Shaolin Brew: Race, Comics, and the Evolution of the Superhero

By Troy D. Smith

Shaolin Brew: Race, Comics, and the Evolution of the Superhero looks at how the comic book industry developed from a white perspective and how minority characters were and are viewed through a stereotypical white gaze. Further, the book explores how voices of color have launched a shift in the industry, taking nonwhite characters who were originally viewed through a white lens and situating them outside the framework of whiteness. The financial success of Blaxploitation and Kung Fu films in the early 1970s led to major comics publishers creating, for the first time, Black and Asian superhero characters who headlined their own comics. The introduction of Black and Asian main characters, who previously only served as guest stars or sidekicks, launched a new kind of engagement between comics companies and minority characters and readers. However, scripted as they were by white writers, these characters were mired in stereotypes.

Author Troy D. Smith focuses on Asian, Black, and Latinx representation in the comic industry and how it has evolved over the years. Smith explores topics that include Orientalism, whitewashing, Black respectability politics, the model minority myth, and political controversies facing fandoms. In particular, Smith examines how fans take the superheroes they grew up with—such as Luke Cage, Black Lightning, and Shang Chi—and turn them into the characters they wished they had as children. Shaolin Brew delves into the efforts of fans of color who urged creators to make these characters more realistic. This refining process increased as more writers and artists of color broke into the industry, bringing their own perspectives to the characters. As many of these characters transitioned from page to screen, a new generation of writers, artists, and readers have cooperated to evolve one-dimensional stereotypes into multifaceted, dynamic heroes.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Release date: May 28, 2024
• ISBN: 9781496851697

Troy D. Smith

Troy D. Smith is associate professor of history at Tennessee Tech University, where he specializes in race and ethnic studies. He has won several national awards for his historical fiction.

Book preview

The graphic of a raised-up clenched fist from a teapot fills the background. The blast vector at the top reads, Shaolin Brew. The teapot reads, Race, Comics, and the Evolution of the Superhero, Troy D Smith.

SHAOLIN

BREW

RACE, COMICS, AND THE

EVOLUTION OF THE SUPERHERO

TROY D. SMITH

University Press of Mississippi / Jackson

The University Press of Mississippi is the scholarly publishing agency of the Mississippi Institutions of Higher Learning: Alcorn State University, Delta State University, Jackson State University, Mississippi State University, Mississippi University for Women, Mississippi Valley State University, University of Mississippi, and University of Southern Mississippi.

www.upress.state.ms.us

The University Press of Mississippi is a member of the Association of University Presses.

Any discriminatory or derogatory language or hate speech regarding race, ethnicity, religion, sex, gender, class, national origin, age, or disability that has been retained or appears in elided form is in no way an endorsement of the use of such language outside a scholarly context.

Copyright © 2024 by University Press of Mississippi

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

∞

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Smith, Troy D. (Troy Duane), author.

Title: Shaolin brew : race, comics, and the evolution of the superhero / Troy D. Smith.

Description: Jackson : University Press of Mississippi, 2024. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2023057093 (print) | LCCN 2023057094 (ebook) | ISBN 9781496851673 (hardback) | ISBN 9781496851680 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9781496851697 (epub) | ISBN 9781496851703 (epub) | ISBN 9781496851710 (pdf) | ISBN 9781496851727 (pdf)

Subjects: LCSH: Comic books, strips, etc.—History and criticism. | Comic books, strips, etc.—Social aspects—United States. | Superheroes in comics. | African American superheroes in comics. | Asian American superheroes—Comic books, strips, etc. | Hispanic American superheroes in comics. | Racism—Comic books, strips, etc. | White people—Race identity—Comic books, strips, etc.

Classification: LCC PN6725 .S65 2024 (print) | LCC PN6725 (ebook) | DDC 741.5/3—dc23/eng/20240213

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023057093

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023057094

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

Dedicated to my lovely bride, Robin

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Whiteness, Respectability, and Comic Books

Chapter One: Race in Comics Pre-1970

Chapter Two: Marvel, Black Power, and Blaxploitation

Chapter Three: Marvel and Kung Fu

Chapter Four: DC Gets Onboard

Chapter Five: Kung Fu Comics and Interracial Partnerships

Chapter Six: Straining against the Structure of Whiteness

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I first embarked on this project more than a decade ago, during a winter break when I was in the history doctoral program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In an attempt to cleanse my intellectual palate from my studies of race and ethnicity, I reread my entire run of Master of Kung Fu comics. I had not seen most of them since the 1980s, and had never read them straight through. As I did so, the name Bill Wu kept jumping out at me from the letters pages. The points raised by this 1970s comic book fan, combined with my own course of studies and research, led me to think of my childhood hobby and interests in a new light.

My first round of thanks, therefore, must go to those scholars whom I was lucky enough to have known at the University of Illinois, Fred Hoxie, Vernon Burton, Bruce Levine, David Roediger, Sundiata Cha-Jua, Ronald Toby, and Poshek Fu. I also want to thank two colleagues in particular: Drs. Jason Jordan and T. J. Tallie, who have taken the time, long after our paths had diverged, to talk with me at length about my topic and were willing to read over my manuscript.

I extend heartfelt thanks to the editors at the University Press of Mississippi, beginning with Vijay Shah who helped me get started down the path and ending with Katie Keene, who helped me reach the end of it.

I also want to acknowledge several colleagues at Tennessee Tech University, where I have worked since 2011 (and where I earned my bachelor’s degree). My fellow historians Michael Birdwell (recently deceased) and Allen Driggers kindly took the time to discuss comic books and read my drafts. Krystal Akehinmi and Arthur Banton, recent additions to our department, have also been very generous with their time and support for this project, as has our chair (now dean) Jeffery Roberts. Outside the history department, Robert Owens and Charria Campbell from the Office of Multicultural Affairs have been extremely helpful, especially in their work to organize a panel presentation featuring Drs. Akehinmi, Banton, and myself talking about Black Superheroes. I also owe a debt to my former student Dan Snyder, who spent several semesters helping me do research on this and other projects.

I am deeply indebted to several scholars in the field of comics studies. Stanford Carpenter, John Jennings, Stacey Robinson, Damian Duffy, and Osvaldo Oyola have spoken and/or corresponded with me at length, giving me their valuable insights and time. Charles Hatfield, who moderated the session at the first annual Comics Studies Society conference where I presented part of my research in 2018, took the time to continue the discussion after the session ended. I am also grateful to Carol Tilley for organizing that conference and for her encouragement.

I am very grateful to comics luminaries Steve Englehart, Tony Isabella, and Doug Moench for granting me interviews about their work in the 1970s. For twelve-year-old-me, to whom these gentlemen were celebrities and weavers of some of my favorite memories, such an opportunity would have seemed impossible. I am thankful as well to several other comics professionals, cited in this volume and just as meaningful to my childhood, with whom I have been able to interact on social media, such as Larry Hama, Jo Duffy, and Don McGregor. John Ostrander has also been very helpful, to the extent of being a guest speaker in my comics history class.

The person to whom I am most indebted for this work, though, is award-winning science fiction author William F. Wu. It was his missives to the Master of Kung Fu letters page that first grabbed my attention, boldly wrestling with a status quo that was often years away from developing the tools to understand what he was saying. I am very honored that I, too, was able to exchange communications with him that probed the meaning of race in comic books, and that he has shared so much of his time and energy to help me with this book.

Finally, I want to thank my beautiful, and very patient, wife Robin for living with this project (and my ceaseless talking about it) for years. The same is true of our (grown) kids Victor and Hannah. It is with some degree of regret that I inform them that, even after this sees print, I will still subject them to endless discussion of the subject.

INTRODUCTION

WHITENESS, RESPECTABILITY, AND COMIC BOOKS

Throughout the history of the medium, comics have closely followed trends in popular culture. This is because publishers tend to go where the money is. In the early 1970s, efforts to follow current fads led to a new kind of engagement between comic companies and minority characters (and readers), which would begin with Kung Fu and Blaxploitation comics capitalizing on popular movies of the period. This led to the creation of minority characters as headliners of their own titles, rather than simply sidekicks or guest-stars, and some of those characters would endure into the twenty-first century and make the transition from comic page to screen. The engagement between publishers and minority characters would consist of a cooperative effort between the (initially mostly white) writers and artists and the readers, including fans of color. The interactions, and occasionally tensions, between creators and public would refine the way minority characters are presented in comics (and other licensed media) and the way identity is defined in comics. This refining process expanded as more writers and artists of color broke into the industry and brought their perspectives to the characters, and is a continuing process in the twenty-first century as letters pages have been replaced by social media and fan sites. Voices of color, therefore, have taken nonwhite characters who were originally viewed specifically through a white lens and situated them outside the framework of whiteness. This reframing of the characters has often included contending not only with negative racial stereotypes, but with respectability, civility, and the model minority myth.

In recent years there have been studies about Asian/Asian American identity and representation in comics and popular culture in general, and even more works about Black identity and representation. John A. Lent’s 2015 work Asian Comics gives a good overview of the comics tradition of several Asian countries, while Jachinson Chan’s 2001 book Chinese American Masculinities and its chapter on the comic book Master of Kung Fu remains an invaluable examination of Chinese American identity as expressed in comic books. Sheng-Mei Ma’s 2000 book Deathly Embrace: Orientalism and Asian American Identity included a chapter about the golden age of adventure comics. Matthew Pustz explored the problematic nature of whiteness in 1970s Kung Fu comics in his essay ‘A True Son of K’un-Lun,’ in the 2020 anthology Unstable Masks: Whiteness and American Superhero Comics. In the broader study of Asian/Asian American identity and the role of sexual identity in racial formation, David Eng’s 2001 work Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian America is especially pertinent. Frank Wu went beyond the binary approach often applied to racial studies in the past with his 2002 book Yellow: Race in America Beyond Black and White, and Michael Keehan traced the beginnings of the yellow stereotype in his 2011 work Becoming Yellow: A Short History of Racial Thinking.

The litany of impressive works in recent years about Black identity in comics include such works as Adilifu Nama’s Super Black: American Pop Culture and Black Superheroes (2011), Deborah Elizabeth Whaley’s Black Women in Sequence: Re-inking Comics, Graphic Novels, and Anime (2015), Jonathan Gayle’s excellent documentary White Scripts, Black Supermen: Black Masculinities in American Comic Books (2012), and the anthologies The Blacker the Ink: Constructions of Black Identity in Comics and Sequential Art (2015, edited by Frances Gateward and John Jennings) and Black Comics: Politics of Race and Representation (2013, edited by Sheena C. Howard and Ronald L. Jackson II). Qiana Whitted examined racial issues addressed by writers such as William Gaines, Harvey Kurtzman, and Al Feldstein in EC Comics: Race, Shock, and Social Protest in 2019. Ken Quattro’s 2020 book Invisible Men: The Trailblazing Black Artists of Comic Books provides excellent details about Golden Age African American comics artists.

In the introduction of his documentary, Gayle said that an increasing amount of critical scholarship … examines the manner in which comic books reflect broader societal understandings of the various domains of human experience, including of course race and masculinity.¹ That scholarship has been interdisciplinary, with much of it coming from the fields of library and information science, English, visual arts, and cultural anthropology, as well as my own discipline of history.

One recent (2019) example of that latter methodology is All New, All Different? A History of Race and the American Superhero by Allan W. Austin and Patrick L. Hamilton (from the fields of history and English, respectively), which examines racial representation over time and in historical context and does so extremely well. This is the primary way in which historical approaches to comics studies, such as the one you are reading, differ from those taken by other fields: historians examine text and context equally, in order to demonstrate change over time. Utilizing that approach, it is my goal in this volume to give a brief overview of Black and Asian/Asian American representation through the decades, framed by the lens of whiteness, and to demonstrate how both fans and creators of color influenced the gradual change in that representation. I will also demonstrate how the 1970s comics adoption of the then-popular cinematic trends of Kung Fu and Blaxploitation became a pivotal point in that process, giving minority readers a representational point of reference, and how that process informs twenty-first century live-action portrayals of those 1970s characters.

Further definition of race and whiteness can be achieved by interrogating nonwhite racial intersections. Vijay Prashad, in the classic 2001 work Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting: Afro-Asian Connections and the Myth of Cultural Purity, described Asian and African interaction as an expression of polyculturalism that transcends race; polycultural intersections, Prashad asserts, most often occur at points of working-class identity and anticolonial radicalism. This was manifest in the popularity of 1970s Kung Fu movies among Black audiences, but also in the cooperation and philosophical exchange among radical Marxist groups organized among nominally racial or ethnic identity groups, such as the Black Panthers’ participation in the Rainbow Coalition in late 1960s Chicago. This sort of polycultural intersection is reflected in the title of my work: Shaolin Brew, which is a track by the Wu-Tang Clan, the all-Black rap group who named themselves after the title of a Kung Fu movie (Shaolin and Wu Tang). It must be noted, however, that although such racial intersections between Asian and African American comic book characters became fairly common in the 1970s, they were virtually unheard of before. We will discuss the reasons for that change in detail. Other notable works on African American and Asian/Asian American intersections that help inform that discussion include Afro-Orientalism by Bill V. Mullen (2004), Afro Asia, edited by Fred Ho and Bill V. Mullen (2008), and Facing the Rising Sun by Gerald Horne (2018).

However, I am not simply looking at representation (or polyculturalism). I am looking at the process of that representation via the interactions between creators and fans of color over time. Primarily, however, I am examining it through the theoretical lens of whiteness studies. Whiteness theory officially entered academia in the early to mid-nineties and began to be widely used as an analytical tool by the early years of the twenty-first century; it has now become de rigueur in critical examinations of race and identity across many disciplines. However, as Sean Guynes and Martin Lund point out in the introduction of their 2020 edited volume Unstable Masks: Whiteness and American Superhero Comics, this approach has heretofore only been used in a handful of academic studies centered on comics.² The most recent, at the time of this writing, is Bandits, Misfits, and Superheroes: Whiteness and Its Borderlands in American Comics and Graphic Novels by Josef Benson and William Singsen (2022).

I imagine that the casual reader, who has not made deep dives into the world of academic theory of the past couple of decades, might be understandably puzzled at this point. I just mentioned several recent works that have focused on race in comics, specifically on African American and Asian/Asian American characters, and yet I assert there have only been a handful of works on whiteness in comics. The reader would be justified in wondering, as well, what a book about Black and Asian superheroes has to do with whiteness, to begin with. Therefore, like any good historian, I will define my terms and provide context.

Whiteness, in this framework, does not refer to the simple fact of European ancestry. Whiteness is a racialized power structure. Blaxploitation and Kung Fu superheroes, who were (mostly) nonwhite, were created and existed in an industry that was overwhelmingly composed of white people, marketed primarily to white people, and set in a milieu that reflected the racial power dynamics of the United States. It was, and is, a world where heroes (especially main heroes) are implicitly expected to be Caucasian. So, too, is the average citizen because, as Toni Morrison wrote in Playing in the Dark, American means white.³ As comics scholar Frederick Luis Aldama has pointed out, whiteness has become normalized and most people have become habituated to it. Aldama calls for us not only to dishabituate whiteness but to trouble it by exploring and revealing how nonwhiteness interfaces with it.⁴ That is my goal with this book. Naturally, that first requires a closer look at what whiteness is.

The antecedents of whiteness theory stretch back over a century, to the work of sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois. Perhaps his most recognized work is the 1903 essay collection The Souls of Black Folk, in which he coined the term double-consciousness. Most people are much less aware, however, of his 1920 essay The Soul of White Folk. But what on earth is whiteness that one should so desire it? Du Bois asks therein. Always, somehow, some way, silently but clearly, I am given to understand that whiteness is the ownership of the earth forever and ever, Amen! He points out that newer white immigrants from Central and Eastern Europe, considered undesirable by most Americans, were nonetheless trained from their arrival to hate the Black race.⁵

Du Bois built on those ideas in the work that would prove to be his most intellectually influential, 1935’s Black Reconstruction. Du Bois asserted that, during Reconstruction, the planter class in the South faced the prospect of white and Black laborers uniting to protect their own interests against those of the people with capital. Planters prevented such a union by sowing the seeds of discord between the two races, primarily by treating them differently. White workers, also, labored for pitiably low wages, but they were compensated in part by a sort of public and psychological wage.⁶ That wage was their whiteness, and the superior social status it accorded them, thus partnering white workers with the exploitative planters as the us versus the Black them.

Novelist James Baldwin is the next major link in the literary chain that culminated in whiteness theory. He revisited and greatly expanded on Du Bois’s whiteness themes in his own body of work. He noted that Irish immigrants had become white by developing antipathy toward Black people, and that the price of the ticket into America for such immigrants was to become white and thereby lose their previous identity. They were defined thereafter in opposition to Blackness, known only for what they were not. White people are not white, Baldwin wrote; part of the price of the white ticket is to delude themselves into believing that they are. In a similar vein, when asked by a student during a speech to address the Negro problem, Baldwin responded, It’s not the Negro problem, it’s the white problem. I’m only black because you think you’re white.⁷ Or, as David Eng put it in Racial Castration, "Whiteness—in its refusal to be named and its refusal to be seen—represents itself as the universal and unmarked standard, a ubiquitous norm from which all else and all others are viewed as a regrettable deviation."⁸

The publication in 1952 of Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks was a major step toward the critical approaches that would later be known as whiteness theory and critical race theory. Fanon, a psychiatrist and political philosopher originally from Martinique, and a man of color, examined race and colonization. He focused particularly on the psychopathology of subaltern Black people, arguing that white colonizers socially indoctrinate people of color to accept a position of permanent inferiority and self-loathing.⁹ Whether he likes it or not, Fanon wrote, the black man has to wear the livery the white man has fabricated for him. Look at children’s comic books: all the Blacks are mouthing the ritual ‘Yes, boss.’¹⁰

In the wake of Black intellectuals, white academics began to look at race in new ways. In 1968 historian Winthrop Jordan introduced one of the most important books in the historiography of race and early white identity, White over Black. In it, he argued that early colonial identity centered Americanness on whiteness, defined in opposition to African and Native American people. Jordan noted in his introduction that he and James Baldwin had independently come to many of the same conclusions.¹¹ In 1974, Theodore W. Allen published (in pamphlet form) Class Struggle and the Origin of Racial Slavery: The Invention of the White Race, which expounded on his ideas about white skin privilege that he had been voicing for a decade (and would continue to expand on until the end of the century). Allen argued that slavery and racism had been introduced by the colonial ruling class in order to control the working classes.¹² In the 1980s Peggy McIntosh wrote about the interlocking nature of white privilege and male privilege, and her 1989 essay White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack introduced the idea of implicit and unearned social advantage as a form of privilege to a broader audience.¹³

Whiteness as a recognized academic approach, however, came into being on the heels of several influential works published in the 1990s, beginning in 1991 with historian David Roediger’s Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class. Acknowledging his debt to Du Bois and Baldwin, Roediger examined the process of white workers solidifying their identities in opposition to Black workers, from the beginning of the nineteenth century through the end of the Civil War. The following year, Toni Morrison’s work of literary criticism Playing in the Dark was published. This was closely followed, in 1993, by sociologist Ruth Frankenberg’s White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness and Cheryl Harris’s pivotal Harvard Law Review article Whiteness as Property. In 1995 historian Noel Ignatiev’s How the Irish Became White gained national attention, to the extent that President Clinton mentioned it on several occasions.¹⁴ Ignatiev also attracted attention with the journal he coedited with John Garvey, Race Traitor, whose motto was treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity, and his calls to abolish whiteness.¹⁵

The year 1997 saw the publication of English professor Mike Hill’s anthology Whiteness: A Critical Reader and British film historian Richard Dyer’s White: Essays on Race and Culture. The former collected essays from authors representing several different fields. As the book’s description pointed out, the works it presented were, in essence, a second generation of writing on Whiteness, moving past acknowledgement of its heretofore invisible nature, to in-depth analysis. Dyer’s work examined visual representations of whiteness created by white people, including a discussion of Tarzan in various media, including comic books.¹⁶

In the ensuing decades, there have been countless articles and monographs exploring the sundry facets of whiteness. Many of these have gone beyond the Black/white binary, as did Ronald Takaki’s Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans in 1998, and into examinations of the othering of various nonwhite minority groups. I have found Gary Taylor’s Buying Whiteness (2003) and Nell Irvin Painter’s The History of White People (2010) especially helpful. However, I particularly want to highlight one twenty-first century work that informs this book: Roediger’s Working towards Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Became White: The Strange Journey from Ellis Island to the Suburbs (2005). Roediger continues his narrative of whiteness where Wages of Whiteness left off, the end of the Civil War, and follows it into the twentieth century, focusing on the struggles of Eastern and Southern Europeans who were part of the second large immigration wave into the US. Those Europeans were not considered white by citizens of their new country, with Jewish immigrants having a particularly difficult time. As Du Bois and Baldwin observed, it was only by divesting themselves of their original identities and joining the melting pot of white America, and by demonstrating they had adopted the prevailing prejudices against Black people, that they were able to progress from nonwhite to ethnic white and finally to unqualified whiteness. The transition, or at least the final manifestation, of this journey is often reflected in the popular culture they created.

Whiteness, then, is the dominant point of the racialized power structure that developed in the colonial period and has been further entrenched over time. Whiteness theory examines the cultural aspect of that structure, while critical race theory (which has unexpectedly become a bogeyman to conservatives in recent years) focuses on the legal component of it. The two approaches go hand-in-hand. As Ronald Takaki put it, ‘Color’ in America operated in an economic context (which is why so many labor historians use whiteness theory to frame their work).¹⁷ It developed with the dual purpose of helping English colonists establish a unique and discrete view of their own identities, and of buttressing the institution of slavery, which was becoming more and more firmly established over the course of the seventeenth and early eighteenth century. Both of those purposes ultimately served to establish and reinforce white supremacy. Tools that eventually developed to help achieve that purpose included the concepts of civility and respectability.

For most of United States history, defenders of the white power structure (whether operating via legal, social, or cultural means) have been explicit about their racist motives—but not always. Among the Founding Fathers generation, for example, many southerners (most notably Thomas Jefferson, but he was echoing the common sentiments of the day) decried slavery as a moral evil. They commonly articulated the belief that it would gradually pass away as the nation became more enlightened. Meanwhile, they continued to own slaves. As antislavery politician John Quincy Adams put it in 1820, They have betrayed the secret of their souls—that is, while they gave lip service to morality and the rights of all humans, their actions demonstrated that they actually liked being masters and did not want to give it up.¹⁸

Emancipation is bound to take place, such (white) individuals seemed to be saying, but do not rush it. Let it take place gradually. Even many white people during the era who actually were opposed to slavery counseled Black people to be patient, not to push, and to be grateful for what they had. Black abolitionists, and their sincere white allies, who did not comply were regarded by the majority of white people as troublemakers. Frederick Douglass, the escaped slave-turned-activist, said Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. David Walker, whose father had been a slave, said, While you keep us and our children in bondage, and treat us like brutes, to make us support you and your families, we cannot be your friends. White abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison responded to mainstream calls for gradual emancipation: Tell the mother to gradually extricate her babe from the fire into which it has fallen; -but urge me not to use moderation in a cause like the present. For most of the first half of the nineteenth century, though, both moderate slaveholders and moderate abolitionists pointed toward a gradual (and civil) end to the institution.

However, as the old legal maxim goes, justice deferred is justice denied. The same situation persisted in the civil rights movement. Even Martin Luther King Jr., certainly a relative respectable and civil moderate compared to Malcolm X and Stokely Carmichael, was considered a firebrand by the majority of whites at the time, and even many white people sympathetic to his cause insisted that Black people must be patient and not make waves. Dr. King responded to those calls in his famous 1963 Letter from a Birmingham Jail:

We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly, I have never yet engaged in a direct-action movement that was well timed, according to the timetable of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the words Wait! It rings in the air of every Negro with a piercing familiarity. This Wait has almost always meant Never. … We have waited for more than three hundred and forty years for our constitutional and God-given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jet-like speed toward the goal of political independence, and we still creep at horse and buggy pace toward the gaining of a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. I guess it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging facts of segregation to say, Wait.¹⁹

People of color, then, have had to contend with two types of white resistance to change. There has been the overt, explicit kind exemplified by people like the Ku Klux Klan or the angry segregationists yelling profanities and insults at schoolchildren, and the covert, implicit kind exemplified by people who present themselves as allies but insist on respectable, civil behavior—all while quietly helping to move the goalposts farther and farther away. One big difference is that members of the latter group often do not realize, or admit to themselves, that they are invested in preserving the white power structure. The results, though, are the same.

It is reminiscent of the Walrus and the Carpenter in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass. In a poem recited to Alice by Tweedledum and Tweedledee, the Walrus and the Carpenter discover an oyster bed as they are walking along the beach. The Walrus, who is rather charming and polite, cajoles the oysters into taking a walk with them. They do so, except for the eldest oyster, who does not trust the strangers. After a short walk and some pleasant conversation, the Walrus and the Carpenter (who is gruff and all business) eat the oysters. The Walrus seems to experience regret even before the strangers reveal their trickery to the oysters:

I weep for you, the Walrus said:

I deeply sympathize.

With sobs and tears he sorted out

Those of the largest size,

Holding his pocket-handkerchief

Before his streaming eyes.

The Carpenter shows no such compunction. Other than a sarcastic remark or two, he concentrates on his dining. After the recital is over, Alice declares that she prefers the Walrus, as he was at least "a little sorry for the oysters. Tweedledee and Tweedledum inform her that the Walrus actually ate more oysters than the Carpenter, and was using his handkerchief to shield that fact, while the Carpenter ate as many as he could get. Alice decides They were both very unpleasant characters."²⁰

It is also reminiscent of the characters played by Benedict Cumberbatch and Michael Fassbender in the 2013 Oscar-winning film 12 Years a Slave (a far cry from their performances as Doctor Strange and Magneto, respectively). Cumberbatch and Fassbender played plantation owners named Ford and Epps, each of whom is, at one point, owner of the protagonist Solomon Northup (on whose autobiography the film is based, and played by the future Mordo, Chiwetel Efiojor). Epps (Fassbender) is a small slaveholder notable for his lusts and brutality, and who constantly vocalizes his superiority to his chattel. He attempts to beat any hint of defiance from Northup and the other slaves. Ford (Cumberbatch) owns a much larger plantation, and is more genteel. At times he even seems kind, and presents himself as a friend of sorts to Northup, promising to help him regain his freedom if he will only be patient. It eventually becomes obvious that, as Dr. King said, wait means never.

Ford is less outwardly cruel than Epps, but both are equally invested in the social and economic privileges of whiteness. While the Eppses of this world trumpet their white supremacy and demand fearful contrition from nonwhite people, the Fords ask only for patience and civility, with the implicit (or sometimes explicit) promise that such behavior will—eventually—lead to liberation and acceptance, though it never quite does. The Ford approach is a gentler, and in many ways more effective, means of protecting the structure of whiteness. And that approach has often employed the idea of Black respectability to its own benefit.

Osagie Obasogie and Zachary Newman, in 2016, defined modern Black respectability politics:

the notion that minorities can best respond to structural racism by individually behaving in a respectable manner that elicits the esteem of Whites as a way to insulate the self from attack while also promoting a positive group image that can uplift the reputation of the group.²¹

An argument can be made that the nonviolent approach taken by early civil rights leaders, enduring beatings with dignified comportment and without even verbal retaliation, operated in tandem with the much more directly resistant Black Power movement to achieve significant gains while using very different tactics. However, political scientists Tehana Lopez Bunyasi and Candis Watts Smith point out that more traditional civil rights approaches that highlight the necessity of proving to White audiences that Blacks are good and deserving of respect, rights, and dignity trouble modern groups like Black Lives Matter, because there is an implicit message that you must prove yourself to be good in order to gain rights that are already promised to you as citizens and human beings.²²

Further, Lopez Bunyasi and Smith echo Frederick C. Harris in noting that the politics of respectability has evolved to accommodate neoliberalism and its focus on self-care and self-correction.²³ In other words, it focuses on the need of the individual (through good behavior) to overcome, rather than on addressing structural racism and its attendant institutional issues. In that respect it is closely related to what Austin and Hamilton called the liberal myth of brotherhood. As Green Arrow told the Apache youth Jerry in Justice League of America #57 (November 1967), You have to grit your teeth—prove yourself a real person … It’s easy to throw up your hands and surrender! It takes real guts to grin and bear it—and show yourself a better man than he who condemns you!

The problem with uplifting stories that leave out structural barriers, Harris pointed out in The Rise of Black Respectability, is that they can have the effect of steering ‘unrespectables’ away from making demands on the state to intervene on their behalf and toward self-correction and the false belief that the market economy alone will lift them out of their plight.²⁴ Discouraging people of color from addressing the fundamental structural elements of racism, and directing them instead to quixotic efforts to prove themselves individually in order to gain some form of acceptance (that is never fully equal), is a strategy to protect the status quo of whiteness. So, too, is deluding sympathetic whites who have a sincere desire to help people of color into, instead, guiding them into fruitless efforts at respectability.

The model minority stereotype of Asian Americans is another tool to preserve whiteness that is similar in its application to Black respectability politics. This stereotype took hold in the American consciousness in the 1960s, particularly after the publication in 1966 of a New York Times Magazine article by University of California sociologist William Petersen, entitled Success Story, Japanese-American Style. Petersen lauded the Japanese American community for rising above the tragedy of WWII-era incarceration and achieving great success, doing so by their own almost totally unaided effort. He contrasted this with problem minorities like African Americans and Latinos and ascribed it to the fact that Japanese Americans were exceptionally law abiding, hardworking, frugal, and (perhaps most importantly) rarely given to radical political behavior. The latter virtue was due to the fact that, unlike other minorities, they did not hold onto anger and resentment.²⁵

By 1970 Chinese Americans had joined Japanese Americans as part of the model minority, as indicated by a New York Times article titled Orientals Find Bias Is Down Sharply in U.S. The piece highlighted the almost total disappearance of discrimination against [Chinese and Japanese Americans] since the end of World War II and their assimilation into the mainstream of American life. One Chinese immigrant was quoted as saying that being Chinese was no longer a liability "if you have the ability and