How much has the X-Men as a reflection of real life minorities changed overtime?

[Electricmastro]

100% agree! The idea that a bunch of white mutants (Cyclops, Emma, Kitty, ect..) Suffer more racism, prejudice and bigotry over actual minorities is a complete joke. Is Scott being called a mutie more offensive than Sam Wilson being called the N word? Is Emma Frost more discriminated against than Monica Rambeau? There are real minorities in the MU who can be used to tell stories of oppression and bigotry but Marvel insists on pushing them aside in favor of majority white mutants. Even minority X-men are pushed to the side or are wallpaper characters, so the mutant metaphor for minorities has to be done away with.

Perhaps further complicating the connection between mutants and real life minorities are scenes like the one in Uncanny X-Men #223 (1987), in which a white human is shown being against mutants, but also emphasizes how doesn't care if people accuse him of being racist against them, and that he'd bust anyone's face if anyone talked badly about him or black humans like his black friend too.

[Beaddle]

Something interesting I found with real life minorities angle is, how do actual minorities feel within their own community? In xmen evolution nightcrawler dates a black girl who parents banned her from seeing him after they discovered he was a mutant. prejudice is a very complicated topic as even within their disfranchised community, there is prejudice. Jews for examples could be prejudice to other Jews who were not born or raised Israel. Africans have the issue of light skinned vs dark skinned.

In x-men, I believe the movies of first class the questioned has been raised of the mutants who didn't have too hide. Xavier, Magneto, Mystique and Beast may all been mutants but its different fro Mystique and Beast due to their physical appearances.

Watching xmen evolution, it did strike out to me that one to two black characters were bullying the mutant kids.

[tuck frump]

Perhaps further complicating the connection between mutants and real life minorities are scenes like the one in Uncanny X-Men #223 (1987), in which a white human is shown being against mutants, but also emphasizes how doesn't care if people accuse him of being racist against them, and that he'd bust anyone's face if anyone talked badly about him or black humans like his black friend too.

You have plenty of people irl being vocally gay friendly and racist at the same time. Or the other way around. This makes it more realistic.

[Electricmastro]

Something interesting I found with real life minorities angle is, how do actual minorities feel within their own community? In xmen evolution nightcrawler dates a black girl who parents banned her from seeing him after they discovered he was a mutant. prejudice is a very complicated topic as even within their disfranchised community, there is prejudice. Jews for examples could be prejudice to other Jews who were not born or raised Israel. Africans have the issue of light skinned vs dark skinned.

In x-men, I believe the movies of first class the questioned has been raised of the mutants who didn't have too hide. Xavier, Magneto, Mystique and Beast may all been mutants but its different fro Mystique and Beast due to their physical appearances.

Watching xmen evolution, it did strike out to me that one to two black characters were bullying the mutant kids.

I think that prejudice is a lot more of a complicated fiery poison than some people might think at first glance, as in it goes beyond “I simply hate someone for their skin color, religion, etc.” Prejudice of white Americans tends to be publicized the most, and there’s indeed much evidence of that proves that there were many bad people acting very irresponsibly in regards to that, though at the same time I don’t think that should take away from the suggestion that just about any community in any part of the world that grows big enough is still capable of expressing prejudice no matter who they are, even among minorities themselves, such as Muslims being against gays or blacks being against Jews, as I recall Martin Luther King questioning how there was anti-semitism among blacks people after Jewish Civil Rights activists Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner got killed. And then conversely you have cases like Jewish entertainer Al Johnson putting on blackface, but also rather paradoxically fighting against black discrimination in others parts of his life, and other cases like with Jewish creators Stan Lee and Jack Kirby who helped create stories featuring the racially stereotypical Whitewash Jones in Young Allies, or Jewish creator Will Eisner similarly creating Ebony White.

I guess what I’m saying is that however bad relations with minorities can get, it’s never extremely simple and straightforward, and the evidence surrounding such cases should be analyzed as carefully and responsibly as much as possible, potentially looking for a solution that could used to help solve a problem as soon as possible. I’m sure that just as there can be truth to that in real life, there can be truth to that in the Marvel Universe as well depending on how the writing plays out.

[Lapsus]

I don't sympathize with them. I just prefer this over what we got before: blandness.

The problem is that they are still bland, their motivation is stupid, which for me, doesnt matter how human you portray them when there is nothing beyond..." they are replacing us"

Human villains sucks big time in this franchise.

[Zelena]

The problem is that they are still bland, their motivation is stupid, which for me, doesnt matter how human you portray them when there is nothing beyond..." they are replacing us"

Human villains sucks big time in this franchise.

Fear can do this to people: bland fury and bland hatred. It's not necessary to go back very far in human history to find examples of this behaviour. (At first, I thought you talked about mutants…)

[pkingdom]

The 'we will replace you' line in Xavier's recent psychic temper tantrum baffled me. Its kind of been underlying a lot of the X-men history; they are the future! and all that jazz. But when you combine that line with all of the imagery and references to Israel and Jerusalem, it almost feels like they are portraying the X-men as 'Jews according to White Supremacists'.

Don't make the racists right!

[Electricmastro]

The 'we will replace you' line in Xavier's recent psychic temper tantrum baffled me. Its kind of been underlying a lot of the X-men history; they are the future! and all that jazz. But when you combine that line with all of the imagery and references to Israel and Jerusalem, it almost feels like they are portraying the X-men as 'Jews according to White Supremacists'.

Don't make the racists right!

And may add more credence to the idea of how, regardless of how many times people like to repeat it, Professor X and Magneto really aren't completely comparable analogies to Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, like how ChristianfromNJ98 was getting at with his recent insightful post: https://community.cbr.com/showthread...is-not-for-MLK

And going back to what I myself previously brought up in that I really do think that the genesis for Professor X, Magneto, and the X-Men in general originates more from the effects of nuclear war than civil rights, particularly from Binder's 1953 nuclear radiation article. That's not to say that writers that come along after Stan Lee can't write stories touching on real life minority rights, but no matter how many years pass by, I think that it will always be hard to dissociate Stan Lee and Jack Kirby's mutants from Otto Binder's sorts of ideas involving the possibility of dangerous superpowered mutants rising up to enslave and kill off humans, because it's a sort of backstory that can't be completely gotten around when attempting to write the mutant experience as a parallel to the real life minority experience. I've come to realize that that can make it more complicated when claiming many similarities between mutants and real life minorities, as there's definitely a limit as to how much the two can be compared before one starts to see major differences:

[pkingdom]

Wow, that passage kind of summerizes all of X-men in one go. That's super apt.

[Londo Bellian]

Storm's thoughts of wanting to just kill Batroc and friends and cursing Krakoa Law 2 for preventing her from doing so during "Marauders #2" really feels chilling in light of that passage. Is it from a publication before the first "X-Men" issue was brought out by Lee and Kirby?

[Electricmastro]

Storm's thoughts of wanting to just kill Batroc and friends and cursing Krakoa Law 2 for preventing her from doing so during "Marauders #2" really feels chilling in light of that passage. Is it from a publication before the first "X-Men" issue was brought out by Lee and Kirby?

It's definitely likely that Lee and Kirby were inspired by previous reading material such as 1953's Children of the Atom, though the main inspiration seems to be from the article in question which is the Otto Binder article "How Nuclear Radiation Can Change Our Race," also published in 1953, 10 years before the X-Men was first published.

It may actually serve as an unofficial explanation for what fuels the humans' fear and hatred towards mutants, specifically early cases such as Bolivar Trask's initial distrust of them in X-Men #14. It's really this sort of foundation that Lee and Kirby built on that we seem to be dealing with:







Source: http://blog.modernmechanix.com/how-n...ange-our-race/

[nx01a]

Is it from a publication before the first "X-Men" issue was brought out by Lee and Kirby?

Here ya go. 10 years before X-Men #1.

[Zelena]

And may add more credence to the idea of how, regardless of how many times people like to repeat it, Professor X and Magneto really aren't completely comparable analogies to Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, like how ChristianfromNJ98 was getting at with his recent insightful post: https://community.cbr.com/showthread...is-not-for-MLK

And going back to what I myself previously brought up in that I really do think that the genesis for Professor X, Magneto, and the X-Men in general originates more from the effects of nuclear war than civil rights, particularly from Binder's 1953 nuclear radiation article. That's not to say that writers that come along after Stan Lee can't write stories touching on real life minority rights, but no matter how many years pass by, I think that it will always be hard to dissociate Stan Lee and Jack Kirby's mutants from Otto Binder's sorts of ideas involving the possibility of dangerous superpowered mutants rising up to enslave and kill off humans, because it's a sort of backstory that can't be completely gotten around when attempting to write the mutant experience as a parallel to the real life minority experience. I've come to realize that that can make it more complicated when claiming many similarities between mutants and real life minorities, as there's definitely a limit as to how much the two can be compared before one starts to see major differences:

"… his great superiority in mind"? It's clearly not the case of Marvel mutants except some individuals.
The topic of Übermenschen is rather common in science-fiction. What he could do, his relationship with our species… Don't forget that during a long time, we have considered that Neanderthal man has been supplanted by Homo sapiens because he was less clever, less adaptable. It fueled the idea that, one day, we will suffer the same fate.

[LordUltimus]

Storm's thoughts of wanting to just kill Batroc and friends and cursing Krakoa Law 2 for preventing her from doing so during "Marauders #2" really feels chilling in light of that passage. Is it from a publication before the first "X-Men" issue was brought out by Lee and Kirby?

Didn't she say "stand down or be destroyed" to a group of civilians during Utopia?

[Electricmastro]

"… his great superiority in mind"? It's clearly not the case of Marvel mutants except some individuals.
The topic of Übermenschen is rather common in science-fiction. What he could do, his relationship with our species… Don't forget that during a long time, we have considered that Neanderthal man has been supplanted by Homo sapiens because he was less clever, less adaptable. It fueled the idea that, one day, we will suffer the same fate.

It being the case or not, it's that sort of foundation that later X-Men stories have to build themselves on top of since, of course, Stan and Jack built the foundation after being inspired by something that came before it, like with the Übermenschen you were talking about. It's definitely a complex subject matter that has probably been oversimplified by later writers more than it probably deserves, even on the grounds of being a prejudice-addressing superhero book.