Mixed-Race Superheroes

By Eric L. Berlatsky, Gregory T. Carter, Chris Gavaler and 8 more

American culture has long represented mixed-race identity in paradoxical terms. On the one hand, it has been associated with weakness, abnormality, impurity, transgression, shame, and various pathologies; however, it can also connote genetic superiority, exceptional beauty, and special potentiality. This ambivalence has found its way into superhero media, which runs the gamut from Ant-Man and the Wasp’s tragic mulatta villain Ghost to the cinematic depiction of Aquaman as a heroic “half-breed.” 
 
The essays in this collection contend with the multitude of ways that racial mixedness has been presented in superhero comics, films, television, and literature. They explore how superhero media positions mixed-race characters within a genre that has historically privileged racial purity and propagated images of white supremacy. The book considers such iconic heroes as Superman, Spider-Man, and The Hulk, alongside such lesser-studied characters as Valkyrie, Dr. Fate, and Steven Universe. Examining both literal and symbolic representations of racial mixing, this study interrogates how we might challenge and rewrite stereotypical narratives about mixed-race identity, both in superhero media and beyond.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Release date: Apr 16, 2021
• ISBN: 9781978814615

Book preview

Superheroes

Introduction

SIKA A. DAGBOVIE-MULLINS AND ERIC L. BERLATSKY

In a 2017 Wired article published a month before DC’s Wonder Woman U.S. premiere, comedian and TV host W. Kamau Bell wrote,

I have two Black/mixed-race daughters. My oldest daughter is 5. At that age many kids are covered in superhero gear. But not her. I asked her who her favorite superhero was. I had no idea if she even had one. After thinking for a considerable, considerable time, she finally declared, Word Girl! Word Girl is a PBS show starring a brown-skinned fifth grader who fights crime and teaches kids to read. (Because apparently even POC superheroes have to work multiple jobs.) That means if Hollywood wants my daughter’s ticket money when she is my age, then it needs to do better to highlight and create heroes that look like her and her friends.

Although Bell’s commentary is primarily intended to critique the dearth of nonwhite (and not necessarily mixed-race) superhero characters, we find his daughter’s response interesting, as Word Girl embodies a kind of racial mixedness or racial indeterminacy (prompting questions like What race/nationality is word girl? on Yahoo! Answers, Is Word Girl black or Hispanic? on Quora, and As far as ‘race’ I guess she’s a Lexiconian? on Fandom). Word Girl is an alien from the planet Lexicon who is found and adopted by a human couple (mirroring the Kryptonian origin story of Superman, the first superhero). While many fans read Word Girl as brown and Latinx (the show debuted on Maya and Miguel), her adoption by Tim and Sally Botsford (conspicuously Anglo names) further complicates how one might think about her racialization. Still, Bell’s daughter’s citing of Word Girl as her favorite superhero (and not, for example, The Powerpuff Girls, rebooted in 2016) speaks to the broader call for all kinds of racially diverse heroes, including those who may blur racial boundaries. Consider Anglo-Indonesian and British writer Will Harris’s embracing of Barack Obama in Mixed-Race Superman: Keanu, Obama, and Multiracial Experience: I was a shy eighteen-year-old confused about my identity [in 2007] and Obama spoke to my desire for a ‘certain presumptuousness, a certain audacity.’ … After a decade of waiting for a ‘new era’ to arrive, I wanted a superman: a comic book narrative of self-discovery that would compensate for my own self-ignorance. Now here was a politician who not only looked different, but talked beautifully—and knowingly—of his mixed-race upbringing. Here was a story that was long and painful but seemed to bend implacably toward justice (16). Harris was not the only one to view Obama as a superhero. There are numerous indirect representations of him as such, including Calvin Ellis/Kal-El as both Superman and Black president of the United States in Grant Morrison’s Final Crisis, vol. 1, no. 7 (Morrison et al.), and Action Comics, vol. 2, no. 9 (Morrison and Ha), as well as images of Obama as (or posing with) Superman in popular media. Ralina L. Joseph’s review of Obama’s recognized extraordinary abilities also invokes his position as a man of steel: Even when blatant racism … is thrown in Obama’s direction, he does not appear to flinch. He is gifted with racism Teflon. Obama’s perceived superhero quality is linked to the representation of his mixed-race (165).

In response to Bell’s critique, 2018 answered energetically with the blockbuster Black Panther, which features a predominantly Black cast and Black director. However, 2018 is also notable for three films that presented mixed-race characters (two of which also featured mixed-race actors or actresses): Ant-Man and the Wasp, Aquaman, and Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse.¹ All three films went into production during the Obama administration and in some way reflect the aspirational postracial politics of the time. However, as political scientist Michael Tesler explains, the 2008 election night hopes of racial unity had given way four years later to growing fears of racial polarization in American politics (5). Racial divisions deepened during Obama’s second term, stoking the racial fears, anxieties, and violence that have characterized President Donald Trump’s rhetoric, policies, and administration. Thus the U.S. premiere of these films (in June and December 2018) coincided with recognition of postracialism as a myth, undeniable in light of the increasingly public expressions of white supremacist rhetoric. In short, the time span during which the development, production, and eventual debut of these films took place speaks to our nation’s contradictory impulses when it comes to issues related to race and racial divisions. Subtle and more obvious stereotypes about racial mixedness, the postracial promise of race mixing, and what Joseph calls the exceptional multiracial appear in these films, suggesting that problematic ideas associated with racial mixedness continue to be recycled in the twenty-first century (4).

The Specter of Mixed Race

In Marvel’s Ant-Man and the Wasp, the villain is a Black and white mixed-race young woman who was orphaned as a child and is struggling to survive as an adult. Ava Starr / Ghost (played by mixed-race actress Hannah John-Kamen) is weary, desperate, and enraged about her corporeal condition, which causes her to literally fade in and out of existence, summoning up the tragic mulatto archetype frequently discussed in this anthology.² Her bodily impermanence literalizes Obama’s description of "the mixed blood, the divided soul, the ghostly image of the tragic mulatto trapped between two worlds" in his autobiography Dreams from My Father (xv; emphasis added). Ava’s moniker, Ghost, is fitting on several fronts, as it relates to racial mixedness and the haunting specter of miscegenation in America. In a flashback we learn that Ava’s father, Elihas, was white and her mother, Catherine, was Black, a coupling whose history invokes violence, coercion, and abuse. As Renee Romano reminds us, Under slavery and later under the system of segregation, Black women had little recourse against the sexual advances of white men, and many Black women were raped, victimized, and sexually abused by white men (235). While Ava’s parents were presumably in a loving (and, of course, contemporary) marriage before they died, Ava’s phantom-like predicament becomes the ghostly embodiment of this aspect of America’s dark past.³ As an adult, Ava is lonely, isolated, and constantly in physical and emotional pain. Her story superficially resembles early nineteenth-century mulatto fiction: The typical plot summary of such writings involves the story of an educated light-skinned heroine whose white benefactor and paramour (sometimes also the young woman’s father) dies, leaving her to the auction block.… The protagonist, sheltered from the outside world, is driven to desperation by her predicament and perhaps to an early death (Raimon 7). Although Ava does not die, her parents are killed when her father’s quantum research lab blows up, leaving her a young orphan. She survives the explosion apparently because of the molecular disequilibrium she experiences during the blast. Dr. Bill Foster⁴ (played by Laurence Fishburne), then a member of S.H.I.E.L.D., is called in to help with this quantum anomaly, a term that parallels how mixed-race people were viewed as racial aberrations.⁵ Even Sonny Burch, the black-market technology dealer, calls her a freak. Ava explains, Every cell in my body is torn apart and stitched back together over and over every day. While this condition allows Ava to live, it also means she lacks solidity—her body goes right through objects and she flickers in and out of being a solid mass.

Bill Foster becomes Ava’s surrogate father (and thus she has both a white father and a Black father, emphasizing her twoness) and builds her a chamber to slow her decay. Ava sleeps in this mostly glass chamber, which allows her to be seen from all sides, displaying her body and underscoring her racial alienation. Her mysterious sleeping chamber and fittingly colored gray Ghost suit, coupled with the gothic elements of the house, contribute to the motif of racial ambiguity, a constant trope in gothic literature (Edwards xxiii). When Scott Lang / Ant-Man, Hope Pym / the Wasp, and Hope’s father, Dr. Hank Pym (the original Ant-Man), pull up to Bill’s house at night and look at the dark mansion in the woods that sits behind closed gates, spooky extradiegetic sounds contribute to the eeriness. They hear a howling wolf, prompting Scott’s comedic comment, This seems right. As James Edwards writes in Gothic Passages: Racial Ambiguity and the American Gothic, The gothic landscape and its identificatory markers … are presented with the gothic currency that typically goes hand in hand with the motif of racial confusion (xxxiii). When Ava/Ghost appears to confront them, she seems physically disheveled. Her slightly messy hair is in loose pigtails, exactly how she wore it as a little girl the day her parents died. Her confusion is symbolically signaled via her subtle infantilization and implied racial in-betweenness. Further, when she talks to Scott, she understandably acts slightly manic while recounting her parents’ death and how she was subsequently used by S.H.I.E.L.D. as a stealth operative who was forced to steal, spy, and kill. Her criminality underscores the numerous transgressions and taboos, racial and otherwise, she embodies.

While the mulatto archetype struggles in between Black and white, Ava is additionally caught between presence and absence: The ghost appears as something at odds with limits, this thing that is both living and dead, that is neither living nor dead, that is past and is not past to come, that looks like a dead father, or husband, or daughter, and therefore the question of definition appears with it (Coughlan 5). Ava/Ghost’s sputtering, like a computerized or digital picture constantly breaking up and freezing, technologizes the tragic mulatto—she is temporarily frozen in real time and susceptible to disappearing but then reappears (though slow-moving and delayed). Her containment suit helps her control her phasing, but it is as if she is always a file in the process of being downloaded. In this twenty-first-century update, the tragic mulatto’s identity confusion is symbolically akin to a delayed download buffering. In computer speak, If a network is fast enough to keep up with playback, buffering is not necessary. However, this is not the case over the Internet where packets can traverse numerous routers from source to destination, and delays can be introduced at any juncture (Buffering). This technical explanation of network packets recalls the scientific lore spread about mixed-race people and their electrical signals in the early nineteenth century: Neurologists decided that electrical signals that control the body run in one direction in white people and in the opposite direction in Black people. Mulattoes, obviously, were bound to be a highly confused people. Their signals were hopelessly mixed, and the slightest mixture—even one drop—was enough to upset the system and jangle the nerves. Small wonder, then, that mulattoes were sometimes imagined by whites to be a shallow, flighty, and fluttering people (Williamson 95–96). Although Ava is more determined than confused, her behavior becomes more and more disturbing and volatile as the film continues. She threatens to do something harmful to Scott’s daughter in order to get into Hank’s lab and then later fights with Bill, throwing him to the floor in an attempt to extract quantum energy for herself. Bill has already told her she only has a few weeks to live, causing her to literally flutter in and out of existence more frequently in the latter part of the film.

When Janet Van Dyne (Hope’s mother and the original Wasp) and Hank successfully exit the quantum realm where Janet has been trapped, their vessel inadvertently hits Ava/Ghost. This allows for a tearful mother-daughter embrace, after which Ghost reemerges. Janet immediately walks toward her, confirming Ava/Ghost’s suffering: Your pain. I can feel it. Ava/Ghost, appearing vulnerable, defenseless, and childlike, responds, It hurts. It always hurts. Janet then places her hands on the sides of Ava’s head, both a maternal and healing gesture, relieving her pain and causing Ava/Ghost to cry. Occurring after Janet’s reunion with Hope, this moment reads like a second mother-daughter exchange. Ava/Ghost now has a second set of surrogate interracial parents: Bill and Janet. At the end of the film, she is no longer tragic. In the final scene she escapes down an alley with Bill, repeatedly telling him to go. He refuses to leave, promising, We can make it. I’m not leaving you, and they embrace. Ava’s future seems hopeful, as she is no longer in pain, she is not alone, and she is no longer dependent on the chamber to live. Referencing nineteenth-century American literature, Eve Raimon asserts, A liminal figure like the mulatta … is well situated to reveal writers’—and therefore the culture’s—conflicted visions of national and racial exclusion and belonging (12). We propose that Ava/Ghost’s liminality serves a similar purpose. That she is at first alienated and entrapped and later free symbolizes the contradictory ways in which multiracial people are and have been viewed. Ava/Ghost’s condition reflects a familiar narrative about mixed-race people and nonbelonging. Fittingly, it is only when she is no longer phasing and thus no longer occupying the same in-between space that her future appears promising.

The Transcendent Half-Breed

On the other end of the spectrum of mixed-race stereotypes is the exceptional, superhuman multiracial figure embodied by Aquaman (played by mixed-race actor Jason Momoa) in DC’s Aquaman.⁶ Arthur Curry is son of Atlanna, queen of Atlantis (played by Nicole Kidman), and Thomas Curry (played by New Zealand actor Temuera Derek Morrison). In the beginning of the movie, Thomas rescues Atlanna when she is brought to land by a storm. They fall in love, but when Arthur is a toddler, Atlanna is forced to return to Atlantis by order of the king. Atlanna and Thomas’s love is literally and symbolically transgressive in at least three ways: Arthur is human, Arthur is Indigenous, and Atlanna has been betrothed to the king. In a voiceover, Arthur explains, Their worlds were never meant to meet, and I was the product of a love that never should have been, thus affirming both his parents’ interspecies and interracial star-crossed lovers’ story. Contributing to his parents’ unlikely union is the setting of their meeting—Maine, 1985. Maine has historically been an overwhelmingly white state. Just five years after Thomas and Atlanna would have met, the white population of Maine constituted 98.4 percent of the population (1990 Census 11). Notably, Atlanna’s whiteness is emphasized with her platinum-blond hair and gleaming white outfits, in particular the white iridescent wetsuit she wears when Thomas finds her unconscious on the beach and presumably the same outfit ornamented by animal bone armor when Arthur reunites with her in the Hidden Sea. (In Adventure Comics, vol. 1, no. 260, the first comic-book account of Aquaman’s origin, Atlanna also has blond hair, but Kidman’s tresses are more platinum [Bernstein and Fradon].) In the last scene, she also emerges wearing a white iridescent dress with beads and sequins. To contrast with Atlanna’s whiteness, Thomas and Arthur are clearly racialized as Maori. Jason Momoa explains how he adopted a Maori identity when playing Arthur to pay homage to Temuera Morrison, the actor who plays his father. During the fight scene on the submarine when he saves Russian sailors, his battle cry is Ona Takai. He expounds, "Here’s the thing with Maoris, I love Temuera Morrison, he was one of my idols. He was my father in the movie. I wanted him to play my dad, so I thought it would be good to just use Maori for it instead of Hawaiian. There’s no such thing as Hawaiian, it’s ‘Nā Kānaka Maoli’ with an L. That’s what Hawaiian means. That’s where the Maoris came from. So, I thought it was all right to go ‘Ono Takai,’ which means ‘You deserve this,’ and I think it’s kind of neat to add a little more flavor in there, you know what I mean" (Barrow).

His battle cry symbolically affirms his self-acceptance despite his liminality. Arthur’s ethnic identity is also emphasized via his tattoos and other subtleties in the film. He wears a pounamu and greets his dad with a hongi, while the Kiwi actor makes reference to ta moko tattooing, all of which Temuera credits to Jason embracing the Maori culture he encountered during filming on the Gold Coast (van der Zwan).⁷ All of this is to say that Arthur’s status as King Orm’s half-breed brother is emphasized through his racial ancestry, not just his status as a fish boy (as one human calls him during a bar scene).

The film’s various storylines center on familial tensions, legacies, and duty. These are further intensified by the film’s main story, which features an interracial union.⁸ Broadly speaking, the film highlights the significance of familial obligations, from the humans’ duty to take care of Mother Earth, to Atlanna’s obligation to her parents and her betrothed, to Princess Mera’s treason against King Orm and her father’s alliance with his kingdom. Aside from Aquaman’s story, the tensions associated with race, citizenship, and family legacy are introduced early via Black Manta’s storyline and patrilineal line. When sea pirate David (Black Manta) and his father, Jesse, overtake a submarine at the beginning of the film, Jesse passes down his father’s knife to his son and reminds him about the importance of filial duty: This was your grandfather’s. He was one of the navy’s first frogmen during World War II. He was so stealthy in the war, his unit nicknamed him Manta. But after the war, his country forgot about him so he went back to the sea, scavenging and surviving with his wit and this knife. He gave it to me when I was your age and now it’s yours, son. Most obviously, this moment highlights a strong father-son bond that mirrors Thomas’s close relationship with Arthur. When David and Jesse fight Aquaman and Aquaman lets Jesse die, Manta becomes obsessed with killing Aquaman in revenge, representing yet another character who is working to avenge, counteract, or make amends for the actions or death of a parent.⁹ However, the story of Manta’s grandfather also intimates the ways that race, allegiance, and betrayal merge and frame Aquaman’s story. Manta’s grandfather was betrayed by a nation that continued to subject him to racial prejudice and oppression following the war. He and many African American servicemen embodied the inherent tensions of fighting for a country that denied democracy to its own citizens and the dilemma of remaining loyal to both nation and race (Williams 6). There are other instances of betrayal and abandonment: Queen Atlanna betrays her people (literally ocean-dwellers but also her race) and marries a surface-dweller, countering Atlantean tradition and racial expectations. The product of her union, Arthur/Aquaman, symbolizes this betrayal. Jennifer Lisa Vest writes, The possibility of Mixed existence creates ‘discomfort,’ a ‘crisis of racial meaning,’ or else elicits a fear of annihilation, political betrayal, or capitulation with colonialist and racist projects (96). Both possibilities are reflected in Orm’s reaction to Aquaman when he captures him. On the one hand, he calls him his half-breed brother. On the other hand, he admonishes, You’ve come all this way to take sides against your own people.

Aquaman is positioned as the marginalized racial Other while he ironically symbolizes colonialist power in that the exploitation of human beings and the natural environment are linked (Pellow 50). When Aquaman is brought before Orm in chains, the massive all-white chambers (including Orm’s throne) underscore the Atlanteans’ whiteness. However, Orm reveals that his hatred of Aquaman is both personally and ecologically rooted: he notes that humans have polluted our waters, and poisoned our children, and now the skies burn and our oceans boil. Here Aquaman’s status as a surface-dweller links him to global ecological injustices perpetrated by those in power. Yet, as David Naguib Pellow affirms, natural resources are used and abused to support racial hegemony and domination and have been at the core of this process for a half-millennium (50). Orm is obsessed with becoming Ocean Master and being acknowledged as such by the seven ocean kingdoms, and thus he also represents colonialist impulses. Here again Aquaman’s contradictory position as both symbolic human colonizer and half-breed colonized contributes to his liminal positioning.

During the ring-of-fire battle scene, Aquaman is simply named Half Breed on the stadium screen, where his and his brother’s photos appear beside a list of pros and cons. Aquaman has no pros, and two out of three of his cons point to his mixedness (surface dweller, half breed, drunk). His half-breed status also becomes the monster Karathen’s main insult when he attempts to retrieve the trident in order to defeat his brother: You dare come here with your tainted mongrel blood to claim Atlantis’s greatest treasure? It is at this point that Aquaman reluctantly steps into the role of mixed-race savior. Earlier, Mera counsels him by stressing that his mixedness is an advantage: You think you’re unworthy to lead because you’re of two different worlds, but that’s exactly why you are worthy. You are the bridge between land and sea. Her encouragement recalls expectations and hopes for mixed-race individuals to solve our nation’s past sins and present ills. Consider Moises Velasquez-Manoff’s argument in a 2017 New York Times opinion piece: President Trump has … reach[ed] backward—vowing to wall off America and invoking a whiter, more homogenous country. This approach is likely to fail for the simple reason that much of the strength and creativity of America, and modernity generally, stems from diversity. And the answers to a host of problems we face may lie in more mixing, not less. Aquaman’s response to Karathen, though, downplays his status as mixed-race savior: You’re right, I am a half-breed mongrel. But I did not come here because I thought I was worthy. He then calls himself a nobody, though he has been told by his father, Your mother always knew you were special. She believed you’d be the one to unite our two worlds. Lyn Dickens argues that in the scene with Karathen, Arthur claims his identity as a ‘half-breed mongrel,’ re-appropriating historic racial slurs against mixed race people. She notes that he maintains both his ambivalence towards Atlantis and his ability to accept this ambivalence without letting it rule him, while making his decision to take on the kingship in order to defend his family and his emotional connections across national and racial borders. Although Dickens asserts that Aquaman is ambivalent in the end (after his brother is arrested and he is officially named king, he asks Mera, So what do I do now?), this ambivalence is short-lived and he quickly becomes enthusiastic about his new role. He notes that being king will be fun, and the final scene features him emerging out of the water and declaring, I am Aquaman. The previous scene importantly shows a reunion between his mother and father with Arthur/Aquaman narrating, Their love saved the world. Thus the film seems to reinscribe Sharon Chang’s assessment of multiracials who are often … publicized as post-racial symbols of integration and the idyllic end of inequity (166).

Race and Superhero Narratives

The prominence of mixed-race superheroes (and their ambivalent meaning) in the Hollywood films of 2018 (including Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse, discussed at length by Isabel Molina-Guzmán in this volume) is a significant change from the overwhelmingly monoracial (and overwhelmingly white) superheroes of comics, film, and television of the past eight decades. At the same time, the thematics of racial mixing, both its promise and its threat, have been at the core of superhero stories since their inception, and thus a close examination of these thematics sheds significant light both on the discourse around mixedness in (particularly) American culture and on the idea of superheroes themselves.

While racial mixedness is now sometimes viewed as a superpower in itself, the origins of superhero stories are substantively rooted in the opposed rhetoric and practice of racial purity and white supremacy. Two of the myriad strands that contributor Chris Gavaler identifies in On the Origin of Superheroes as contributing to the debut of Superman in Action Comics, vol. 1, no. 1, in 1938 (which is frequently cited, if somewhat inaccurately, as the first superhero comic) are inextricably linked to white supremacy and specifically racial purity.

As Gavaler demonstrates in On the Origin of Superheroes and in a series of journal articles, the idea of the übermensch, via Friedrich Nietzsche and others, is at least partially rooted in the discourse of eugenics, and the idea of eugenics plays an important role in the history of superhero comics. Gavaler likewise shows that the idea of superheroes partially arises from the masked vigilante justice of the Ku Klux Klan, especially as depicted in Thomas F. Dixon Jr.’s 1905 novel The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the American South and its film adaptation, D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (1915).

Eugenics, or selective breeding, often in an effort to weed out the putatively racially impure, seems to have the capacity to produce superheroes in multiple ways, and from the concept’s very inception. As Gavaler points out, the first telling of Superman’s origin does not identify Earth’s yellow sun as that which gives Superman his powers. Rather, all Kryptonians had attained what Earthlings would call superpowers through evolution. As described in 1938’s Action Comics, vol. 1, no. 1, "Kent had come from a distant planet whose inhabitants’ physical structure was millions of years advanced of our own. Upon reaching maturity, the people of his race became gifted with titanic strength (Siegel and Shuster 8; emphasis added). The equivalent newspaper strip likewise names Krypton as a planet so far advanced in evolution that it bears a civilization of supermen" (qtd. in Gavaler, Origin 160). That is, in its earliest iterations, the space between Earth and Krypton functions as a substitute for the time it would take for human beings to evolve into more perfect and perfectly powerful beings. Though this evolution is not overtly racialized, Superman’s race is invoked, and evolution was a term often used interchangeably with eugenics (Gavaler, Origin 197) in the early part of the twentieth century. With this in mind, it is hardly surprising that all of the supermen of Krypton are depicted as white, as if all racial impurities had been purged through eons of selective breeding. This portion of the origin, long ignored in favor of the yellow sun theory, returns in the 2013 Zack Snyder film Man of Steel (briefly discussed in Kwasu David Tembo’s chapter), wherein Kryptonians reproduce scientifically and evolution always wins (qtd. in Gavaler, Origin 161). Superman’s racialized purity (despite his being an alien to Earth and an immigrant to America who was created by two Jewish boys during the height of Anglo-European anti-Semitism) is preceded by the likes of proto-superheroes Tarzan and Doc Savage, who despite being raised by (racialized) apes or being a man of bronze, respectively, are also emphasized to be of pure or aristocratic blood, and these attributes, indicated by their whiteness, prove their superiority.¹⁰

The link of (white) racial purity to superheroism via the Ku Klux Klan is also undeniable and one that is inextricable from the concept’s prehistory. Again, as Gavaler discusses, in Dixon’s Clansman, Klan members are depicted as good guy vigilantes in costumes who don their (superheroic) garb in order to prevent or avenge that most heinous of crimes, the sullying of white women’s purity by Black male rapists. In addition, in some ways, the link of The Clansman’s heroes to superheroism is stronger even than the oft-cited Scarlet Pimpernel’s protagonist of the same year, as Dixon’s homicidal Klansmen are the first twentieth-century dual-identity costumed heroes in American lit (Gavaler, Origin 179).¹¹ While the Pimpernel has a secret lair and a secret identity, he does not have a costume or a mask and thus, unlike the Klansmen, lacks one of superheroes’ defining characteristics (179). Likewise, the Klan itself is portrayed in the novel as an institution of Chivalry, Humanity, Mercy and Patriotism (Gavaler, Origin 320) in much the same way that Superman, in most iterations, is configured as a defender of Truth, Justice, and the American Way, coined first in the 1950s television show (Lundegaard). The Klan in the novel vows to protect the weak, the innocent, and the defenseless from the indignities, wrongs, and outrages of the lawless, the violent and the brutal: to relieve the injured and the oppressed. Of course, weak and innocent are terms applied here only to white people (and particularly to white women), while negative signifiers accrue only to Black people. Nevertheless, it is disturbing that Superman’s early catchphrase as Champion of the Oppressed should parrot so closely the mission statement of the Klan (Siegel and Shuster 8; Gavaler, Origin