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.

[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.

[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?

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)

[foibey.livejournal.com]

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

[syphilis-jane.livejournal.com]

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

[askesis.livejournal.com]

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

[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.

[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.

[afro-dyte.livejournal.com]

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