Superheroes have generally been white, like most of their consumers.
But in Super Black: American Pop Culture and Black Superheroes (University of Texas Press), Adilifu Nama hails the many African-Americans who have saved the day with POW!, BAM!, or TAKE THAT!
Nama surveys the pioneering black superheroes and more numerous black sidekicks of white super-aces; the supergirls, super Nubians, and cat women; and the white superheroes who somehow, suddenly became black—and there have been lots of those.
The author, an associate professor of African-American studies at Loyola Marymount University, writes that black superheroes began to appear during the ferment of the 1960s and 70s when “pop culture, the movement for racial equality, and comic books all intersected, resulting in superheroes becoming signifiers of real racial anxieties, desires, and wish fulfillments.” The comic books they populated commented on the tensions among black self-determination, racial authenticity, political fantasy, and economic independence.
Born in 1969, Nama grew up in the wake of that era. “I have enjoyed superheroes from probably the age of 5 years old,” he says by phone. First, it was the iconic ones—Superman, then Batman and Robin, two “cool characters,” he still affirms. “I thought that if I could have a car like the Batmobile when I got older, that would be the pinnacle.”
But his superhero identification changed forever when, in his hometown, Cleveland, he came across an action figure of The Falcon, the first African-American comic-book superhero—"a black man that could fly,” as he writes. “With The Falcon I was able to imagine myself as a superhero, rising above my socioeconomic environment, beating the neighborhood bullies, commanding respect from my male peers, and enjoying approval from all of the pretty girls.”
The Falcon—injected in 1969 into the long-running Captain America series—flirted with themes from the Black Power movement, although his militancy could change at any time. Such hesitation about Black Power typifies black superheroes—Black Panther; Luke Cage, a.k.a. Power Man; others—and the characters exhibited a similar relationship with the “Blaxploitation” films of the 1970s such as Super Fly and The Human Tornado that often appeared to hinder black progress but sometimes entertainingly advanced it.
The history of the black superhero is replete with such ambivalence, Nama writes. The team of Cloak, a black man, and Dagger, a white woman, was at once regressive and futuristic in its handling of racial politics. And the same can be said of the many superheroes who got black makeovers, such as a version of Spider-Man who turned up as a black Puerto Rican, Miles Morales.
Racial switches—or gender ones, as in the case of a Ms. Marvel, mirror image of Captain Marvel—are often purely commercial, Nama says: When characterizations or narrative lines become exhausted, “one of the typical moves is to regenerate characters by changing their race.”
Oddly, the authors who introduce those metamorphoses generally try to gloss over the racial implications, but only call attention to them. How can they not? When The Green Lantern, a 2011 movie, featured the series’ earlier, white hero, Hal Jordan, generations of black fans asked, “Where’s the Green Lantern?,” because for them, the Green Lantern is the later, black one, John Stewart.
Nama concentrates on comics published by the industry’s two giants, DC Comics and Marvel, reasoning that those have the greatest reach into American culture. That meant also taking stock of the expansion of comics into other media—television, film, animation, video games—that most fans now favor, especially younger ones. Comic books have become the medium of adults.
That expansion has been troubled, Nama says. For starters, mass marketing has begrudgingly provided space for superhero-mediated explorations of racial politics. So, after BET Network co-produced a Black Panther animation series in 2009, it chose to release it to DVD rather than broadcast it on TV, presumably believing that the series’ expression of racial independence would not sit well with modern-day audiences. Indeed, says Nama, “I don’t know how something like that can sell in the mass market.”
More viable, on a smaller scale, is an alternative black-comics movement that has grown over three decades. “It’s in that realm that people are pushing the aesthetic and the issues further,” he says. Those comics are beyond the scope of Nama’s book, which he describes as a “laying of the table” for future studies, but he recommends an anthology of such work, and of writing about it, Black Comix: African American Independent Comics, Art and Culture, (Mark Batty Publisher, 2010), by Damian Duffy and John Jennings.
As with many studies of subjects from popular culture, Nama’s perspective is what he describes as “critically celebratory.” He explains: “I don’t want readers to perceive my comments as coming from an involved-yet-detached perspective; but I also don’t want to come across as a fanboy who sees nothing problematic about what has come out.”
Such as? Some appalling distortions of African-American modes of speech and primitive depictions of black political consciousness, for starters. And then there’s always the charge that examining such popular-culture expressions as black superheroes is meaningless compared with studies of, say, the Great Migration or Jackie Robinson’s role in integrating baseball’s major leagues. Nama disagrees: “That which appears the most mundane, innocuous, and everyday offers some of the most provocative and telling cultural and ideological information about a society.” He makes similar points regarding science fiction—his other lifelong fascination—in his 2008 study, Black Space: Imagining Race in Science Fiction Film, also from Texas.
The most heartening information he draws from his current study, he says, relates to how much popular images of black Americans have changed for the better. He often hears black-superhero comic books, films, and the like dismissed as too indulgent of stereotypes and suspect because “Well, white men wrote that.” He finds that an inadequate response to a 40-year body of work: “I mean, if that’s the case, where’s the NAACP when you need them?” he quips. “For me, it’s important to say that we can be critical, and we can be celebratory of the impact that black folk have had on how black people can be thought of and conceived, whether in political movements like civil rights and Black Power—or in cultural expressions like hip-hop.
“To me, it’s quite radical to know that there were characters like Stepin Fetchit, Amos ‘n’ Andy, the black maid, and African savages and primitives as the predominant images of black folk, and a mere few years later, in 1966, we have a Black Panther who is the leader of an African nation [the fictional Wakanda] that has technology far ahead of anything Western civilization has advanced.
“To me, that is a radical transformation of how black people are being imagined.”
