X-Men and Civil Rights

[lisaquestions]

So I was thinking, earlier:

The X-Men comic book series started in 1963, featuring Professor Xavier and his five students, trying to show the world that mutants were just like everyone else by training them to be superheroes so they could fight other mutants. Specifically, the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, led by Erik Magnus Lensherr, aka Magneto (although I don't think he got a real name until much later). When humans spotted mutants, as seen in the first issue, they'd almost immediately form a mob and start attacking the mutant with whatever came to hand. I can only imagine how many times Stan Lee imagined that scene playing out and ending with a dead mutant, since most mutants at the time weren't really all that powerful - and most only had one or two powers, otherwise being fairly normal people.

The X-Men debuted the same year that Martin Luther King led a peaceful protest against segregation in Birmingham, Alabama, where he wrote the famous letter from a Birmingham Jail. The next year, three black civil rights workers were murdered by Klansmen in Philadelphia, Mississippi.

So this is the political environment that the X-Men are born in - the black civil rights movement and violence directed at it. As they mature, the gay rights movement and second wave feminism get started.

So: Why, during all this actual activism, do mutants spend so much of their time kicking each other's asses? Why does the militant, violent faction call itself the "Brotherhood of Evil Mutants?" Why does Professor Xavier feel that the best way to win acceptance for mutants is to train them to fight other mutants? Why don't mutants have a Stonewall?

This isn't really intended to be a criticism - comic books weren't really all that great at social relevance at the time. It's more, "what social forces would drive mutants in the midst of being massively persecuted to turn on each other and not take any cues from the civil rights struggles going on around them?"

Yes, I am a geek. I wear that label with pride.

Edit to clarify: I'm not criticizing the comic books or asserting they should have been written differently. I'm just asking: "Look at the history of civil rights. What would it look like to put the X-Men into that context on a political level?"

Also, read this page for an article highly relevant to this post.

Comments

[gender-euphoric.livejournal.com]

You should lj-friend homo_impetus.

[lisaquestions.livejournal.com]

Like out of the blue?

I'll totally tell him you sent me.

[gender-euphoric.livejournal.com]

As far as I know he lives to read comics-based geekry. So this entry would hit the spot for him.

[drakyn.livejournal.com]

Hmm, warning you: I've only read some comics of the various xmen series, as well as the recent movies, and the xmen: evolution cartoons.

One possible reason is Xavier's idealism; Showing humans that not all mutants are evil and some will even fight for you instead of against you is sure to win some points. Even though it doesn't change the view of mutants as fighters/killers. *rolls eyes*
One would also hope there was less dramatic, more useful activism going on behind the scenes of the comics; but then again, if it isn't shown in the source it isn't strictly canon.

And of course, Erik decided that the best defense is a good offense.

[lisaquestions.livejournal.com]

Right, but I can't help but think there were more forces at work than just "Erik's so pissed off at the Shoah that he wants revenge for that and preemptive strikes to save mutantkind from the same."

And also, yes, the entire point of Xavier's X-Men was showing that not all mutants were bad and some would fight to defend humanity - although this was hardly ever portrayed as effective. Once the X-Men defeated an enemy, they'd get verbal abuse until they went away. And of course the abusers were safe because the X-Men were fundamentally the good guys, and even threatening them would be inflated into more anti-mutant sentiment.

And yeah, I didn't mention it in my post, but the vast majority of mutants are closeted. It's considered unusual that Warren Worthington III is out in the open as a mutant, and he's largely shielded by his rich white maleness, and you see very little actual activism, lobbying, and the like.

[homo-impetus.livejournal.com]

A good use of "useful activism" in regards to any of the X-books can be seen in X-Factor Layla Miller that came out last week.
I don't want to spoil the plot, but I thought/think it was awesome in regards to social justice politics.

ETA: and activism/political action

[homo-impetus.livejournal.com]

Mutants do have something like a Stonewall. Only they have it over and over again....
They have various rebellions and massacres and M-day.
Professor X actually is not intending to train anyone to fight other mutants per se but more training mutants to help humans and keep themselves safe.
Eric/Mageneto was originally training "evil mutants" in order to take over as Homo Superior. To enslave all non-mutants essentially. A sort of mutant manifest destiny if you will.
Grant Morrison does a really great job of showcasing that in his run on New X-men.

There is infighting within any political movement.
Magneto is/was the Malcolm X figure originally (of course prior to Malcolm turnabout in regards to violence later in his life) and Professor X was MLK.

I think comics had as much social/political relevance as they could during that time. I think many of the comic plots mirror that of SciFi during the same time period on shows like The Outer Limits for example.

The X-Men and any "good" offshoot there of do not stand for just actually kicking the asses of random mutants. They believe in protecting mutant and human kind alike from any threat that may come there way. They are working towards positive relations between humans, and if that means putting down another mutant than so be it.


Read this (http://www.alternet.org/blogs/mediaculture/94185/equality,_progressive_politics,_san_francisco_..._and_the_x-men/)
This (http://peiratikos.net/archives/2004/01/05/political-metaphors-in-new-x-men/)

And this (http://www.playahata.com/pages/morpheus/xmen.htm)

What causes the story to suffer the most is that comics are episodic tales. New writers take over and start the tale over again and re-engineer the back story when and where they can in order to sell books. Continuity be damned...especially in this age of the rockstar comic writers and artists and their one company only contracts.
We are never going to get a peace for them...it is unattainable within the medium because it wouldn't sell copy.

Did you read New Mutants in the 80's?

[lisaquestions.livejournal.com]

Hmm - they have violent events, with the rebellions, massacres, M-Days and so on, but I'm thinking of a single defining moment where they stand up and say "no more" and do their best to make it stick.

I agree that there's a vibe of MLK/Malcolm X with Professor X/Magneto, although I think that wasn't really developed very well until the 70s-80s under Chris Claremont. I am very glad that it was developed, even though it seems like much of it has been tossed aside since.

And it's not so much the infighting, because of course there's infighting. I think it's more that the factions were so extreme and opposite each other in every way - and of course, Claremont improved that during his time by giving us the Hellfire Club, the Morlocks, Marauders, the New Brotherhood, and so on.

I'm not at all criticizing the comic books of the time - they had to deal with the Comics Code Authority, and I think that comic books as a storytelling medium were still pretty simplistic - Marvel actually went a step further than the norm for the time by acknowledging prejudice and bigotry in the first place - and the juxtaposition of a comic book at least looking at these issues right in the midst of the real civil rights struggles of the time is particularly interesting to me.

And yes, the "kicking asses" comment was unfair. What I meant was that the X-Men spent more time fighting the Brotherhood of Evil - which they had to do, because the Brotherhood of Evil kept doing evil stuff and threatening human lives. I'm just wondering "what if mutants were doing the activism as well?"

I completely agree with your point about episodic tales and new writers, too.

Anyway, again, this isn't a criticism of the comic book stories, I'm more looking at "What would the X-Men look like if all this stuff were taken into account?"

The New Mutants are the reason I became a comic book fan. Started with the first issue. I still have the first 30 or so issues plus the graphic novel.

[hazelsteapot.livejournal.com]

You beat me to it! (http://www.playahata.com/pages/morpheus/xmen.htm)

I dunno, it feels pretty fucking familiar to me, particularly with the morpheus's spin on it. That is, the dynamic of folks in power seeing "reverse racism" and the "good" mutants who will protect them for no good reason because they deserve it just for being "human". The very usage of a human/mutant split sets up this dynamic doesn't it? I mean, yes, it's sci-fi and that's a major trope, but it's like fucking normal or real/trans or bio/trans.

So without having read the comics, I think what's interesting is what's left out, not this mutant / mutant war being so all consuming, it is what human actions further that conflict that are left out, and I'm really interested in why they didn't see it or left it out. Because the fact that oppressed groups police themselves and have this "good"/"bad" split, liberation/assimilation split is totally unremarkable to me...

PS

[homo-impetus.livejournal.com]

trans_comicgeek

Mostly dead comm, but I believe in promotion whenever possible.

[squigglefish.livejournal.com]

homo_impetus has made some wonderful comments, so I won't attempt to badly repeat any of them :P

In media productions like this, we see an eternal struggle between the rules of the publishers, the desire to tell a minority story, the understanding or not of non-minority people, and the need for appropriate drama and story for the audience.

Comics and science fiction & fantasy regularly attempt to tell a minority story. It's an easy way to explore the human condition, and I'd almost call some of its use as a cop-out (tell a boring unrelated story and then use a minority twist in an off-hand and unchallenging way). There stories have to be told within the context of the rules of the publishers, so the Comic Code has to be followed, certain executive producers get to eliminate all gayness, and so on.

Within those constraints is then the need to find a dramatic storyline to carry the work that will appeal to the target audience, and this is where productions tend to significantly slip up.

As they go, X-men seems to have been pretty good across it's history. I've not actually read the comics, but from what I've heard, they mention activism in passing, keeping that element alive, whilst focusing on the struggle for survival and on presenting the mutants as epic characters that the readers can identify with in their everyday lives. As far as I can see, the issue with the minimisation of activism must relate to the difficulties of writers to present it in a dramatic light. Much of the realities of the struggle are just plain boring to the target demographic, who wouldn't be able to identify with the great marches that happened around the time it was first published.

Whilst we can curse about the publishers and producers, the truth as I see it is that the majority of problem minority fiction relates instead to the perceived need to make something acceptable to the target audience, and to the fact that for so many things, the writers themselves are part of the majority group in comparison to what they are writing, or the writers themselves may not even realise that they are writing a minority-group storyline.

It's crap like that which results in this (http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/Chimera_%28episode%29) and much, much more.

(Sorry, I probably went off on bit of a tangent to the original post)

[lisaquestions.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I agree with all of that. I knew when I started (and tried to say so in the post) that this wasn't something the comic books could cover. I just started thinking about these things:

* The X-Men started during the black civil rights movement.

* The X-Men comics, as written during that time, don't really betray a strong sense of what the civil rights movement was like.

* One of the clashing elements is how Xavier's mutants spent most of their energy fighting Magneto's mutants.

* Humans benefit from this struggle. Are humans actually goading it along?

And that's really what I started the thread to talk about: Was there a mutant civil rights movement? What did it look like? How did they deal with all the grandstanding from Prof X and Magneto? How did they deal with the fact that just revealing themselves in some places would attract an immediate lynch mob? Would that even fly for very long? What if there was a mutant Bayard Rustin in the black civil rights movement? Looking at the events that happened during the black movement, during the gay movement, and during the second wave feminist movement, did mutants have similar experiences? The way the gay and feminist movements purged themselves of radical elements to appear more normal? The way lesbians pushed their way back into feminism? Why no Stonewall - as a trigger point for protest, and not simply a violent attack on mutants? What if Reverend Stryker's paramilitary lynch mobs and attempt to shoot Kitty Pryde on national television prompted a Stonewall-like backlash?

None of this is meant as a criticism of the comic books, or a demand that they should have done anything differently. There is no cursing at the publishers and the producers, or perceived needs to make something acceptable to anyone. This has nothing to do with what "should have been done."

[foibey.livejournal.com]

I've been geeking comic book politics since I started reading comics.

[lisaquestions.livejournal.com]

I spent a long time not thinking as much about politics as I should. And then I spent a long time thinking about politics but not comic books.

And I realize anything I can say has probably been said before, probably in a better way. :)

[syphilis-jane.livejournal.com]

You seem to be made of awesome, so I'm going to friend you, if you don't mind. :)

[lisaquestions.livejournal.com]

Didn't mind. :) Thanks!

I just need to write more stuff like this.

[askesis.livejournal.com]

I don't know comics, but isn't that pretty much exactly what feminism did to itself in the 80s?

[lisaquestions.livejournal.com]

I think there was definitely schisming going on from the 80s until the present day, although I haven't researched enough of the history to say more than that - I primarily have anecdotes from friends who were directly involved.

I do know that there was a definite push in lesbian feminism to define and control lesbian sexuality, to push away from the varieties of lesbian sexuality and into some kind of nebulous "egalitarian sex" that would reject butches and femmes, or BDSM. That fight happened throughout the lesbian community and there was even the question as to whether leatherdykes should be allowed into MichFest.

[heinousbitca.livejournal.com]

A friend of mine is fond of saying "magneto was right." She's a pretty quotable woman but that's definitely the winner as quotes from her go.

Further amusingly, my nickname in high school was "Rogue." Mostly because i had really long hair with the streak in it and all, but also because of that whole don't-touch-the-autisitic-girl mess.

That said people kept calling me that after i shaved my head so it stuck. Sometimes even today when i'm back home i hear someone call me that, and usually it takes a moment or two of ignoring them to get them to call me what they should.

[lisaquestions.livejournal.com]

I'm so going to do a followup post, trying to map out what mutants would be like if Professor X were really like Martin Luther King (that is, not assimilationist, but peaceful), and Magneto were really like Malcolm X (that is, among many many other things, not Professor X's enemy).

Also: I wanted Rogue's hair so badly when I was 18. Not the mullety hair that she often had back then, but the white streak.

[aredridel.livejournal.com]

Huh! Interesting point!

Thoughts, I Have Plenty pt. 1

[neo-prodigy.livejournal.com]

OMG!!!!! I love this.

First of all, thank you for writing this post. Secondly, thank you for linking to the other article. Both were very thought-provoking.

I tackled this issue late last year with some surprising results:

http://neo-prodigy.livejournal.com/738404.html

To reply to some of the points both you and the other author made, and to be clear, I'm in complete agreement with you both, here are some of my thoughts while reading.

While X-Men is an allegory to the Civil Rights struggle, there is a massive difference in terms of power dynamics. Even though mutants weren't as powerful back then, mutants were still far more powerful than black militants at their worst. Magneto alone could single-handedly crush a city and humans would be powerless. This opens up a new dynamic because marginalized people typically don't have resources much less the power to strike back at their oppressors on that type of level.

If blacks, women, LGBTQs had the power to topple buildings or conjure cyclones, I think we would be dealing with a whole new ballgame in terms of dealing with institutional oppression: possibly better, possibly worse.

From a narrative standpoint, I can understand (though I still agree with you and the other author) why most of the stories revolve around mutant vs. mutant. Simply put, humans aren't a threat in terms of knock down drag out fights. The only thing they have going for them are the Sentinels and how many times have those robots been crushed. Now if those Sentinels were like say the Borg or the Cylons, then we would have some interesting stories going on.

Sadly the mutant vs. mutant fights are always more exciting and more epic. Again, not disputing your points, because I think they still stand, but just an explanation.

Thoughts, I Have Plenty pt. 2

[neo-prodigy.livejournal.com]

The really fucked up part about all of this is sadly that good minority vs. bad minority dynamic is a necessary evil. It was good cop bad cop.

Dr. King wouldn't have been as successful as he was if there hadn't been the militant black power movement. White folks realized that these issues weren't going away so they would much rather with the "good Negro" who was about peace and love as opposed to the "mean angry one."

I believe King was aware of that the struggle was being fought on multiple fronts which is why he was able to go the nonviolent route. While I doubt the creators intended this, I suspect this dynamic also holds true for X-Men. Xavier plays the role of the good minority because he knows he's the preferable alternative to the mean angry mutants. Good cop bad cop strategy. Maybe that's why Magneto and Xavier have never really tried to murder each other once and for all because deep down they know they still need each other to achieve some semblance of progress.

In fact, in the 4400, Shawn used the same tactic with the center when Jordan took a more militant stance. He knew with the tensions rising between the 4400 and non-4400 somebody had to play the role of the great unifier and he took on that role. He knew that the militant front was covered and Jordan wasn't going to let the humans go unchecked.

Oh and the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, I had this discussion on NoScans once and we suspect that the BEM was named in the same spirit as say the rap group NWA in the "fuck the establishment I'm the scary thing you fear the most, now what?" kinda way.

If my rambling is any indication, it's that these posts were so thought-provoking that the cogs were churning like WHOA!

All of this said, I would love to see a POC or another marginalized group do a reinterpretation of X-Men or another story touching on these themes and getting right where the original creators missed the mark.

[afro-dyte.livejournal.com]

Would you mind contributing this to Ars Marginal (http://arsmarginal.wordpress.com)?

[lisaquestions.livejournal.com]

Oh, damn I even talked to Denny about this but it slipped my mind. Yes, of course. Do you think it could use some revision?