Lisa Harney (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
lisaquestions) wrote2008-08-27 11:32 pm
lisaquestions) wrote2008-08-27 11:32 pm
X-Men and Civil Rights
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.
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.
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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?
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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.
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M-day brought us what the world would look like if Mags won.
Age of Apocalypse brought us what it would look like if he had won.
Grant Morrison's future visions in New X-Men or the mini-series X-Men:The End give us yet another story.
Any Exiles arc has some interesting tidbit in it of the possibilities.
Although honestly the issue that I mention of the X-factor Layla Miller special is one of the first times I have seen things put together so well.
I love Layla though, so I could just be biased.
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I also wonder about characters who have seen the future (Kitty Pryde and Rachel Summers) in Days of Future Past, and how much energy they'd put into preventing that, spreading the word about it so people know that "things are going to hell and we need to do something about it" and what that would mean.
And yes, it seems far-fetched, but hey, telepaths nearly everywhere might help with the convincing.
And yes, The End was one of the reasons I started thinking about this stuff. I haven't read Grant Morrison's future X-Men materials, though.
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Do you remember when Doug died and the speech she gave at his funeral?
That changed my life. I think I was like 10 or 11 or something.
You should write some fanfic about what you mean. I think this is the first time I have actually said that, so this moment is monumental. I am going to stick a flag in it.
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And yes, I remember when Doug died! :(
I hadn't thought of fanfic, to be honest, but it might be worth trying out. It'd be writing something, at least.
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All of my older comics are in storage across the country from me, or else I would try to find the issue I am talking about.
Kitty's speech at his funeral was and is to me still one of the most moving pieces of writing in comics.
The memory of it is anyway. I could reread it and think it was tripe, but I think that is actually an unlikely scenario.
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Age of Apocalypse posits the war happening anyway, and Magneto being opposed by those who're worse, but House of M basically posits that the war ended without firing a shot.
I was just reminded of the Exiles arc with Uberdictator Tony Stark...
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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 reasonbecause 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...
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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)
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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.
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And Morpheus' article addresses why this war rings so hollow.
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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.no subject
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...
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If I was a digital artist, I would totally make you one. But yeah, prolly.
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It might be that I'm overcautious, but that's my personal reaction, even though part of me would love to do it.