Incoming wall o' text.
The inherent problem with that is that you're delving into different stories in different worlds -- the fictional world of the X-Men or the real world.
In the X-Men's world, you don't see much in the way of stories about real world oppression on the news. They don't touch on Black Lives Matter, or Islamic Mosques being burned or gay kids being targeted with violence. For all we know, as things have been shown in recent years with people of all races banded together in hating on mutants, there
is no longer significant human bias against human minorities. The bigotry is saved for mutants, in the X-Universe. If it's brought up at all, like a reference to concentration camps with Magneto, or Kitty's infamous N word dialogue from
God Love, Man Kills, it's to draw a parallel to what mutants are going through. The reason for that is because mutants were created to be a fictional minority group and the X-Men are fictional members of that minority group who battle the unwarranted hate and fear directed at them.
It's a metaphor.
You have mutants who can choose to hide what they are that run parallel with real world minority groups based on religion or orientation, then you have mutants who cannot choose to hide what they are to parallel racial minorities.
Now, before anyone gets angry with me, let me finish.
I
do think real world minority characters are underrepresented in the X-Men, as well as across the board in comics in general. I expect it's chiefly because of the era in which most of the characters were originally created and the fact that fans, especially of Marvel and DC, don't want to read about some
new guy, they want to read about Thor or Iron Man or Wolverine or whatever. People interested in reading about the new guys tend to gravitate to Indie titles, which focus on new material, rather than classic.
There are quite a few minority characters that exist across the X-Men line that haven't made the cut long-term, though. Probably the most diverse team ever created were the
New Mutants, but only one of their number truly made it out of the kiddie class and into the Big League, and her hold is tenuous, at best, right now. (Magick)
What we have are a handful of well developed minority characters, significantly more that were once developed but left to languish years ago, and the rest fall into tokenism.
Four characters that I really love in the franchise happen to be minorities. I say "happen to be" because them being a minority isn't the specific reason I love the characters. I love the characters for being
great characters.
Storm and Bishop
They're interesting, well-developed characters of color who are mutants. Bishop has suffered abysmally, story wise, but I hold out hope he'll one day find the right writer and be fixed. Lord knows he needs it. If ever Marvel was going to relaunch Excalibur, for example, Bishop would be a perfect choice for the by-the-book element in the original cast....the straight faced man as a backdrop for the humor associated with the title.
Storm is tragically marginalized these days and I think it boils down to no writer having a clue as to how to write the character correctly. (Amusingly enough, I thought Jason Aaron, in the
Quest for Nightcrawler arc did a pretty good job of capturing the substance of Storm and not relying on feats, as most writers seem to want to do with her.)
The other two are more controversial, and open another portion of the subject at hand called "not
my minority".
Nightcrawler and Psylocke
eth·nic·i·ty
noun
the fact or state of belonging to a social group that has a common national or cultural tradition.
Nightcrawler is ethnically a gypsy from central Europe. If you've ever lived in central Europe, you're probably familiar with just how harshly this group is treated, as in they still have their camps burned down and are chased away from towns by the authorities . It's socially accepted bigotry, as I witnessed first hand when my youngest child was in kindergarten, in listening to her teacher talk.
The character's heritage is overshadowed by the fact that he looks like a blue devil. Why not use his heritage more, like Claremont did?
Psylocke was raised a white woman of privilege, but she's been in an Asian body for many years now. Does that completely discount her? It appears to, based on what I've read from other fans. I mean, I'm not defending the original story line or anything, but she
is actually a race other than white, and she's also bisexual. Again, neither are addressed, overly much. Why not?
This is where we get into the territory of not my minority group. Is there really a right or a wrong answer to this? Isn't diversity about inclusion of all groups? Why discount those minority groups that don't represent what you're personally interested in? I see it happen all the time.
The final thing is this, in response to what to do about it. In my opinion, if you scream and demand diversity, the response is an uptick on token appearances, or at least that's what I've seen so far. Why was Iceman written to be gay? Because Bendis needed a token minority in his classically all white O5 group, after such an outcry over lack of diversity in the line-up. That's what I believe, anyway. With as little as Storm has done in Gold, she seems more like a token black character on the cast, rather than an A-list X-Man. I'm sorry, but
that's not good enough.
In X-Men Red, three of the cast are a part of real life minority groups. Instead of people being excited on these boards for the book, I see them bashing the cast and whining about it. (Now if this ends up as another team book that is written like a solo with supporting, I'll probably join the whining.
)
Maybe instead of complaining to Marvel and demanding
more characters who'll just end up in limbo, it would be better to say we'd really like the ones we have to be used and a significant part of the franchise once more? Make them great characters again, don't just make more lackluster characters.
That's my 2 cents on it.