This picture depicting common heroes in Marvel and DC comics portrays strong color-blind racism and the idea of American Exceptionalism. These comic book characters have been around for years helping save cities while being role models in the community. Kids look up to, adore, and try to emulate these very heroes. However, most every hero shown here is white. There is a clear absence of black and other minority heroes/heroines. Even in a fictional universe, minorities are ignored in roles of power and importance. Though this is obvious if you happened to watch a superhero movie over the past few years, it is mostly ignored due to the fact that people assume that white heroes are a part of a natural order of things.
Furthermore, these comics and heroes represent American Exceptionalism. They uphold the Constitution in their actions and what statements they make. They fight crime and don't violate peoples' rights. This illustrates how America's principles are thought to be the best and therefore preserved at all costs. The ideas that founded the nation are so supreme that heroes fight to protect and abide theses principles.
I agree that many comics portray the "super heroes" of the world as white people, which subliminally shows American Exceptionalism. This also seems like a way to indirectly racialize against minorities in society, through comics. This same concept was shown when little boys looked up to cowboys (they were displayed as only whites, not including minorities). Not until recently did Disney start portraying princesses as anything other than white. These princesses were icons to most children in American- Disney was extremely influential to children, and still is.
ReplyDeleteTo add to the concept of racialization, in the most recent version of "The Green Hornet", the main character was played by Seth Rogen (a white man), while his genius sidekick was played by an Asian man (Jay Chou). It is hard to picture anything but a white man as a superhero, but we are willing to put an Asian man in the sidekick role. In a way though, I think this almost goes against American Exceptionalism, by conceding that Asians are likely to be smarter than Americans. Still, we have too much pride in the concept of an ideal American to put an "unAmerican" looking person in the main role.
ReplyDeleteI can see where you are coming from, but I feel as if your argument is a little lacking. There are a great number of black superheroes, some include Anarchist, Bishop, Blade, Caption Marvel, Nick Furry, etc. This link has a list of all of the black super heroes: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_black_superheroes#Marvel_Comics]. However, I do believe that there is racialization of black people in the superhero world, but this is mainly done by the media and how they choose to portray comic books through film, rather than by the comics such as Marvel and DC.
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