I get invested in this part of the X-Men. I think it's hard to keep myself separated from it. I am a lesbian and I grew up in a small town, I got bullied relentlessly at school from Grade 7 to Grade 10. I had a best friend I grew up with, but as we got older we grew apart, well she eventually told her friends I was gay and they told the whole school. In Grade 10 some kids tried to kill me for being gay. My parents moved us to the city because of that incident. I didn't end up in the hospital and the bus driver finally got up and pulled them off me so I just had some bruises on my neck, no charges were laid against anyone. This was back in the late 80's. For the rest of the school year I had to sit on the bus in the seat closest to the bus driver and some of the other kids who were nicer sat beside me so that the bullies would leave me alone on the bus. They would still come at me while at school, try to corner me in different places where teachers couldn't see them.
I didn't tell anyone I was a lesbian when I got to the city school. I just stayed away from people, I was invisible until I graduated and then I moved out of Saskatchewan as fast as I could to a place where I knew there was an LGBT community.
But I find it hard to not be empathetic to characters in stories like this. I feel sad for Cylobel even though she is only a fictional character and it kind of breaks my heart a little that no one is ever able to save her from the endless torture they inflict on her.
People hate for no reason, they hate me just for existing, and even though things are better now, occasionally you still get hate thrown at you. I remember only a couple of months ago walking out of a meeting at the local Pride centre and some a bunch of white guys started shouting at us and calling us a bunch of names and everything else you can probably guess. They were starting to walk toward us, but then more people came out of the meeting and they got scared and ran off like the cowards they are. We didn't do anything to those men, we didn't say anything to them, they just knew that we were LGBT because we walked out of the Pride centre and that was enough for them to throw vitriol and hate at us.
I remember they painted some rainbow flags on the sidewalks for the last Pride parade and people wrote horrible things about how much God hates us and how we are going to burn in hell. They even draw swastikas on some of the murals.
Some of them aren't even religious, they hate because people of minorities because we are all "the other" and for that reason we are to be hated because we are different from they are and no other reason.
I am just a lesbian woman, I am white, and I can pass as a heterosexual woman, but then you have all the people who are visible minorities, you have the transgender men and women who cannot pass as easily, you even have gay men and lesbian women who prefer to be gender binary in their clothing so they don't pass.
The reason that racism in the Marvel Universe is not unrealistic is because I have seen this hate and vitriol myself. It exists, and a lot of people won't even try to step forward to help you when it's happening. They just watch or turn their eyes away and walk away as fast as they can. There was a picture in today's X-Men Week that truly captures what human hate really looks like, this is the picture that truly shows what dealing with racism and bigotry every day of your life can be like.
There but for the grace of god go we all! The Holocaust occurred 80 years ago, and so many other genocides and ethnic cleansing since then. People do not learn from history, they are truly doomed to repeat it. Fascism, racism, and bigotry are on the rise everywhere, and the worst part is they are on the rise in the so called free western nations just as much as anywhere else.
It is not unrealistic what happens to mutants in the comics, because it happens in our world all the time, just most people don't see it!
I am sorry, perhaps I shouldn't have posted this in this thread, I just started rambling and I couldn't stop, I see myself in Cylobel in the comic and that is why the images of what happened to her character kind of haunt me a little after the fact.