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]

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."

[kiya]

Not comics but sort of comics-universe-like, have you ever read any of the Wild Cards series? The parallelism of the mutant civil rights stuff there with the real-world civil rights movement is Not Subtle, but it was interesting to me when I read it.

[lisaquestions.livejournal.com]

I have! There's some good stuff in there, especially early on. It gets out of hand in later books, though.

I've heard the new stuff is pretty good, and the comic (at least what I've read so far) is good.