Is Captain Boomerang a racist?

[Frontier]

Red Skull is a hardcore racist and Nazi. Same with Arnim Zola, it’s been depicted that way pretty explicitly in the comics.

Captain Boomerang was a racist during Ostrander’s run. He was meant to be the worst of the worst in contrast to guys like Bronze Tiger and Rick Flag. I’m not sure if that’s the status quo now though.

He may not be as overt a racist but he's pretty definitively the one member of the Squad everyone hates.

[The Cool Thatguy]

Yeah, Boomerbutt was racist in the first SS run.

For instance, When they are planning to take down William Hell and it is observed that the only people William Hell arrests are minority members, Boomer's reply is "Well, that makes sense. They commit all the crimes, don't they?"

To which Bronze Tiger observes, all the criminals in the room are white :P

Boomer 'got away with it' because his character was always meant to be over the top, and the cast was all too willing to make Boomer suffer for his @$$ hole nature. Waller, for instance, stranded him on a desert island for year, and cast members would often render him unconscious and then place him in danger to get help for unauthorized missions.

Boomer was a complete scumbag in the first run, all things considered. When he thought that Shade was going to rape Vixen, he offered to remain silent so long as he could join in.

Dunno if writers could make a character like him fly these days. And he's been toned down a lot now.

[K. Jones]

Time was you could tell a character was an ******* because he said something and you were like ... ohhhhh ... this guy's an *******. I suppose that's still typically true. Something about his look and design and gimmick made Ostrander think, yeah, this guy is a hater. Maybe the boomerang motif on a very white guy. It's not like boomerangs are in and of themselves cultural appropriation, but the way Digger plays it up, plays it into his Aussie background, kind of comes across like that. Nobody accuses Batman of cultural appropriation because of his Batarangs. But you've got this very pasty red-headed goon in his absurd costume with his traditional boomerangs and his accent and something don't sit quite right.

The Suicide Squad is interesting of course because it is made up of villains who are on a spectrum of being bad people. Bronze Tiger is pretty noble as a dude ... he's also a stone cold killer. Does the code of an assassin absolve him of being a bad person because it's just business? Are you effing kidding me? That probably makes it worse, but we as a culture find assassins to be very chic.

So you're building a team of ne'er-do-wells up and don't just want the tension of "if you go rogue Amanda blows your head off", you want interpersonal tension. Because these are all villains and they're not like a slick team of heist villains who are selected for their ability to work together. They don't want to be here, they don't want to work together, they have really diverse backgrounds for who they are and why they're here.

So Digger being a racist was a solid play for making him immediately and easily the most unlikable piece of crap on the team. Being the most cold blooded or ruthless or murderous or evil? To the pop culture court of opinion? Not as unlikable as being a blatant racist because of your blue collar ignorant secret origin. It's far more of a pop culture crime to grow up poor and rural and remain stupid than it is to kill people for money, for whatever reason that is and I sure don't know why that's the case. And then there's the rub - because in addition to being Ostrander's token scumbag, he also gave Boomerang that survivor quality. A book where characters die a lot, and Boomerang has that coward's luck! Oh god you love to hate a character like that.

[The Cool Thatguy]

Minor point.

In the first SS, it wasn't a team of only villains, and Tiger was a victim of brainwashing. There was only one mission that was all villains.

Boomer survived the Squad because, as pointed out several times, he's good in a fight. Used to be you didn't need a million dollar movie and one liners to be bad ass.

[Frontier]

Well was the last time Boomer called a woman a "bloody bike?" It was practically his catchphrase...

[Robotman]

It doesn’t come up in the current books but yeah, the Cap Boomerang from Ostrander’s 80s run was definitely racist. But he was also sexist, conniving, cowardly, greedy, oh and a murderer. Even his fellow inmates couldn’t stand him. That was Captain Boomerang.

A character being so openly racist wouldn’t fly in today’s mainstream comics so I wouldn’t call the current iteration of the character a straight up racist. he’s still a real son of a bitch. But that’s kinda why fans like him.