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

[lisaquestions.livejournal.com]

True - a lot of the stuff I'm talking about actually did eventually happen on some level later in the series, the cartoons, and the movies. And yes, Magneto should have had Mystique stay there as long as possible.

The impetus for this was thinking about the start of the X-Men, right in the middle of desegregation and the Civil Rights Act and the formation of an actual effective civil rights movement - or rather, overlapping movements - that have served as the model for activism ever since. And that in the midst of all this, we get a comic book that's really about a marginalized group (with superpowers) that's also facing these struggles, but the story doesn't really go there so much, and the later stories aren't written in that context.

And now, of course, I think the current timeline is that everything's happened in the past 10 years? So Xavier founded the X-Men in 1998, which excises all of that.

[lisaquestions.livejournal.com]

Actually, hmm...was past Kitty in future Kate's body unconscious for a lot of it?

[lisaquestions.livejournal.com]

I didn't know about that, but it's an awesome rumor. Even though outing people is bad! Very bad!

Oh, Dazzler is back, woo.

And I think you're right. If mutants are willing to topple nations and threaten the world with nuclear destruction, some will out closeted mutants.

[lisaquestions.livejournal.com]

Actually... I don't know about expendability. The Magneto in X3 would, but he wasn't really the same Magneto as in the first two movies. Yes, he was going to sacrifice Rogue, and that was wrong, I think that he largely views mutants as more important than humans, whatever their circumstance. Of course, this is situational, and you put a mutant like Rogue in front of him when he has a mutant-making machine that'd kill him to use at full power, and he'll take the opportunity.

That's not to say he wouldn't out anyone. His politics are pretty radical, to say the least. I think he's primarily focused on winning the war before humanity starts it.

Which puts another angle on it - this belief by the extremists on both sides that mutants and humans are on a collision course for war, and the FUD that would cause.

[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...

[lisaquestions.livejournal.com]

Yes!

That was the point of my question about why mutants are beating each other up - one of the thoughts that prompted this was how that kind of fighting really does benefit the anti-mutant humans, as it sucks up energy that could be used for anything. That while Magneto is presented as a parallel for Malcolm X, he's really a huge distraction that cuts down on the X-Men's effectiveness beyond fighting to stop Magneto, and of course - given how the majority treats minorities - whatever Magneto does still reflects on all mutants.

There's a lot of room for some bitter intra-mutant relations along multiple lines.

And: What are humans doing to make the conflict worse? Are they provoking Magneto secure in the faith that Charles will stop him? Is there more too it? Has the government recruited mutants and seeded them into mutant organizations to spy on them? (http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0519/dailyUpdate.html)

[lisaquestions.livejournal.com]

There's a lot of room for some bitter intra-mutant relations along multiple lines.

er, "because of this, but also bitterness toward humans who foment it further."

I also don't think the conflict could possibly be stable because it keeps the strongest mutants from actually doing anything.

[lisaquestions.livejournal.com]

Anyway, that was the question I asked that prompted me to write this.

And Morpheus' article addresses why this war rings so hollow.

[bruceb.livejournal.com]

The Hellfire Club is in the position of Quentin Crisp's "stately old homos", more or less - they have their position in the very upper tiers of society, where overall group solidarity means pitching in when it's time to keep the unhappy masses at bay, and applying the "don't frighten the horses" standard.

I haven't seen Iron Man yet, but the "this isn't the strangest thing you've waked in to find me doing" line nails it precisely. Protect the class, and everyone else will pretend either that they don't know what you're up to or that they aren't bothered.

[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]

Good points. I never really saw the Hellfire Club as caring much about mutant liberation - they had as much power and privilege as anyone could have before you throw in superpowers.

I need to write a followup post.

Oh, when I said "both sides" above, I meant humans and mutants, not Xavier's mutants and Magneto's mutants. Just to be clear.

[squigglefish.livejournal.com]

I entirely see your point, X-men does suffer unfortunately, and unavoidably, from "more mutant than thou" type stuff, wank community schisms.

In the context of the story, however, and in being a publishable comic, I'm not sure how they could have been avoided. The inherent issue with x-men was that although the audience was called upon to identify with the mutants, the writers also knew that readers or other media commentators could also find it very distasteful for the majority of regular humans to be painted in a realisticunfavourable light. This is made worse, because although there are opportunities for the interactions to be explored safely, such things eventually boil down to politics, wereas the comic concept itself as I understand it was more action focused. As such, only a passing mention of the troubles could be considered.

[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."

[hazelsteapot.livejournal.com]

My comment isn't so much about the comic as it is about how it represents the kyriarchical viewpoint and what is that perspective about.

That said, I mean, they could've chosen a less loaded word than human to represent the dominant class, for example. But again, that's representative of the mindset of benevolent supremacy they represent...

I also think it's hugely significant that the white people see the mutants as aggressive and violent etc, but in particular that they see them as having immense power able to break the order any minute if they chose, like every card in Gambit's deck was THE RACE CARD OMG POWER OF DOOM...

[lisaquestions.livejournal.com]

Now I want an icon with Gambit holding a clearly labeled race card, but I suspect the message would be lost in translation.

[hazelsteapot.livejournal.com]

heh.

If I was a digital artist, I would totally make you one. But yeah, prolly.

[lisaquestions.livejournal.com]

Also, because I think using it would be entitlement on my part.

[hazelsteapot.livejournal.com]

Could you explain? There's part of me that reads this as irony, and part serious, but I'd think that if you used it in appropriate situations it'd be rad (though that being a white person's default icon would be dubious, I get that).

[lisaquestions.livejournal.com]

Because I can't think of many conversations where it'd be appropriate, really.

[hazelsteapot.livejournal.com]

nod. I mean, I'd still appreciate your thoughts on it, but it's not exactly a big deal.

[lisaquestions.livejournal.com]

Well, that's pretty much my thoughts. That and I'm a bit cautious about making use of stuff like that when I'm not directly oppressed in that way.

It might be that I'm overcautious, but that's my personal reaction, even though part of me would love to do it.

[ibnfirnas.livejournal.com]

You might also remember that Professor X himself was closeted for *years* in the series, and lobbied as "Hi, I'm a non-mutant intellectual expert of mutants, and I say they should have rights." And the Xavier Institute was closeted for years as a "mutant school."
...yeah.

I'm also remembering the semi-retcon that people like Magneto and Mystique named the "Brotherhood of Evil Mutants" ironically, as sort of a, "you'll call us evil anyway, we'll thumb our noses at you while we do it, ooh we're so scary" thing.

[lisaquestions.livejournal.com]

True on Xavier, and I really should have talked about that. Really, the whole "Professor X = MLK and Magneto = Malcolm X" thing is problematic anyway, and this just makes it moreso.

And yeah on the naming ironically, although it's hard to be ironic when you're leading a brotherhood of evil mutants and trying to conquer nations and engaging in the occasional act of nuclear terrorism. ;) Mostly the latter more than the former.

Also, that's a really cool icon. :)

[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. :)