Children have their heroes. One of mine was Superman. To me, for the longest, he was simply the coolest of all cool things.
But every now and then I’d find myself around an adult who wasn’t particularly fond of the last son of Krypton. A few of them just felt he wasn’t thrilling or remarkable.
If the adult was Black, their dislike of Superman was socially and racially motivated.
For starters they weren’t keen on the idea of this White man being the ultimate savior. They also took issue with him being mostly invincible, especially being impervious to bullets. As I child I didn’t understand why that was bothersome.
Since then, I’ve lived through too many Black males being slain by bullets. I get it now.
They’d go on. Superman is nosey with his super hearing and x-ray vision, they said. If he were Black with those powers he’d be a criminal, they said.
I watched Superman fly around the Earth so fast in reverse of its rotation, it made time rewind. He removed a still smoldering missile from beneath the ground where it impacted, and he didn’t get burned in the process. He raced a speeding train, won, then jumped across the track in front it. He’d rescue someone in peril on the other side of the world and still made it to work on time.
In addition to all of that he could freeze things by breathing on them and shoot beams of heat from his eyes.
As a child it made no sense to me why some Black people got bent out of shape over the fact that Superman is White. I didn’t notice. |THIS.
[By Mr. Joe Walker]
BLACK is a 9-chapter series that deals with race, social perspective, and inclusion. Each entry is based on real life events.
