero comic writers depict Black superheroes that support punitive carceral state solutions for minority criminality, no one references this history.

The problem here involves the superhero concept’s inability to envision non-White straight males as fully realized humans. The agony and the ecstasy of Black cultural and political complexity — from Jesse Jackson’s frustrated expletives in July 2008 over Barack Obama’s irrepressible moral centrism to Jesse Jackson’s joyous tears in November 2008 over Barack Obama’s irrepressible electoral victory — overloads the superhero’s straightforward make-believe. Black Panther, Black Lightning, Bishop, Mr. Terrific, Green Lantern, John Stewart, and U.S. War Machine: different power sets, different publishers, indistinguishable skin tones and identical personalities, all inflexible, assertive, upstanding old-school race men known more for quiet dignity than solo bombast, these characters present White male metahumanity shellacked with a moist black paste of burnt cork and water. I suggest that culturally authentic minority superheroes do not and cannot exist: all people of color receive from the superhero publishing industry replaces authentic and innovative characterization with race and gender drag. Sam Wilson’s instructive: these empowered Negro automatons unmask as superhero comics’ eternal sidekicks; they highlight White heroism’s astonishing brilliance and sacrifice race minority self-respect. This uncontroversial nostalgia justifies Black superhero inclusion in nearly every mainstream superhero team of note and illustrates an antiquated genre’s authorial recognition that the superhero concept cannot handle human difference. Every Black superhero is Will Smith drained of charisma, Denzel Washington without sex appeal, Barack Obama absent Michelle Robinson. All the same, all forgettable, all inhuman. Anonymous, nameless, Black. Other.

Michelle Rodriguez, captured by TMZ.com

When actress Michelle Rodriguez bellows “Stop stealing all the White people’s superheroes!” to a TMZ reporter, the initial backlash from superhero integrationists used digital condemnation and public shame to exact mob justice; within a day, Rodriguez’s pseudo-apology explained her disdain for superhero cross-racial casting as a desire to find multiple cultural mythologies Hollywood representation. Her critics remain unconvinced. I believe their skepticism toward Rodriguez’s perspective stems from the fact that everyone interested in posthuman and/or augmented, empowered human fiction in America today starts with seventy-seven years of superhero comic history as their main reference point. Imagine a future without the superhero. Imagine a future without the notion of a single person who can direct world history’s meandering river with unsanctioned activities that violate state sovereignty and ignore the rule of law. Imagine a future without the White male power fantasies that differentiate the superhero from the Gilded Age’s mystery men or Graham Greene’s quiet American. Imagine tomorrow as cosmopolitan cacophony, as an urban jungle gym where Asian Americans both support and oppose affirmative action, where Black Americans both support and oppose gay marriage, where gay men both support and oppose immigration reform, where Mexican Americans both support and oppose contraceptive mandates, where women both support and oppose religious freedom. Imagine tomorrow as remotely affected by today, and acknowledge that the superhero outlived his usefulness. The anachronistic Superman does not speak to individual aspiration, but to herd anxiety. Superhero films today comment upon unlimited power’s impossible paradox; Superman and his contemporaries personalize the unipolar American hegemon’s failure to establish justice and ensure domestic tranquility with Call of Duty martial advances at ready disposal via Raytheon and Lockheed-Martin. The superhero concept dramatizes White male power fantasy to express virile manhood through war and conquest; these figures of empire police unruly colonies populated with indiscernible aliens untouched by rational thought and Judeo-Christian order. Plot manifests from variable pacification success rates. The superhero’s great power lacks all sense of responsibility; it simply persists, unmoored from anything more complicated or complex than ‘punish the bad man who killed Mommy and Daddy’.

Adding melanin is no cure for unchecked militarism, fictional or otherwise; two Black Secretaries of State advised President George W. Bush before and during the Iraqi quagmire. Only rank racial tribalism exalts the need to view one’s own face in the corporate culture one consumes; this ethnocentrism leaves no room for critical examination of the superhero concept itself. Diversity initiatives in superhero comics fail because the superhero concept rejects human difference; every recent example of misogynistic cover art or fandom backlash against superhero cross-racial casting stems from general superhero creator/audience acceptance of the White male power fantasy as natural and normal. The term ‘Black superhero’ identifies a logical impossibility with a pejorative. Nerds of color who refuse to discard superheroes and wrangle superhero narratives with alternative reading practices to fit their politics and complement their group identities deny reality — there is simply no way to cast the Servant as Charles Stanhope.

Stanhope’s ethereal polish and command posture require chattel subjection. Reynolds’ portrait depicts a British nobility fueled by tortured adoration from broken children whose urgent pleas for respite from arduous toil and impassioned prayers for return to beloved parents go unheeded and unnoticed. The superhero is not a natural evolutionary step for reality or fiction; it’s a seventy-seven year old straight White male privilege delivery system. Those who believe superhero media’s reactionary excesses can be soothed with increased race, gender, and sexual orientation diversity wish only to substitute themselves for their oppressors, and combat nothing.

JLA: Liberty and Justice (2003), written by Paul Dini with art from Alex Ross

The DC Comics’ art from painter Alex Ross outlines the superhero concept today: in his JLA: Liberty and Justice, written by DC Comics’ animation legend Paul Dini, the Justice League characters feature smooth bulk and rounded brawn, adult muscle paired with primary colored paunches. Men are active but middle-aged, steely and determined, without care for clogged arteries or hypertension. Perfectly shaven with Brylcreem pomade and hip-hugging leotards, Ross’ work recalls Norman Rockwell’s America, where respectable Americans consumed conspicuously and segregation preserved decent communities. Like Matthew Weiner’s heralded Mad Men, Ross transports the audience to a postwar American economic success defended by flinty men with squinty eyes and absolutist ethics while readers enjoy safe genre futurism on every page. Batman’s cowl, tight enough to transmit facial expressions, locks into a perpetual scowl as he deconstructs villainous master plans. Ross’ Batman stands pudgy, comfortable; his grey contours testify to expense account living replete with three-martini lunches. Witness nostalgia as comic art, before Alcoholics Anonymous and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission wrecked the party.

Unknown artist, Dido Elizabeth Belle Lindsay and Lady Elizabeth Murray (1779).
Scone Palace, Perthshire, Scotland.

Ross’ antiquated Establishment action figures present the superhero self-image integrationists accept, defend, and then beg to subvert on the margins. It’s not enough. Brown palette swaps that color over George Reeves and Adam West recreations prove meager reparation for superhero comic whitewashing. This too, ignores history. Dido Elizabeth Belle Lindsay and her cousin Lady Elizabeth Murray appear together in a portrait from the late Eighteenth Century, friendly, enigmatic, and equal — to a point. Dido, in a Indian turban plumed with ostrich feathers and exotic silver satin, enters posterity an exaggerated Oriental, a perpetual foreigner totally without definition unless visually justified by non-Western affectations. The unknown portraitist does not imagine smiling brown Dido, a free English woman born from British imperialism, with the prim reverence afforded her cousin and countless other noble British ladies. The skin still matters. Today, art historians’ alternative analysis of Charles Stanhope, third Earl of Harrington, and a Servant interrogates the time-lost lives behind servile brown eyes, and speculates that this tortured gaze scans something past Stanhope’s shiny armor. Perhaps the Servant spies tomorrow, Jubilee, a new birth of freedom. We can never know. To my mind, Reynolds’ portrait allows superhero integrationists a prophetic metaphor: however difficult, look past the intended narrative of one’s age. Imagine tomorrow. Envision a world where your humanity depicts more than a detailed frame for someone else’s daydream.

_________

[i] “An Answer to the Question: ëWhat is Enlightenment?'” — Immanuel Kant, 30 September 1784

[ii] Esther Chadwick, Meredith Gamer and Cyra Levenson, Figures of Empire: Slavery and Portraiture in Eighteenth-Century Atlantic Britain, exhibition wall text, Yale Center for British Art, 2014

[iii]Stanhope sat for Reynolds two years following his regiment’s deployment to Jamaica to battle back French incursion that threatened Britain’s largest slave colony. — Esther Chadwick, Meredith Gamer and Cyra Levenson, Figures of Empire: Slavery and Portraiture in Eighteenth-Century Atlantic Britain, exhibition wall text, Yale Center for British Art, 2014

_____

The entire roundtable on Can There Be a Black Superhero? is here.

Patreon: Threat or Menace?

Posted on May 10, 2015 by Noah Berlatsky

Okay; so last week I talked about maybe using a kickstarter to fund my book (on the topic of Can There Be a Black Superhero?”. The collective reaction was, meh.

So as an alternative, I thought that I might possibly shut down the blog for a few months as a way of getting time to work on the book.

Alternately! If people really don’t want the blog shut down, I could try to do a Patreon to fund the blog so I could work on it in good conscience, and then do the book as the hobby.

Any thoughts on that as an option? I guess I’m not confident that anyone would want to pledge to the blog, but it couldn’t hurt to find out. My one concern is that it would be crappy for me to take money for the blog when contributors aren’t paid…I don’t know. Thoughts?

John Jennings and Stacey Robinson, from the Black Kirby project.

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon

Tag Archives: Can There Be A Black Superhero?