Professor X isn’t Martin Luther King, and Magneto isn’t Malcolm X, but the X-Men has always drawn on not-so-subtle racial subtext to stage their high-concept conflict between genetic super-mutant assimilation and separatism. In the very first 1963 Stan Lee/Jack Kirby X-Men comic, Xavier and his students defend a military base from Magneto’s depredations. In the 2014 film X-Men: Days of Future Past, Xavier, Wolverine and the gang make the future safe for mutants by protecting the president of the United States. For the X-Men, typically, racial justice is to be achieved, not through peaceful or violent protest, but through assiduously defending the status quo and bashing other minorities who fail to get with the program. It’s as if #BlackLivesMatter decided to fight police brutality by fundraising to build more prisons.
The latest arc in G Willow Wilson’s Ms Marvel comic, drawn by Takeshi Miyazawa, fiddles with the X-Men formula in some ways. In the first place, Ms Marvel, aka Kamala Khan, isn’t a mutant; she’s an Inhuman, another Marvel comics group of genetically distinct superheroes. Inhumans differ from mutants in that their movie rights are owned by Marvel itself, not Fox.
More consequentially, the teenage Kamala is Muslim and Pakistani American. Unlike the majority of the X-Men, she’s dark-skinned, which makes the racial subtext of difference and stigma both more pointed and less offensive. In X-Men a bunch of (mostly) white guys experience the kind of hate and marginalisation associated with minorities. In Ms Marvel, stigma against the Inhumans becomes a metaphor for the stigma Kamala herself experiences as a woman of colour.
Wilson, who is Muslim herself, has used the resonance between Kamala’s identity as a woman of colour and as a superhero to lovely effect in her run. For instance, early on Kamala, who is a shapeshifter, turns into a white woman in her superhero identity. Like the nebbishy Jewish stereotype Clark Kent, she becomes an Aryan assimilated superhero. But as the story goes on, she decides that the glammed-up white hero form is not for her, and instead fights crime in her own skin and colour. Empowerment, for Wilson and Kamala, doesn’t have to mean giving up who you are.
The most current arc, though, is less graceful. Kamala is learning about her Inhuman heritage. Like mutants, it turns out there are good Inhumans, who use their powers to help humans, and bad Inhumans, who see themselves as superior and want to rule the world. Kamala finds out about the later through her visiting family friend, Kamran. Kamran is hot and plays video games and loves Sholay and is generally the perfect crush object. Unfortunately, he’s also, as it turns out, a super-powered jerk in league with the bad Inhumans. He kidnaps Kamala and breaks her heart, more or less in that order.
As with the X-Men, the real racists are the racially marginalised. It’s one of the bad Inhumans who refers sneeringly to humans as a “sub-species”. It’s Kamran, Inhuman and Pakistani American, who bends his evil eyebrows and assures Kamala: “There’s no reason to keep wasting your energy to protect people who don’t believe what you believe. Who can’t do what you can do.” As with Magneto, who babbles about racial supremacy in X-Men comics across the decades, eugenics becomes the ideology of the marginalised. Supervillain race prejudice is, coincidentally, always directed at the white mainstream.
In some ways, the fact that Kamala and Kamran are people of colour actually makes the racial politics worse. Kamran, who at first appears so gallant and geeky and cool, turns out to be a skeevy jerk; he offers Kamala a ride to school, and then drives her off to meet the Inhumans, even though she repeatedly tells him she doesn’t want to skip her classes. This is presented in the story as a violation of consent. “You brought me here against my will. After I said no,” Kamala tells him, and when he tells her he figures she just needed a little persuasion, she adds: “That is incredibly gross. You are incredibly gross.” He then guilt trips her for having been attracted to him. He’s an abuser.
The emphasis on consent, and on the autonomy of young girls, is presented gracefully, and in an all-ages context no less. But it unfortunately is built around the stereotypical image of the man of colour as sexual predator. Kamran is first presented as an exciting prospect for Kamala in part because of their shared cultural identity; he loves Bollywood like her, and they talk about their obligation to their families and their heritage. But then that turns out to all be a lie; the really good man in Kamala’s life is her dorky, trustworthy white friend Bruno. Feminism becomes a way to reject the patriarchal norms of non-western men. The storyline uncomfortably echoes the way that “feminist white women rush to rescue Muslim women from the ‘oppression’ of the hijab”, as Mikki Kendall writes in her new intro to Vron Ware’s Beyond the Pale.
Of course, minority communities can be patriarchal and hateful, just as majority communities can. The problem is that superhero narratives so often seem able only to show hatred in the context of the minority, while being unable to think about majority power and injustice. Kamala declares: “There’s always that one group of people who think they have special permission to terrorise anybody who disapproves of them. And then everybody who looks like them suffers.” She’s not wrong – but the vagueness of that last sentence is telling. Who is causing the suffering of Pakistani communities in the US? Who, for that matter, is launching drone strikes on Pakistan? Terrorist racial others are active supervillains. But mainstream violence against racial others is presented as some sort of natural law, sans perpetrators, for which the terrorists, and the terrorists alone, are responsible.
Kamala, at least so far in the book, never faces racial profiling, though surveillance of Muslims in the US is pervasive and aggressive. The status quo does not threaten her, as an Inhuman or as a Muslim. Instead, Kamala, like the X-Men, fights to keep things the same. Racial others who attempt to enact change are evil.
And, again, some people who attack the status quo are in fact evil. But not everyone who wants change is a supervillain. Ms Marvel is an innovative and exciting comic in a lot of ways. But it still, rather helplessly, falls into the X-Men narrative, where the only way minorities can do good is by policing other minorities. Ms Marvel doesn’t get to be MLK or Malcolm X, either. Instead, to be a hero she, like Professor X, has to fill the role of establishment lackey.