A writer at Reactor, which is affiliated with Tor Books, turned out another questionable article about the issues with Superman involving race and immigration, once again distorting a lot of details for the sake of modern leftist ideology:
Someone once quipped “Superman is a fantasy comic book about a powerful straight white man who is nice.” Which is pretty funny and also probably correct about some versions of Superman. There are other versions, though. Guess which I want to talk about?
One could argue that Superman (or at least some versions) isn’t white. He’s not even human. He’s an alien from the planet Krypton. His marvelous powers derive from that fact. OK, I hear some of you say, but he looks exactly like a white guy and everyone treats him or at least his persona Clark Kent as white. How is that not being white2?
It might be useful, if one were a member of a deprecated non-white ethnic minority, if it were possible to present oneself as white. News flash: it is possible and people have done this frequently enough that there’s an accepted word for it. Perhaps several words. One is “passing.” Historical examples abound. Some who have opted to pass have done this so effectively that their descendants had no idea that their ancestors had been considered non-white.
Sure, it’s possible. But if this is supposed to downplay how Kal-El was created by Siegel and Shuster as a white humanoid figure from another galaxy, I’m not impressed. It’s trivial, and above all, it’s regrettable how there’s only so many PC advocates who’ve been mercilessly dumbing down the Man of Steel for the sake of identity politics, while doing nothing to offer talented storytelling that’s organic and doesn’t come at the expense of prior merit.
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Pre-Crisis Superman is more like someone consciously passing for a white American better than he is like someone who believes he is one by default. He reserves his birth name, Kal-El, for use by family and close friends. The public knows him by an adopted stage name. To his co-workers, he uses the unremarkable (in an American context) Clark Kent. If you were to ask his co-workers what religion Clark Kent is, they might guess Lutheran or Methodist or some other sort of Protestant. None of them would suggest the correct answer, “Raoist,” because that’s not a detail Kal-El shares with co-workers.
Additionally, because he possesses abilities no standard model human has, from super-strength to invulnerability to super-senses, Kal-El has to be continually on guard lest he accidentally reveal he is Kryptonian by, say, casually lifting a truck out of his way.
By any chance, is the writer aware that several years ago, the overrated Brian Bendis wrote a storyline discarding the secret ID mode, but not in a way that ensures good storytelling? Probably not, though something tells me he wouldn’t mind a bit, and wouldn’t complain how dreadful Bendis is as a writer. As for religion, has it ever occurred that some of these ideas like Superman being a Raoist were only developed in later decades?
One story I vaguely recall may have established the Kryptonians as worshiping science. But considering most leftists today don’t exactly have much respect for Judeo-Christianity any more than science itself, what’s the use of this observation either? Now, here comes the PC part, which, while no longer surprising, is still nonetheless dismaying:
Not only is Kal-El an alien but in many continuities, he is an undocumented alien, having been rocketed to Earth as a baby. He never passed through any formal immigration process. Now, the border policies in place when the 1938 version of Superman would have landed on Earth were considerably less stringent than they are now, but they did exist and Kal-El was in violation of many of them. Later versions of Superman broke the law to an even greater extent.
Having arrived as a child on Earth, Kal-El has done his best to assimilate into and be a constructive member of the dominant culture5. He not only embraces his adopted nation’s values; he uses his unique abilities to exemplify them. This is in no way unusual for immigrants, although the manner in which Kal-El pursues this goal is unusual. However, his public faces (Clark Kent, and to an extent Superman) are different from the Kryptonian one would encounter in the Fortress of Solitude. Kal-El is a true blue American! And he’s also a Kryptonian born and bred, who finds it prudent to be judicious about how he presents himself to his fellow Americans.
It’s probably not entirely coincidental that Superman was created by two Jews, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, who were both sons of immigrants (and Shuster was an immigrant himself, having moved from Toronto to Cleveland at a young age), in a time when prejudice against immigrants was on the rise, when antisemitism was rife and most white Americans did not question the numerus clausus policies then in place. Their creation, Kal-El, can be an inspiration to Americans, celebrated across the nation… as long he first circumvents reflexive white American xenophobia by convincing them he is one of them.
Wow, look how these parrots the “Superman’s an Immigrant, Not A Refugee” narrative, and obscures the science fiction trappings of the comic series in the process. In the world view of the propagandists who published this useless column, there’s just no room for surrealism. No doubt, they’ll be taking a similar approach to Starfire tomorrow, if not today, and also for Martian Manhunter, who’s mentioned in footnotes for the article. Same for Marvel’s version of Captain Marvel, Mar-Vell of the Kree, who was created as a metaphor for dissidents from communist Russia in 1967. Why, even the Silver Surfer could probably fit the bill there.
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Also note how the writer parrots a bizarre PC narrative that makes it sound like virtually every USA citizen at the time was just xenophobic and nothing else. I recall some people making comments like that at the time Marvel published their insufferable miniseries The Truth: Red, White & Black, which was intended as nothing more than tearing down everything Captain America was all about, and making it look like virtually everyone in the USA at the time was irredeemable with no common sense. That kind of propaganda is exactly what led to September 11, 2001. It’s offensive and tiresome, and the way this column employs it also minimizes the concept of surrealism along with science fantasy. If these magazines are going to serve more as activist propaganda than in stressing what can make a great science fiction tale, it’s no wonder these magazines have long outlived their usefulness, and nobody should buy their rag if they care more about politicizing the stories and franchises in focus than in stressing the differences between real life and fantasy, all for the sake of tasteless agendas.
It’s just sad how this is basically all science fiction news sources are coming down to nowadays, along with the comic publishers themselves, and this is why, when Superman and the rest of the DCU become public domain, it’ll be for the best.
Originally published here.
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