I’ve been meaning for some time to write about some of the cancel culture items in the news. For instance, the Dr. Seuss estate decided not to publish six books anymore because of some racist images in them. Other books have followed suit, along with various other areas of the arts.
I understand that books are discontinued all the time. I’m not sure why the company had to make a big news story out of it. Was it for positive public relations purposes? I doubt there were a lot of people haranguing the Dr. Seuss people about this.
I’m not a big fan of censoring things that contain potentially offensive material. The Laura Ingalls Wilder books have some racist portrayals of Native Americans; should we remove those from shelves? Or should we have discussions with our children, as we read classic literature, about why that is now considered wrong? After all, that’s what we do with the n-word in Mark Twain’s works.
So I had all these ideas to write about. And I decided to add a different angle. I’ve been reading a lot of back issues of comic books on my Marvel Unlimited app. There is a movie coming out in the near future called Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, based on an older series titled Master of Kung Fu. During the 1970s, martial arts was a big craze, leading to a number of comics about it.
As I was reading through many of these, I couldn’t help but notice the great number of racial slurs toward Asians. Even though I’m sure folks knew it wasn’t nice to use those words in the 70s, it was, probably, more accepted. Today, not so much, and that’s a good thing.
But I started to think about other Marvel comics. During the 1960s, Marvel tried to promote more Black characters such as Black Panther and Luke Cage, also known as Power Man. Luke Cage especially was as stereotypical as you could get and doesn’t really hold up well today, tossing around some more of those words and phrases we would not use anymore.
I wondered some more about this. I can access all these comics online, and Marvel hasn’t made any attempt to adjust any of this in their back issue collection. In fact, there are new editions being released in book form with a bunch of issues printed together. I haven’t heard about them getting heat for the racial insensitivity that appears as other entities have received.
I’m part of a Facebook community that focuses on the first 25 years of Marvel Comics. So I went to them for insight on how these fans felt about this. I posted on there, asking for people’s opinions on this topic, and also asking for people to be respectful of other opinions that might be different.
Here’s what I discovered from a group of people who I don’t know. A few people referenced the idea that in the 60s and 70s, we lived in a different world. “Context and time period are everything,” commented one member. That seems to hit home with me the most with all these stories. At the time, some words were more acceptable, but they are not now. That doesn’t mean we should just throw out all those things; we can always learn from them.
One person suggested that items like this should have introductory material that explains why this type of material might have been considered okay in that time period and why it is not anymore. What? A learning opportunity? This person said he had seen that on some old cartoon collections, and it was really interesting and informative.
Someone suggested that these comics are not under attack because they’re not being presented to young children; it’s older males, mostly, who read these. That makes sense, though I wonder if it might change if the Shang-Chi movie hits it big and people start digging through those old comics.
Another person said that it’s a certainty that some things we think are okay today will be looked at askance in the future. That seems likely. He said that will allow future generations to see how awful our attitudes were, and that’s how the world improves. I rather like that thought.
There were a lot of outstanding thoughts like these.
And then things erupted. People who disagreed with others took shots at them, despite my plea to be respectful. There’s nothing wrong with some back-and-forth, and some were able to do that and agree to disagree. Others just sniped and ran.
The very idea that I was going to write about this was attacked as well. One person called me out for daring to write about this in a newspaper. I wasn’t allowed to be biased or have an opinion. I told him that my writing is always an opinion piece; this was not for the front page news. And while some members jumped to my defense, he kept swinging and calling me a disgrace. Finally, the admin of the group turned off comments.
I was hoping for a good dialogue, not a bunch of fighting in the comments. But that’s what social media seems to have devolved to these days. Perhaps that will be the bad attitude the one commenter postulated on, the area future generations will look back and be embarrassed about. If that leads to a better future, I suppose I can tolerate being called a hack.
Word of the Week: This week’s word is vulnerary, which means helpful in the healing of wounds, as in, “The kind words and ideas from others were vulnerary to the poster who had been attacked for his ideas.” Impress your friends and confuse your enemies!