It's Getting Better: Pop Culture's Shift to Multi-Ethnic Characters Instead of Caricatures

[CBR News]

While there's still room to improve, positive changes are being made toward minority representation - specifically Indian and Middle Eastern - in pop culture.


Full article here.

[Robotman]

there's still a lot of work to be done. Blue Beetle on Young Justice talked like an extra from a Cheech and Chong movie. "hey hermano lets go fight those super-vatos!"

[Xalfrea]

Some progress is better than no progress. It certainly is much better than what was seen back then.

[Confuzzled]

there's still a lot of work to be done. Blue Beetle on Young Justice talked like an extra from a Cheech and Chong movie. "hey hermano lets go fight those super-vatos!"

Unfortunately, if no member of the creative team behind a certain product is of the same ethnicity or cultural background as the character, there will be some level of disconnect. People will heavily lean on stereotypes or end up "normalizing" the character to such an extent that all of his or her culturally and heritage informed unique experiences will be washed away.

That is the reason why a Sana Amanat and G. Willow Wilson created Kamala Khan is a much better realized and real character than a Brian Bendis controlled Miles Morales.

[Conquistador18]

Considering that religion is at the heart of the worlds problems right now, how about characters who have the courage to speak out against their tyranny and oppression.
And Luke Cage has got to be the most cringe worthy character ever.

[Anduinel]

Generally agreed, however:

It happens far too often, and that sort of reaction -- rather than properly calling attention to the mistakes and discussing how to actually improve on them -- makes people afraid to even try. It slows progress. Rational discussion is important.

That goes two ways. For every pro out there willing to accept that they might have made a bad call when it comes to representation, it seems we've got two belittling and ridiculing even mild "proper" criticism. The quickness of the audience to anger doesn't come out of nowhere, it comes from years of that kind of response being the norm. Heck, we saw Axel Alonso doing it just a couple of weeks ago, directly after he flubbed the Herc question. He unwittingly put his foot in his mouth, which was understandable. Doubling down by retweeting a (quickly deleted) mockery of the issue, however, was plain thumbing his nose at readers' concerns just because he could. So let's extend some of that cautionary advice to the creators and gate-keepers, because if there's a hostile, cynical, ultra-critical atmosphere around this kind of thing, they own at least half of the blame for it.

[mathew101281]

Considering that religion is at the heart of the worlds problems right now, how about characters who have the courage to speak out against their tyranny and oppression.
And Luke Cage has got to be the most cringe worthy character ever.

Religion has always been with us. It has been the motivation for great art, literature and philosophical thought. To claim that it is the heart of the worlds problems to over simplify the worlds problems. More often then not most conflicts are about resources rather then religion. For example the Middle East has been predominantly Muslim and the West predominantly Christian for millennia but the history of conflict between the two regions has more often then not been about resources and ownership of land then belief.

[Thad937]

there's still a lot of work to be done. Blue Beetle on Young Justice talked like an extra from a Cheech and Chong movie. "hey hermano lets go fight those super-vatos!"

I loved Blue Beetle on Young Justice. He was a teenager so he's not going to speak like a college professor.

[JamesIII]

I agree mostly with this article but I think it's a little reductive. Khan and Baz are not the only good multi-ethnic characters out there. Karima Shapandar, Sam Wilson, Karma, Hisako Ichiki, Idie Okonkwo, just to name a few. Some of them started as caricatures, but the nature of the medium and the shifting creative teams has allowed them to become fully realized characters that don't rely on stereotypes.

Certainly there's a lot of work to be done, but it's not like we are JUST NOW starting to see progress. Comics have been a progressive medium for a long time.

[Robotman]

I loved Blue Beetle on Young Justice. He was a teenager so he's not going to speak like a college professor.

i'm a Mexi myself and grew up around mostly hispanic kids. i've never heard anyone speak in that stereotypical cholo way before.

Al Madrigal had a great piece on the Daily Show about Mexicans in America. the 3:00 mark is similar to how i feel.



average mexican kids today dont talk like that. it just sounds outdated. i'm sure there are plenty of kids in the barrio that are super cholo-ish but Jaime was supposed to be from the suburbs.

[ShaunN]

I think that it hits the nail on the head. I grew up of Indian (South Asian) descent in a small town in Canada. I loved comics and admired the characters, but I found that I actually limited myself and felt limited by the reality that there were no characters like me at all. The portrayal of people of Indian background in highly stereotypical terms is also a big problem. At the roast for James Franco, Aziz Ansari addressed this when so many of the other comics on stage made fun of him using Indian stereotypes. As he pointed out, their references seemed to come from the 1980s. It was apparent that most of the other comedians felt no need to think about their portrayal of Indian people at all.

Kamala Khan is great simply because she is a typical teen with a slightly atypical background. But she is easily recognizable as a person and highly relatable. That is just good writing.

[wyokid]

What's the point if they're doing it just to market to white readers?

I thought Panther could and likely should have been the Batman of the Marvel U. That character archetype was missing from Marvel’s pantheon, and Panther’s origins and motives are different enough from Batman’s to prevent him from being called a Batman rip-off.

If anything, now that Batman has become Iron Batman, with all that stupid armor and tech--wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong DC--he is following T’Challa’s lead and not the other way around.

The main thing preventing Black Panther from fulfilling that Batman niche for Marvel is, frankly, Marvel. Whether knowingly or subliminally, Marvel marketing--if not Marvel editorial--sees Panther in a racial context and, thus, as a less “pure” character than, say, Drax the Destroyer or the Sub-Mariner. I don’t mean racism so much as a level of sensitivity and concern for the reader’s ability to identify with and/or respond to these issues.

For example: a line was cut from my contribution to the recent Deadpool marriage issue because Marvel was concerned black readers might be offended. I assured them black fans would not be offended by the line, but I was overruled. Which troubled me because I was an actual black person assuring them black people really aren’t as thin skinned as they (or the corporate hedgehog above Marvel editorial) may think Black people have a sense of humor. Deadpool, the character, busts on everybody. It was a violation of his character for him to start pulling his punches just because he was talking to a black person.

Marvel and DC should stop being afraid of letters, afraid of email. The incident struck me as a little silly, that Marvel wasn’t so worried about their black fans as they were perhaps worried about offending the sensibilities of their white fans and/or of ‘Pool coming across as racist.

It wasn’t a racist line. It was, however, the funniest line in the story and they cut it, despite having an actual black person assure them. If they actually understood humor (or black people), they could have run one of those old Stan Lee asterisk captions; *We were assured, by an actual black person, that this line was okay --Ed.

This is what I mean by a creatively compromised environment. This wouldn’t happen at, say, Milestone. They’d say either the line was funny or it wasn’t, Either ‘Pool was in character or out of character, and that would be the only criteria they would use. Larry Hama, my mentor, taught me that humor involves risk. There was rarely an issue of Crazy Magazine we published without being convinced we would be fired for it. Everybody, of every ethnicity, was fair game.

[Fuzzy Barbarian]

Yknow what'd be sweet? A non-stereotypical Asian character. Now there's some under-representation. I don't even care what kind of Asian, just give me something! The last good one in similar regards to Simon Baz (at least the one I can remember) was Surge from New X-Men - Academy X, and she's one of the X-kids who has been discarded. Seriously, we need more Asian superheroes who aren't friggin' stereotypes (Katana and Sunfire seem... very Japanese, to say the least) or... whatever the hell Psylocke is!

[RobinFan4880]

Yknow what'd be sweet? A non-stereotypical Asian character. Now there's some under-representation. I don't even care what kind of Asian, just give me something! The last good one in similar regards to Simon Baz (at least the one I can remember) was Surge from New X-Men - Academy X, and she's one of the X-kids who has been discarded. Seriously, we need more Asian superheroes who aren't friggin' stereotypes (Katana and Sunfire seem... very Japanese, to say the least) or... whatever the hell Psylocke is!

What about Amadeus Cho, Jubilee and Armor?

[Fuzzy Barbarian]

What about Amadeus Cho, Jubilee and Armor?

I meant in regards to Surge's Japanese background playing a role in her character, but not defining it. I've never been a big Jubilee guy, so I dunno, but from what I've seen of X-Men TAS (which I know is not fully indicative of what she's like), being Asian doesn't factor into her character at all. The only thing I read of Armor is Whedon's Astonishing run, so I dunno her backstory. I have literally never read anything about Cho. But they're not stereotypes, so it's at least a step.

The point is: the amount of Asian superheroes who aren't stereotypes is amazingly low. Hell, the amount of Asian superheroes in general is pretty low.

Also, we both forgot to mention Silk, who I didn't even know was supposed to be Asian (thank you, Humberto Ramos art) until Marvel started screaming it. There's also the issue of having a character not have their race and background factor into their characters at all, which... I dunno. That has always been an iffy debate.