PC Disasters

How Superheroes Give Multiculturalism A Bad Name

DC and Marvel come up with sometimes awkward attempts at introducing multiculturalism in their stories. When it comes to ethnic characters, while some of them are original and unique the others are ethnic derivatives of existing  characters. They don't always need to be black, Asian, Latino or mixed race as they can be white Europeans but it can sometimes indicate a lack of imagination in part of the writers. I suspect they often give characters ethnic successors of sorts as it's easier to do those than it is to risk creating an original one ala Fire/Beatriz da Costa, Vixen/Mari McCabe and Crimson Fox/Constance D'Aramais. Another reason would be that original ethnic superheroes can be stereotypical owing part to the writer's lack of knowledge of and experience in other cultures. Some of them try not to make those characters stereotypical as it is with Constance who is said to struggle not to seduce people even if she could.

Perhaps the most insulting permutation of this meme would be to create a blackface version of an existing character. This has already happened before which makes you wonder why didn't the writers bother to create a completely original character if their versions are an insult to those who originally intended the characters to be. Black Wally West could easily be Jamal Downey, Black Helena Bertinelli could have gotten away with those changes had she been named Helena Arobeiki and Black Iris West would be better replaced by an original black female character. It would be far more shocking if Barry Allen ended up dating an original female character of colour than if he's got a crush on a race-swapped Iris West as she's originally white and not his step-sister in the comic books.

This has already happened to two Flash villains in the New 52 stories and with one character, it shows how utterly misinformed these writers have towards foreign cultures. One might wonder if Marco Mardon could have been more provocative had he been either an entirely original character or if that's a different man assuming the powers and namesake of Mark Mardon. I thinking of naming this character Juan delos Reyes or something but you get the point if this was a different character assuming the guise of Weather Wizard. But as the CW Flash programme shows, the writers really don't take Weather Wizard seriously be it giving him actual powers, making him Latino or making him a blond Aryan ubermensch joke who goes by the name of Clyde Mardon.

That isn't to say that what DC and Marvel are doing is bad in and of itself. It's a statement that says a lot about not knowing enough about other cultures if they set out to introduce ethnic characters at all. It would explain why one character (Beatriz Da Costa) is a fan favourite and the other (Constance D'Aramais) failed to catch on with the readers persistently. Both of them have had times where the writers tried not to make them that stereotypical but Beatriz could have gotten away with this by being written as actually having ties to Brazilian culture whilst Constance was doomed to be a cliche even if she wasn't as cliched as her sister was (in a way).

That and Beatriz was a distinctive enough character with a Super Friends pedigree along with Icemaiden probably because Beatriz is a green pyrokinetic whenever you expect flames to be yellow whilst Crimson Fox wouldn't stand out if there's Vixen and several other animal themed superheroes around. Super Friends wasn't exactly the first superhero story to introduce multicultural superhero teams since Batmen of All Nations could count as well but I brought up Super Friends is because Fire and Icemaiden appeared in the comic book tie-in.

In the case with ethnic successors, the original Helena Bertinelli and a few others were distinctive enough from their predecessors not just in ethnicity but also in characterisation and motivation. This is something that the CW writers failed to take note if they wanted to get away with giving Barry Allen a black love interest because when that character is a minstrel version of an existing counterpart, s/he is doomed to be a nonthreatening cliche of sorts.