RACE-BENDING FOR FUN AND POLITICS

This week's mythcomic deals with the politically incendiary topic of race-bending, possibly the most divisive topic in the comics-subculture.

In art and literature, race-bending refers to any situation in which an audience's expectation of a character's racial makeup-- usually though not invariably associated with the character's phenotype-- is contradicted by a new iteration of said character.

Race-bending falls into two categories; the overt and the covert.

The overt form refers to all depictions within a given narrative, where a character starts out being depicted with one racial appearance but is given a different appearance within a subsequent narrative. One of the most memorable cases of recent years appeared in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, wherein the Caucasian comics-character Nick Fury was played by Samuel L. Jackson. Within the MCU iteration, the Nick Fury who co-ordinates the Avengers has never been anything but a black man, and so he has no direct connection with the earlier depiction.

The reverse of the overt form is not seen very often these days. However, the main character of the 1999 book PAY IT FORWARD is a black male, who becomes a white character in the 2000 movie of the same name.

The covert form refers to depictions that stand outside the narrative as such. For instance, in the prose debut of the Oriental villain Fu Manchu, the character is unquestionably Asian. However, though Fu is still supposed to be a Chinese character within all of his film appearances, he's almost always played by Caucasian actors, such as Boris Karloff, Henry Brandon and Christoper Lee.

A similar extrinsic distortion takes place on those occasions when an actor of color plays a character whose racial identity as a Caucasian is historically relevant. In the 1993 MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING, Denzel Washington plays the traditionally white-Italian character Don Pedro, but there is no attempt to rewrite the character to take account for his sudden negritude. It's more as if Washington is simply playing a Renaissance-era Italian without reference to the actor's actual race, just as one sees in the "white Fu Manchu" films.

In the United States, leftist ideologues approve of race-bending when it serves the perceived interests of an ethnic minority, and to disapprove of it when it serves the perceived interests of an ethnic majority. Thus Jackson playing Nick Fury in 2008's IRON MAN is "good," while Scarlett Johanssen playing the Japanese character Motoko Kusanagi in 2017's GHOST IN THE SHELL is "bad." I use the term "perceived interests" because ideologues don't care how good a given actor's performance is. The primary concern of the ideologues, despite all their high-sounding rhetoric about "diversity," comes down to "who gets paid."

This state of affairs is without a doubt a reaction against the early practices of Hollywood casting. Though I reject all political cant about a "cult of whiteness" in the United States, it's quite true that the main reason white actors played Asians, Native Americans, Hispanics, and even a few Negroes in Hollywood is because the dominantly white film-going audience wanted to see actors of their own ethnic persuasion. Since this system mitigated against non-white actors regardless of the level of talent involved, clearly it was an unethical system. However, the current, one-sided political correctness ideology-- which does not care how well Scarlett Johanssen can play Kusanagi, only that she is not Asian-- is no great improvement.

Though I've discussed the covert form in the previous paragraph, my concern in the forthcoming mythcomic is that of the overt form, wherein a creator decides that he will literally change the established racial identity of a given character.