Originally Posted by
Michael Watkins
you're missing the context. and that's alright. I know that everyone sees things from their own perspective.
taken from his bio: "Jerome Beechman was the son of Frederic Beechman, a physicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, and Margaret Beechman. Before conceiving his son, an explosion breached the facility's nuclear reactor, bombarding Frederic and a cleaning woman with radiation. When Jerome was born a year later, he possessed black skin (despite both of his parents being Caucasian) and tufts of body hair. Jerome was despised by his family because of his freakish appearance, and when he was ten his father drove him out into the New Mexico desert and abandoned him.
While wandering the desert, Jerome encountered Nekra Sinclair, the daughter of the cleaning woman who had been bombarded by radiation in the same accident that had affected Beecham's father. Although her parents were black, she had been born albino white and had developed vampiric features. For six years they lived by theft and scavenging until they were attacked by a lynch mob that thought they were monsters. The hatred triggered by the attack manifested Beecham's ability to control women with his pheromones, as well as Sinclair's powers, which the two used to kill some of their attackers and escape the rest."
not everyone sees the racist dog whistling just beneath the surface of the origin. but there's a reason why his origin was paired with Nekra's. taken alone, there's nothing that weird about it. but the writer, himself, made it about race; with the pairing. this exposure to radiation made Nekra, the daughter of two African americans into an albino. so what did the writer think might make a good contrast to this? they had two white americans have a monkey. and they chose to name him Jerome (a stereotypically black name). and Nekra is an almost naked African American woman who is seen as desirable to most men (because she's white).
and if you think that I'm full of it, the writer also had the leader of the racist group Sons of the Serpent be a self-hating black man.