In February of 2021, it was reported that Ta-Nehisi Coates was writing and developing a new Superman film to be produced by JJ Abrams. However, this iteration of Superman would be played by a Black actor. In fact, this wasn’t the first time that someone had tried to get a Black Superman project off the ground at Warner Bros. Actor and producer Michael B. Jordan had also pitched a similar project with a Black actor playing Clark Kent as part of a deal he signed in 2019.
Coates and Abrams' potential Black Superman movie was announced at a time when DC’s cinematic universe was going through a bit of turmoil. The connected saga that began with Zach Snyder’s Man of Steel seemed to be on its last legs. While some of the films like Wonder Woman, Aquaman, and Shazam found commercial and even some measure of critical success, the misfires like Suicide Squad, Batman v Superman, and the theatrical release of Justice League were dragging the franchise into the realm of cultural punching bag. Especially when compared to the success of rival Marvel.
A few years later and things have changed for Warner Bros and the future of DC superhero movies. Warner Bro's recent merger with Discovery networks has been followed by some very drastic changes (which is a whole other story), not the least of which is a public commitment to rebuild and prioritize a shared universe for DC movies and television. Henry Cavill, the most recent actor to wear the cape, has recently announced his return to the role after appearing to have left the franchise in the wake of Justice League's flop. There have been dribs and drabs of information regarding a Black Superman movie, as recently as last month there were reports that the movie is still on track to happen, although no timeline or even director has been announced.
Who knows whether this is happening or not. Either way, a decade ago when this was announced in 2021, I couldn’t help feeling a bit apathetic about it. A Black Superman film could be very interesting. Given Coates’ talent as a writer and Abrams's ability to produce a crowd-pleasing spectacle, the odds are that if such a film was actually shot, edited, and released, it could be quite good. Still, there was something about a Black Superman that bothered me.
It would make racists mad, they would complain about the erasure of square-jawed American white men from depictions of heroism and valor, and that's fun for me. But I just didn’t think that making Clark Kent/ Kal-El a Black man was a very interesting choice. For one thing, the character of Kal-El already serves as an analog for a particular minority experience in America, that of the Jewish immigrant. Superman was created by Joe Shuster and Jerry Siegel, both the children of immigrants who grew up in the heartland of America, their families came to America for a better life and in the case of Siegel’s family to escape the rising antisemitism in Europe.
In case you aren’t aware of the particulars of the Superman mythos: As a baby, Kal-El is sent away from his dying home planet by his parents in hopes he will survive when they will not. He lands in Kansas and is adopted by a loving couple. He is raised within the platonic ideal of Americana. He is given the name Clark Kent and as he grows he becomes aware that he is not like everyone else around him. He decides to use the powers granted to him by his otherness to defend “Truth, Justice, and the American Way”.
As was the case with many comics being published in the ‘30s and ‘40s, this meant punching Hitler.
Superman’s most prominent foil was Lex Luther. An uber-wealthy industrialist, with occasional political aspirations, who hates Superman for his otherness. Lex inherently mistrusts Superman’s intentions as he is quite literally an alien, and believes that the defense of America and the world at large should be left to him, a capitalist who was born on this planet.
Different writers and creatives have either leaned into or away from the Jewish immigrant corollary. Indeed, some of the most compelling evidence for Clark Kent as an immigrant allegory was added to his character after his creation by Shuster and Siegel. Snyder’s films viewed Superman explicitly as a Christ figure, even including his death and resurrection.
As with any art, much of this is left to subjective interpretation but personally I very much like the Jewish analog angle. In our ever-present selective historical amnesia, Americans often forget how much antisemitism and anti-immigrant sentiment was a part of this country before, during, and after World War II. Superman was not only a thematic response to the antisemitism driving millions from their homes in Europe, soon leading to much worse but also a rejoinder to those with anti-Jewish sentiments living here. Superman, as an immigrant, embodied the ideals of America more than anybody else. Still, he needed to conceal his identity, adopt a more American name, and in his alter ego of Clark Kent sought to fit in without making waves. As Superman, he dealt with egomaniacal villains, intergalactic threads, and nagging self-doubt driven by his otherness. He faced all of these threats with an overwhelming amount of hope and faith in the inherent goodness of his adopted people.
These themes are largely absent in his cinematic portrayals. Snyder does delve into topics of Clark’s self-doubt and otherness, but instead of portraying him as an immigrant Snyder casts Superman as a conflicted god deciding how much he should invest in the messy mortal affairs of humans. A Black Superman could very well pick up that torch and run a marathon with it. In fact, my educated guess is that these themes present in the comics and animated depictions are what drew Coates to the project. The message could potentially hit much harder with Superman draped in Black skin and all the cultural baggage that entails.
But DC comics already had a Black character serving as a Superman analog, with a backstory that more closely aligned with the Black experience in America and thus could have been a more subversive story to present on the big screen.
Allow me to introduce you to Icon.
I Am Just an Icon Livin’
Icon was a comic book superhero first published under the Milestone Comics imprint. Milestone was published and distributed by DC comics but remained separate from the main DC continuity. Milestone was created by a group of Black writers who wanted to address the dearth of Black heroes in the pages of comic books. Icon was created by Milestone co-founder Dwayne McDuffie who imagined Superman by way of the Antebellum South.
When an intergalactic cruiseliner suffers a malfunction and explodes, a lone escape pod makes its way to earth in 1839. Through technology in the pod and the physiology of its occupant, the alien takes the appearance of the first life form that he encounters, an enslaved woman named Miriam, who adopts him as her son.
The alien, once named Arnus, adopts the name Agustus Freeman and because he does not age, he lives through the Black American experience nearly in its entirety. His goal is to remain unnoticed and survive until such time as Earth's technology can advance to the stars and he can rejoin his people. In the present day, Augustus makes a living as a corporate lawyer until an encounter with some wayward youth breaking into his house inspires him to use his extraordinary powers and intellect to fight crime in the predominantly Black city he calls home.
As Icon, Augustus possesses a similar powerset to Superman. Unlike Superman, Icon was written as a Republican, a social and fiscal conservative. So much so that he was a favorite of Clarence Thomas who would often quote from the books. This didn’t sit well with McDuffie who was a liberal democrat and wasn’t looking to create propaganda for a conservative agenda, but I believe that Icon’s republican characterization is one of the most subversive themes in comics.
Icon’s conservatism is the product of having lived through slavery, the civil war, reconstruction, Jim Crow, and the Civil Rights era and finally making a comfortable life for himself as a successful corporate lawyer in the age of urban street culture and gang violence. Other Black heroes in the Milestone universe consider him a sellout, his own sidekick Rocket (who was one of the aforementioned inspirational wayward youth) serves as a political foil.
From a narrative standpoint, Icon’s conservatism solves a narrative quandary that affects all superheroes but particularly Black ones. Why would a Black man in America with superpowers look to aid the police? This idea is commented on beautifully when early in his superhero career he tells Rocket that they should help the police and admonishes her to not assume that everything is racial. When he appears to offer his assistance to some police officers, they promptly prepare to shoot him.
Icon needs convincing that he should serve as an aspirational figure to the Black community, he tells people to pick themselves up by their bootstraps (which is a decidedly easier feat to achieve when you possess the power of flight) and tells Black criminals that they discredit the race. He name checks Booker T. Washington, Rush Limbaugh, and yes even Clarence Thomas. But he also possesses admirable qualities. He has hope and compassion. His attitudes and opinions come not from a generalized negative racial animus but from a genuine desire for better things in his community.
Often Black conservatism is viewed with little empathy or thoughtful consideration. Figures like Clarence Thomas and Kanye are seen as Uncle Toms, enthusiastically impeding political projects of Black Liberation for their white benefactors, reaping material rewards at the cost of their people's overall advancement. For Icon, it's important to remember that his chief goal once stranded on this planet was survival. He had no illusions of changing things for the better. Only living in hopes that humanity would catch up to the rest of the galaxy. Following the rules and keeping his head down was the most prudent path. (His canonical involvement in the underground railroad notwithstanding) Somewhere along the way, this transformed from a survival strategy to a genuine ideological commitment.
Icon’s character narrative is a comment on how Black people who experience both the worst impulses of white supremacy, as well as great personal success, can be deluded into believing that racism is purely an issue of the individual. Personally witnessing explicitly racial barriers be removed and taking the opportunity to embody white paradigms of success had led Icon to the belief that Black people cause their own problems by not fully engaging with the promise of American exceptionalism. In his view, the barriers to Black liberation are now self-imposed.
In 2022, there is a rich narrative to be mined from a conservative Black superhero. Especially if handled by someone like Coates who is very aware of these dynamics within the Black community. Representation within art does not equal endorsement, a movie about a Black conservative protagonist does not need to validate his views. Instead, his conservatism can serve as rich character conflict, something necessary for creating compelling characters but is often lacking in contemporary superhero movies. I don’t believe that a Black Clark Kent can offer the same.
Critical Race Swapping
Black Ariel, Black Queen Anne Boylen, and most likely Black Superman all adhere to a particular kind of racial politics in art. Portraying characters who are canonically white with Black actors serve as in-your-face proof that there is no difference between races. Anyone can and should be allowed to tell these stories. These aren’t white stories, they are human stories and the aesthetics of skin color should not affect them in any meaningful way.
But of course, we still live in America, and in every single instance where Blackness is introduced into what were previously exclusively white spaces, a racist backlash is soon to follow. As we covered in part one, the studios who produce these projects are well aware of this. They are banking on it, as reactionary attacks against these movies generate free publicity and immediately create a sizable audience who (rightly) love drinking racist tears. Again the cinematic quality of these films and shows is not the issue here.
However, there are other aspects of this kind of representation that deserve critical analysis. The goal of race swapping for social justice seems to be to prove to white audiences that Black women can sing underwater just as well as white women and should have been given the chance to do so all along. It's not a representation of the Black experience but rather a kind of argument that the main problem concerning Black Americans is that we haven’t been given sufficient opportunities to become white. By inserting Black faces into narratives that white people subconsciously or explicitly view as white stories, the message is that Black people have been white all along and white people, for whatever reasons, just haven’t learned that fact yet.
The contradictions between the nominal American values of freedom and equality and America’s addiction to creating and enforcing cultural and racial hierarchies are left unexamined. The Little Mermaid is a tale of assimilation, a story about a woman who willingly rejects her culture and native appearance in hopes of being accepted by a different world marked by wealth and privilege. Oh and love, I guess. Interestingly, some literary historians consider The Little Mermaid to be a kind of love letter from Hans Christian Anderson to Edvard Collin, a man that Christensen had fallen in love with but was engaged to marry a woman. In this view, much like Superman and the Jewish immigrant experience, The Little Mermaid can be seen not just as a fairy tale about love and sacrifice but as a straight-up trans allegory.
You could say that a better way to include diverse representation while retelling Superman and the Little Mermaid would be to cast a Jewish actor as Kal-El and a trans woman as Ariel. This is the issue of seeking racial justice through spectacle rather than deep critical analysis. In very few cases, this kind of representation ends up saying very little about the people and cultures they are attempting to represent and perhaps missing what made these stories interesting in the first place. The insertion of Black actors in these roles ironically aligns more with the conservative politics of Icon. Issues of race in this country are mostly the product of Black people either being denied or denied the opportunity to assimilate into a culture of whiteness.
I’m not saying that race-swapping is always bad or anything so reactionary as all that. Recently Marvel announced the casting of Black actor Yahya Abdul-Mateen II to play a character named Wonder Man who is canonically white in the comics. The latest in the trend of Marvel Studio's race and/or gender swapping many characters from the books. Abdul-Mateen is a wonderful actor and I’m legit excited to see what he does with a character that has a long history in the comics but little recognition to anyone but the most dedicated comic fans. Critical race swapping may not be the most revolutionary kind of liberatory politics but on a base material level it means there are more roles available in major projects for awesome actors like Yahya Abdul-Mateen II. That’s pretty nice.
Of course, critical race swapping is not the only form that representation in movies and television can take. In part three we are going to break down these different kinds of representation and examine how they interact with everyone’s favorite academic boogeyman: Critical Race Theory.
Solidarity Forever
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1yeDXUj-hMkeCD9JufKuxUKVCboFyUr-q/view?usp=share_link
Karen Vicks and Frank X playing Beatrice and Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing
Would Shakespear have done any "race swapping"?