The X-Men: too much the model minority?

Chris Claremont’s handling of anti-mutant discrimination was a major part of what elevated the X-Men from second-string to A-liserst. In his hands (and others, of course), bigotry provided a source of dramatic tension, inspired multiple stories and gave comics fans who were gay or people of color a team of heroes whose situation they could identify with.

Not everyone identified. A common objection is that mutants are powerful, dangerous individuals where black Americans and gays are just ordinary people: the book’s unintentional subtext isn’t “persecution is bad” but “minorities are scary threats and not entirely human!” It’s a valid criticism ,though I don’t think it’s the last word — like I said, I’ve known other minority members who don’t accept that interpretation.

Another objection is that in a world of superhumans, why should anyone care about mutants? Sure, Storm and Wolverine have scary powers, but so do Thor and the Vision. This argument I don’t think holds at all. The past few years have been a reminder, if any of us needed it, how absolutely deranged bigotry is. Deciding mutants are different from all other superhumans isn’t at all implausible. Ask a bigot why the X-Men are a threat but not the Avengers and you’ll get a baffled “They’re mutants!”

It’s especially plausible when you consider that mutants embody the “great replacement theory,” the idea that some Other race will come along and take America from its rightful white owners. That was Bolivar Trask’s specific argument when he created the Sentinels: mutants are a literal master race and if left to their own devices, they will replace Homo sapiens as ruler of the world. Of course mutants aren’t really a separate race or ethnicity, any more than genes for drinking milk (millions of people are lactose-intolerant) or exceptional height mark someone as a Homo superior. But like I said, bigotry is not rational.

Marvel hasn’t always treated mutants as replacers; the second Sentinel story, by Roy Thomas and Neal Adams, portrayed mutant persecution as closer to the communist witch-hunts of the 1950s (Stephen Attewell discusses in detail how the metaphor worked in the Silver Age). Claremont, however, made it a core of the book, such as when Kitty Pryde compares “mutie” to the n-word. Unfortunately Claremont’s portrayal (and pretty much everyone else writing the book in the last century) of the X-Men as a minority struggling to achieve equality was absolutely terrible. While Professor Xavier is sometimes equated to Martin Luther King, it isn’t even close.

This hit me years ago while watching the PBS miniseries Eyes on the Prize, chronicling the civil rights movement from the Montgomery bus boycotts through the passage of the Civil Rights Act. Looking at black men and women protesting, demanding their rights, sometimes dying for their cause, I realized that among Marvel’s mutants at the time, such behavior was unthinkable (it’s been a long while since I read any X-books regularly so I can’t say if that’s changed).

If a group of mutants walked into a “no mutants allowed” restaurant and demanded service, Claremont’s Cyclops would stand watching with horror and shaking his head in despair. Forcing a confrontation will just inflame prejudice and make things worse! Don’t they know the only solution is to show what a model minority we are, changing hearts and minds slowly? Someday, when humans rise above their prejudice and see mutants aren’t a threat, they’ll invite us to sit at their lunch counters. Until then, the only option is for mutants to keep their heads down and not provoke retaliation.

Magneto, of course, would simply drop a rock on the diner. He’s not one for nonviolent protest either.

Claremont’s X-Men aren’t MLK, they’re the sensible white liberals whose calls to wait, slow down, don’t inflame the bigots, drove MLK up the wall. The people who agreed that of course Jim Crow needs to end, of course Negroes should have their rights. Even so, to demand your rights? Protest against injustice? You’re making everything so tense!

As MLK put it, the Israelites in Egypt moved too fast when Moses told Pharaoh to let his people go. They inflamed the slaveowners, stirred up tension, but it was the only way things could change: “You must remember that the tensionless period that we like to think of was the period when the Negro was complacently adjusted to segregation, discrimination, insult, and exploitation. And the period of tension is the period when the Negro has decided to rise up and break loose from that. And this is the peace that we are seeking: not an old negative obnoxious peace which is merely the absence of tension, but a positive, lasting peace, which is the presence of brotherhood and justice. And it is never brought about without this temporary period of tension. The road to freedom is difficult.”

The Claremont-era X-Men didn’t want that period of tension. They saw tension as proof they were doing it wrong. But the strategy of waiting patiently for someone to acknowledge your rights has never worked. In the words of Frederick Douglass: “Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation…want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightening. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters…. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.”

The X-Men endured way too much.

#SFWApro. Covers by Jack Kirby (x2), Neal Adams, Gil Kane and John Romita Jr.