May 2013

Oh, what?  He isn’t?  Are you sure?  I mean.  He’s black.  That means, like, Sue has to be black, right?  She doesn’t?  Johnny or Sue could be adopted?  Or they could be children of different mothers or fathers or maybe they’re interracial or something?  But I thought if you’re half black and half white you just look almost white?  That’s not true?  Really?  Well, the original Johnny was a white guy, so he has to stay white.  What about Idris Elba?  Oh, yeah, he was cool in Thor?  The original character wasn’t a black guy?  Oh, well, then that’s OK because he’s not a major character.  Besides, this doesn’t have anything to do about race.  I know I keep talking about it.  But just because I talk about race doesn’t mean what we’re talking about is actually about race, even if the only reason we’re talking about it is because a black guy might be the Human Torch.  It’s just not about race, OK? That pretty much sums up the stupidity you’ll find online about the rumor of Michael B. Jordan’s (of Chronicle fame) possible casting as the Human Torch in the reboot of The Fantastic Four. Cracked.com has a brilliant take-down here.  Read the comments on the first link at your own risk (I’ll post some gems below). Let’s call this for what it is:  soft racism.  For example, here is this amazing quote from The Wrap (linked in the previous paragraph): This is a horrible idea. Johnny Storm is an iconic Marvel character, a blonde, blue-eyed, party boy daredevil. He’s not a second string character, he’s a principal team member of one of Marvel’s flagship series. As a long-time comic book collector, it would completely distract from any story to change Johnny’s ethnicity. (It was bad enough that Jessica Alba was such an awful, awful blonde). Johnny once dated a Skrull – an African American could play her, or She-Hulk is an ancillary FF character – her ethnicity could be changed with little distraction, even Ben Grimm would be less distracting as another commenter suggested, although that would raise the question of whether Ben would stay Jewish (there are far less Jews in Marvel Comics than African Americans). But Johnny Storm? Comic book fans take “canon” very seriously, and this idea just smells like disaster. Translation:  Johnny Storm was white in the comics, and if you made him black, we’d all get distracted because he’s black; if you’re going to have black people in this, let them play aliens or green rage monsters who are secondary to the plot, but don’t you dare put a black guy as a main character, because I’ll just be so distracted by…black guys. Clearly, none of this has anything to do with race, am I right?  If you’re distracted by black people, you’re not distracted because they’re black; you’re distracted because they…are…look at the beautiful sunset!  There are a lot of people arguing variations of this type.  The irony is that in throwing a hissy fit over this topic, these commenters have inadvertently punched themselves in the face.  It’s not possible to wiggle out of a soft racism charge when your main argument is “black people are distracting when they are in my movies about white people.” Some, however, have taken a different strategy, such as this fellow over at IGN: The whole “defined by whiteness” arguement is stupid (by that same standard many black heroes should easily be recast as white as they’re not “defined by blackness”), the guy is wrong for the role plain and simple, it’s about race because that’s where he’s wrong for the role…if he was a 300 pound white guy that could nail Torch’s personality exactly, he’d still be wrong for the role. Rather than taking the time to proper cast the movie the guy is trying to go with an associate wrong for the role, it doesn’t matter how good he can act, Johnny Storm is white, and people are looking for proper adaptations for things of this sort…try creating or utilizing the existing black super heroes if it’s that important rather than lazily shoehorning bad choices for the sake of it. i.e., even though the Human Torch is not defined by his whiteness, he can’t be played by a black guy because he’s not black.  If you can see the circles going around and around here, you deserve a pat on the back. The irony with statements like these is that they often not only refute themselves, but they also fall for the typical anti-racist-is-code-for-anti-white rhetoric that assumes that because you can’t do the same thing to other races, it is just as racist to do it to white people.  Let’s set aside the fact that changing the Human Torch’s race isn’t really an insult to white people (after all, it’s not like we don’t have a shitload of white superheroes in film already *coughWolverineCaptainAmericaCyclopsProfXBatmanGreenLanternOnAndOnAndOncough*).  What is alarming about arguments like this is the bizarre amnesia to which their proponents have succumbed.  Not to beat a dead horse, but racism is alive and well in this country.  This is why I find historical amnesia on this subject disturbing, since it allows people of any race to make arguments that are counterproductive and, in some cases, damaging.  The two positions are not equal:  casting a white guy as Luke Cage is not the same as casting a black guy as the Human Torch.  There is no history of white people being denied entry based on their race (especially in American comics).  Isolated cases may exist, but one cannot rationally argue that whites are discriminated against at the same level as blacks (today and in the past — see here) — it’s an absurd claim. None of this is new to the world of film adaptations, though.  We saw something similar when Idris Elba was cast as Heimdall.  Not surprisingly, when the film came and went, it didn’t seem to have that much of an impact on,