I’ve had to spend the last nineteen years on this planet navigating through the veritable minefield that comes along with having a crazy Haitian mother. It’d have been one thing to if my mother had just been Haitian; I can deal with being cursed out in Creole and threatened with voodoo; but the crazy part really put the icing on the cake in regards to things I’ve had to do to delay an ass whooping (when your mother is Haitian and crazy there is no avoiding your ass whooping – you were born deserving one and she’ll be damned if she doesn’t give it to you.) I learned at a very early age that if I didn’t watch what I said I ran the risk of riling up my mother.
So here I am now, nearly twenty (which I find mind blowing – I’ve almost been on this planet for a quarter of a century) navigating myself through college and a whole different level of interaction with my peer-groups, I’ve developed a very good sense as to what I (or someone else) has to say to rile people up. People are simpler than you’d think and I’m sure most of you out there know what I’m getting at. If you’re willing to piss people off, even a little bit, it’s not at all difficult to control the entire nature of a discussion.
I try to avoid building blame trees, I really do, but what I was just talking about is exactly what I feel that this article over at io9 does. I don’t want to accuse Marc Bernadin of anything, because when it comes down to it I don’t live in his head and can only guess at his intentions, but I knew from the moment I read that article it would stir up a shitcrock even moreso than Ryan Choi’s death. I didn’t really expect the whole Donald Glover for Spider-man thing to come out of it, but nothing at all has surprised me about the nature of the discussion that’s surrounded the article and the subsequent meme.
My problem with Mr. Bernadin’s piece stems from the fact that he’s posing the question of an ethnically diverse Spider-man the easiest and most comfortable way possible.
Look at any discussion on the internet about this and it’s pretty much all the same – people who are for the idea of Spider-man being cast as a non-white person, people who are against it because Spider-man is white in the comics, and people who are against it because they are racist. Hell, I’d even say that a lot of people in the second group fall into the third group given how uncomfortable the idea makes them.
The entire nature of the discussion Mr. Bernadin has presented is innocent enough but at it’s core it almost seems designed to divide. The racists and the über-purists are easily identified and weeded out, leaving behind what seems like a sizable contingent of level-headed individuals who want a black Spider-man. You’d think that will all the support Glover has garnered for his campaign for Sony to give him an audition that America was ready for a black Spider-man.
I’m going to tell you that it’s not and had that been the question originally posed by Mr. Bernadin, we would all see that instead of fooling ourselves that we have finally moved into the post-racial utopia.
This is where my “Angry black guy” is going to start seeping out, so please, bear with me.
We live in an America where I’ve had to sit in a class with people who thought Barack Obama’s election and subsequent assassination would bring about a race war. We live in an America where there are still motherfuckers who get mad about Affirmative Action and are too up their own asses to pick up a book and figure out why we need it. We live in an America where people still haven’t gotten that it pisses off black people when you go out of your way to mention how “Well-spoken” they are. Shit, we live in a god damn America where there’s never even been an Asian dude on the Real World.
Most importantly: We live in a world where whiteness is being peddled as a commodity.
And that’s only the tip of the iceberg.
When I was in high school I did an internship at the Philadelphia Inquirer (one of the few times in my life I’ve done something productive and educational on the weekends) one of the reporters and I had a conversation about the Blade films (specifically, the third one which had come out two or three years earlier.) She had interviewed one of the producers on the film and he claimed that the Blade character worked well on film because in Europe and Asia the populations had a hard time accepting media with heroic black protagonists since they were used to seeing blacks as villains. Blade worked because he has that anti-hero edge, and if this producer guy is to be believed, Hancock would’ve been acceptable to those countries standards for black protagonists because he was a drunk and an asshole.
And course he should be believed. When Danny Glover tried to make his film about the leader of the Haitian revolution, Toussaint L’ouverture, do you know what the producers asked him?
So yeah, you want to get offended that a black guys wants to audition for Spider-man? Go on, I don’t give a damn.
We waited a long time to be free from slavery. We waited a long time to get a semblance of equal rights. Some of us thought we’d have to wait forever to get a black President.
I’ll wait as long as I have to for us to get a shot at heroism.
I’m Jay Galette and here’s hoping before I die I get to see a Black Panther movie.
