By DJ Ferguson
Gamora: “I always hated that chair.”
Thanos: “So I’ve been told. Even so, I’d hoped you’d sit in it one day.”
When I was about four or five, Batman was my favorite superhero. I was first becoming cognizant of the world in general around the time of Batman: The Animated Series and Batman: Forever came out. I had action figures and wore costumes in the likeness of my favorite characters from the DC franchise. Dressing up as Robin to my older brother’s Batman during holidays was a favorite activity of mine. I wore a homemade costume and everything.
When I was in high school, my brother came home from college and brought back a veritable treasure trove of trade paperbacks. I really dove into the source material with classics like Batman: Year One, Haunted Knights, The Long Halloween, Robin:Year One, Batgirl: Year One, Death in the Family, Batman: Hush, and Under the Red Hood. It added more depth, substance, flesh and bone to my childhood impressions and nostalgia during a time of significant change.
I was still in high school when I first started showing major symptoms of Irritable Bowel Disease. I dramatically lost weight, was often doubled over in pain, and my mental faculties were routinely slipping. Reading Grant Morrison’s Batman: Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth, inspired me to hang on psychologically.
Though Batman was an integral part of my childhood and adolescence, glaring patterns of white saviorism emerged in varieties I eventually could not overlook or ignore.
In 2013, unbeknownst to Lucius Fox—the Black technological mastermind behind Batman’s many gadgets and president and CEO of Wayne Enterprises—his son Lucas Fox took on the mantle of Batwing. This dawning made Luke the first Black American person in the Bat-family.
Many celebrated this character arc, and racist Batfans surely disdained this transfer of power.
I felt nothing.
In 2015, a young Black teen in the DC Universe, Duke Thomas, led a movement of young vigilantes known as We Are Robin. The gang mostly operated in the shadows, but managed to receive tacit approval from Batman’s official proteges. We Are Robin were effective change-makers in Gotham, and even went up against a gang of Joker-inspired domestic terrorists before their leader was offered a more official role of The Signal as a Bat-themed hero. Eventually, in Gotham, a law was passed outlawing the group of vigilantes, an arc that I’m sure its creators hoped would elicit a response from its Black readers and fans.
I felt nothing.
I don’t think I can ever be excited by things like this ever again, and this is good.
I have no interest in being a militarized, martial arts billionaire vigilante, or one of his wards, employees, sidekicks, adopted children, or standard bearers.
I’ve written before about my distaste for succeeding white men, and I believe that succession is one of many strategies white people have adopted to cope with their mortality—the mortality of their own cosmetic supremacy.
When I say “cosmetic white supremacy,” I’m distinguishing between dismantling their structures versus merely “changing the face of white supremacy.” We know from the history of Latin America and the “decolonization” of Africa, that white oppressors often install non-white puppets to carry on their white supremacist, colonialist, and imperialist work. These non-white titular agents take public reigns, though continue doing the bidding of white colonizers.
Maybe some white supremacists truly do judge by the content of our character over the color of our skin, but that “virtue” can obscure something more insidious if they’ve deemed our character to be an asset to the white structures and value systems that are killing us in genocidal fashion.
This ongoing cultivation of Black yearning for white power is why I believe envy is one of the worst sins we can leave unchecked under their power. Unaddressed, this envy—wanting what they have—can warp and twist our souls into something unrecognizable to our ancestors, all under the banner of the politics of recognition.
The alternative to ending cosmetic white supremacy would be ending “legacy white supremacy,” named after the television trope: “Affirmative Action Legacy”. Affirmative Action Legacy is a comic device in which a white superhero bestows his power, abilities, technologies, or weapons onto a character of color, usually a visibly and characteristically Black sidekick or minor character.
I believe that uncritical, unaware consumption of this trope can prime us and our children into idealizing and idolizing the prospect of being named as a successor to white empire.
It’s for this reason that Dean Armitage from Jordan Peele’s Get Out would have “voted for Obama a third term.” A conventional white supremacist is only comfortable with a white body stewarding his interests, but white supremacists like Dean may sometimes prefer white empire being stewarded by non-white bodies.
Someone like Dean may be enthralled by the possibility of Black superhumanization or Black “cool” taking the empire places it has never been before. Not only is he perfectly fine with the white American settler empire living on through a Black body; he probably believes it’s better off with Black bodies and our Black American (Akata) cultural flourishes and enrichment of the ground they broke.
In 2019, I watched Sam Wilson receive Captain America’s shield from Steve Rogers at the end of Avengers: Endgame.
I felt nothing.
Upon his addition in Captain America: Winter Soldier, Sam Wilson, aka the Falcon, more or less shared Steve Roger’s values, survivor’s guilt, and orientation about authority. However, these similarities, which could legitimately build an arc of mutual respect, bonding, and genuine friendship, was severely undermined by Wilson’s compliance and Capt. Roger’s obvious paternalism.
Wilson was aggressively ingratiating, and had no character identity outside of his fanatical devotion to Captain America, a superhero mantle defined unilaterally though nationalistic patriotism. It is here we can see the lineage of white masters rewarding the most loyal and servile property of “America.”
I certainly have the ability to appreciate what these moments meant to the fictitious characters and what this represented to them on their personal journeys. I was happy for Miles Morales becoming a Black Spiderman in Into the Spider-Verse. I enjoyed both of these movies very much. But I had no happiness of my own about it apart from: “Oh, good for you. You must be very proud of yourself. #BlackExcellence, I guess.”
But in terms of the representational “win” I was supposed to have been cheering for? I felt nothing.
Because those characters, those positions, that role, that status, it doesn’t have the same meaning for me anymore.
My heart and mind are too enamored by the possibilities of what lies beyond this ship, this kingdom, these cells, these borders, their definitions of reality, their world. I want freedom too much to want to be a slaver or beneficiary of their legacy.
I just want to stand up and walk away.
Suggested Reading
“DJ Ferguson” is a Black American (Akata), freelance writer who studied Philosophy at Ball State University. Would love to produce content like this for a living , so please help fund RaceBaitr!
