"Black Skins" and White Masks: Comic books and the secret of race

African American Review, Spring, 2002 by Marc Singer

The stereotypes through which American popular culture often interprets and represents racial identity operate not only as tools of defamation but also as vehicles for far more subtle manipulations of race. In his 1946 essay "Twentieth-Century Fiction and the Black Mask of Humanity," Ralph Ellis on observes that stereotypes of African Americans, whatever other purposes they might serve, become a means "by which the white American seeks to resolve the dilemma arising... between his acceptance of the sacred democratic belief that all men are created equal and his treatment of every tenth man as though he were not" (28)--a means, in other words, of reconciling the contradictions between an ideology of democracy and a history and practice of prejudice. Whether these stereotypes assume the form of unrealistic portrayals of racial minorities or an equally unrealistic invisibility, they often fulfill this double function of oppression and reaffirmation.

Comic books, and particularly the dominant genre of superhero comic books, have proven fertile ground for stereotyped depictions of race. Comics rely upon visually codified representations in which characters are continually reduced to their appearances, and this reductionism is especially prevalent in superhero comics, whose characters are wholly externalized into their heroic costumes and aliases. This system of visual typology combines with the superhero genre's long history of excluding, trivializing, or "tokenizing" minorities to create numeorus minority superheroes who are marked purely for their race: "Black Lightning," "Black Panther," and so forth. The potential for superficiality and stereotyping here is dangerously high. Yet in recent years, some comics creators have demonstrated that the superhero genre's own conventions can invite a more nuanced depiction of minority identity. Race in contemporary comics proves to be anything but simplistic. If some titles reveal deceptively soothing stereotypes lurking behind their veneers of diversity, then others show complex considerations of identity.

This article begins by addressing previous critical debates over the function of race in comics. I then investigate the portrayals of race in several mainstream superhero comic books of the 1990s. The series Legion of Super-Heroes serves as an example of a comic which espouses platitudes of diversity while actually obscuring any signs of racial difference. This attitude, however, is offset by other series such as Black Lightning and Xero, both of which use the convention of the secret identity--a genre staple as old as superheroes themselves--to represent issues of racial and sexual identity. Both comics also indirectly draw upon the concept of double-consciousness to construct their models of racial identity. But before turning to more widely-known critical race theory, I need to offer a brief overview of the criticism on comics and race.

Historically, critics have long associated comics with the perpetuation of racial stereotypes. Frantz Fanon forges this connection in passing in Black Skins, White Masks (1967), writing, "Look at the children's picture magazines: Out of every Negro mouth comes the ritual 'Yassuh, boss'" (34). Fredric Wertham had offered far more extensive criticisms in Seduction of the Innocent (1954), in which he argues that comics "expose children's minds to an endless stream of prejudice-producing images" (100) in which whites are always handsome and heroic whereas non-whites are inferior and subhuman. Wertham believes these representations not only motivate individual readers toward prejudice, but affect society as a whole by normalizing racist standards through repetition. This process of normalization and indoctrination is, Wertham writes, "where a psychiatric question becomes a social one" (105). Yet the writings of Wertham, Fanon, and other early critics of comics stereotypes tend to apply this formulation only in rev erse: Beginning with the social problems of racism in society, they arrive at a condemnation of the internal oppressions comics construct within readers' minds.

Fanon proclaims that "to make [a black man] talk pidgin is to fasten him to the effigy of him, to snare him, to imprison him, the eternal victim of an essence, of an appearance for which he is not responsible" (35), casting the imprisonment as a psychological, existential sentence rather than a social one. Even Wertham, who concludes that the negative images in comics stem from "not an individual condition of children, but a social condition of adults" (394), nevertheless centers his arguments on the psychological harm comics wreak on individual readers. The psychological focus is particularly strong in Wertham's section on race, where he first argues that children develop "the seeds of as individuals (101), then attempts to "analyze children's psychological processes" as an explanation of how comics transmit racial stereotypes (103-04). Contrary to his rhetoric, Wertham--like most critics of racial representations in comics--rests his arguments almost solely on the purported effects comics have on their read ers' beliefs and identities. (1)