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

[heinousbitca.livejournal.com]

when minorities mutants fight against one another it's so much easier to keep the status quo going, though!

my love-hate-speak-truth-to relationship with the "feminist movement" as we know it (and to every girl with her own stuff and bank accounts who tells me she's not a feminist...) is pretty "special". i think the amusing part is that i always took it on the chin for being "one of those feminist bitches" when i was younger and now i've supposedly turned on it for calling out the racism/classism/transphobia/homophobia that seems to be all too well tolerated whenever it's convenient for the right people.

and yes, i am happy i got mullet-intervened.

[lisaquestions.livejournal.com]

Yes, on the fighting. I think that's part of what clicked for me to write the post. "Why are mutants fighting each other all the time? and who does this benefit?"

Any time I'm talking in a space that's not really feminist (like, there's any men at all), I end up being a feminazi. But from inside feminism, I feel like all I do is call out those things - mostly transphobia and ableism and racism...wait, all of those things.

I've lost count of the number of times a radical feminist (the trans-hating variety) has asked me why I'm wasting time criticizing them when I should be taken on the menz...except they don't stop trying to take me on and saying screwed up things about race, disability, and class.

That icon is sublime.

[heinousbitca.livejournal.com]

oh i feel you, do i ever feel you.

i tend to respond with "Because you're just seconding the patriarchy with your inherent need to be the gender police. In other words, you're just hurting us all."

(and then they ask me why i defend "them" and i just sit there and try to make the speaker quantify "them." by the end of their exclusionfest it's a bunch of white able-bodied cisgendered middle-class women (sometimes with caveats about sexual orientation) and Ubaka Hill. so in other words, it's fucking Michfest.)

(feel free to steal icon, it's everywhere, even if it is awesome.)

[lisaquestions.livejournal.com]

I'm almost full up atm and I like most of my icons. :) Plus, I like to use representations of people. :)

If I ever make good points, they start complaining that I link to Renegade Evolution and Jill Brenneman, because anyone who supports sex worker rights must necessarily be anti-woman.

[heinousbitca.livejournal.com]

oh lord there's nothing classist about hating on sex workers, really. totally. also if you take shots for one internet porno site you can totally claim sex worker status but only when you need to...if you're a hooker, on the other hand, you're just gonna get discarded in this debate as a whore.

i made my peace with being a whore a long, long time ago.

i have a whore paid account so i get a mess of icons. this lets me have weirdly esoteric ones, humorous ones, and, of course, one that forms a license plate that the Department of Licensing (what the DMV is called in Washington State) should really let me have but won't.

[lisaquestions.livejournal.com]

Oh, yeah. Check this post out (http://hexpletive.blogspot.com/2008/09/hearts-thread-so-thats-where-line-is.html) for some anti-sex worker crap. Not Hexy, Hexy's just quoting and responding with anger and power. But wow.