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

[drakyn.livejournal.com]

Outing sounds like something Magneto would do imo. Since he wouldn't care if the prominent mutant got killed because they should have either been helping mutantkind and/or out already and therefore were betraying mutantkind.

I happen to think that the Institute/refuge of Xavier's school is a good idea. And Grey did some lobbying in the first movie. Also, would Mystique pretending to be Kelly be considered lobbying? honestly, Magneto should have kept her there until she either got found out or voted out. She could have been incredibly useful in many, many ways.

[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... 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.