haven’t really been much of a superhero fan since my childhood days, when Adam West played Batman, Lynda Carter played Wonder Woman, Christopher Reeves was Superman, and Michael Gray as Billy Batson in Shazam!
Of course, like most kids back then, I watched superhero cartoons every Saturday morning.
The Wonder Twins. Wonder twin powers, activate.
Aquaman. Home is calling.
The Green Lantern. In brightest day, in blackest night, no evil shall escape my sight.
Batman and Robin. Holy Hamlet, Batman.
Superman. It’s a bird… It’s a plane… It’s Superman.
Wonder Woman and her invisible airplane.
Until I was about 13, I looked up to these heroes who, it turns out sort of looked like me, albeit more muscular. I wasn’t conscious of it, but looking back, they were all white, and most superheroes still are.
When The Black Panther hit the big screen a few years ago, my interest in the superhero world was piqued again. Probably because of my work on racial issues, but I started watching a few Marvel and DC movies again. Deadpool. Spiderman. Wonder Woman. Okay, maybe Gal Gadot is the reason I watched the last one.
The Black Panther got me thinking, though. We had popular green superheroes before we had Black ones. Actually, we had a white superhero dog before we had a popular Black human hero. There’s no need to fear, Underdog is here. I still remember all the words to the theme song.
Until only recently, superhero comics regularly portrayed Black characters as villains. I counted over 80 Black supervillains on this list. Of course there were white villains in comics, too, but given that there were no real popular Black superheroes, people were left with only one impression. Most people over the age of 30 were, as kids, unsuspecting viewers of white superheroes oftentimes fighting Black villains. Black Spider-Woman, Lady Marabunta, Black Manta, Bantam, Kingpin, Fatality, Prowler, Fara, and Shadow Thief were the more well-known Black villains among comic book aficionados.
To be accurate, there were multiple failed and widely ignored attempts to create Black superheroes before the recent Black Panther movie. Indeed, Stan Lee created the then relatively unknown Black Panther in 1966, though it had little traction.
Other failed attempts included Black superheroes Ace Harlem, Sugarfoot, Snake Oil, Dew Dillies, Bubba, and Lion Man, the last of which was an American-born scientist-hero. Guessing you haven’t heard of any of them. Nobody made their blockbuster movies, that’s for sure.
With such a void of Black superheroes, even as a race activist, I was a bit taken aback when so many superhero fans took to social media to attack the choice to hire Black actor Javicia Leslie for the role of Batwoman on the CW network in 2021. The chorus of angry fans was loud.
Batwoman wasn’t Black.
Batwoman was a cousin of Bruce Wayne, so she couldn’t be Black.
Another show with so much potential ruined by wokeness.
You can tell a narrative is being pushed rather than a decent story being told.
*Sigh.*
It turns out, not a lot of the same people upset about Black Batwoman ever blinked an eye over centuries of white Jesus. Yes, you know that brown-skinned Jewish Jesus guy who was born in the Middle East and not Western Europe. It turns out Michelangelo never even met Jesus and Jesus wasn’t Scottish or Dutch. I know, a head scratcher.
Nothing to be ashamed of. We were all socially engineered to develop deep unconscious bias based on the images fed to us our entire childhoods. It’s not our fault.
But now we have a chance to undo our well-trained biases. By learning true and complete history. By being accurate with what we teach our children. By reading some books and watching shows that depict people of all ethnicities, religions, shapes, and colors as the great, bad, good, and average people count among their members. It’s not a suggestion to cancel Thomas Edison or George Washington, give up The Catcher in the Rye, or boycott nerdy Clark Kent. It’s about broadening our field of vision.
It’s not about being woke or not. It’s quite simply the curative medicine we need to transform our world into a more loving and inclusive place.
—
Previously Published on Medium
—
