sallymalikk:theamazingsallyhogan:17mul:mighty-mouth:Colonizers gone colonize. @lmsig In December of
sallymalikk:theamazingsallyhogan:17mul:mighty-mouth:Colonizers gone colonize. @lmsig In December of 1940, America still hadn’t entered the war.There were a lot of Americans - such as the 800,000 paying members of the America First Committee - who looked at fascists massacring their way through Europe and declared “that’s not our problem.”Captain America was created by two poor Jewish Americans, Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, with the specific intent of trying to convince Americans that entering the war was the right thing to do. It wasn’t easy - Kirby went far beyond what was expected of artists at the time, penciling the entire issue with a deadline that would have been difficult for a two-man crew to pull off. Captain America punched Hitler right on the cover, at a time when a majority of Americans just didn’t feel like doing anything decisive against the Nazis.Kirby and Simon faced considerable resistance for their creation, including steady hate mail and outright death threats. Once, while Jack was in the Timely office, a call came from someone in the lobby. When Kirby answered, the caller threatened Jack with bodily harm if he showed his face. Kirby told the caller he would be right down, but by the time Jack reached street level, there was no one to be found.Both creators enlisted after America entered the war. Kirby, as an artist, was called upon to do the extremely dangerous work of scouting ahead to draw maps. He also went on to co-create Black Panther in 1966.They didn’t create Captain America to be an accurate depiction of America-As-It-Is. The character was meant to inspire and embolden, to show America-As-It-Should-Be.The subject of where the Vibranium for the shield came from actually never came up for decades of comics, until it was finally addressed by Black Panther’s writer, Christopher Priest, in 2001. Priest never shied away from acknowledging America’s racism, but he also understood that Captain America represented an ideal, intended to inspire Americans to be better. The story mixed together a “present day” discussion between Cap and T’Challa with flashbacks to when Cap met the Black Panther ruling Wakanda during World War II.FLASHBACK:PRESENT:PRESENT -> FLASHBACKPRESENT:The Vibranium was given, freely, by one good man to another good man.It is right to rage against the injustices done by our governments. We must call them out, and we must fight for what’s right.But if you can’t even stand to see the symbols created to inspire people to be better, and rail against those, then you’re just confusing cynicism for realism.Yo this is all well and good but recognizing colonialism as fucking attrocious isn’t cynicism. Recognizing how it still pervades and violences communities isn’t cynism. It’s fucking realism and no “do gooder” narrative erases that. This origins story reveals that it took decades to even create a narrative where white people hadn’t stolen precious resources from a black nation – and that fits right into the American habit of re-writing history to being the good guys. That’s a reality, even when this made up origins story isn’t.You can be cool with the origins of that shield without acting like people who are fucking over white-washed narratives don’t have a reason to be over white-washed narratives. I don’t agree with the “you’re confusing cynicism for realism” statement at all. I think anyone living in the actual world with any degree of awareness can probably see that we live in an era where cynicism IS realism. It’s bleak out there, kids. I think what’s happening here is an example of a narrow reading of authorial intent re: the origins of Captain America (as a symbol and voice for a specific marginalized group to depict an America they wished to see, which a reader then applies to other marginalized groups or to America as a whole) vs. a post-colonial reading (where you acknowledge that the origins of the vibranium in Cap’s shield isn’t ever questioned for decades because the concept of examining colonialism and questioning the ownership of materials taken from the lands of the colonized was still SO far from being on the radar of most non-colonized people - which is itself inherently problematic, because ignoring colonization is the luxury of the colonizer [and this STILL happening, tbh: the Victoria and Albert Museum is “loaning” treasures stolen from Ethiopia back to Ethiopia. LOANING. Not RETURNING]). Both can be true. Captain America can stand for the idea of an America that is better than the reality AND Marvel could have 1) taken way too fucking long to address the implications of Cap’s shield being made from an element that belongs to Wakanda and 2) done a poor job of justifying this by putting white America-affirming/colonialism-excusing/ignoring words into T’challa’s mouth. I think the initial authorial intent was a good one, and that the idea of Captain America in the hands of a good writer is still a valuable one (though in the hands of a bad writer is a dangerous one). I do think it is relevant and meaningful that Jewish men had an opportunity to create a hero who addressed the atrocities being committed by Hitler against Jewish people during WWII. Cap could have been created for good reasons and as a good man, with initial authorial intent for him to be the kind of man who probably WOULDN’T be okay with the stolen products of colonialism (if they were actually acknowledged), and the narrative can still have historically ignored other real issues, handled those issues badly when it did bother to address them, and had periods of profound racism and nationalism as the character was used to reflect either national sentiment or to adhere to moral standards of the time (either by authorial or editor choice or through externally applied limits). I think the best iterations of Captain America wouldn’t be cool with carrying a weapon made from materials stolen from another people. I think there’s an opportunity for a contemporary writer to address this issue with Cap in a way that is true to the character and acknowledges the fact that nobody ever bothered to write or address the implications of the shield’s origins for decades, because the products of colonialism were so acceptable and so expected that it didn’t even occur to them to even connect the vibranium to the bloody and horrific colonization of African nations by white European colonizers.If Captain America is really a good man (and I believe he is) he can accept this kind of criticism, acknowledge it, and address it textually. That’s what good people do. But he’s also a fictional character whose actions are solely dependent upon the writers, artists, and editors in charge of him, and the burden of using him as a mouthpiece for meaningful goodness falls on them, and they have failed in this many, many times, half-assed it other times, and sometimes hit the mark on some issues. The shield doesn’t have a real provenance, but the SYMBOL of it does, and @sallymalikk presents a really clear argument for why the symbol’s provenance matters, and why questioning that isn’t a matter of cynicism. -- source link
#captain america