"Black Skins" and White Masks: Comic books and the secret of race.

The stereotypes through which American popular culture often interprets and represents racial identity operate not only as tools of defamation but also as vehicles for far more subtle manipulations of race. In his 1946 essay "Twentieth-Century Fiction and the Black Mask of Humanity," Ralph Ellis on observes that stereotypes of African Americans, whatever other purposes they might serve, become a means "by which the white American seeks to resolve the dilemma arising... between his acceptance of the sacred democratic belief that all men are created equal and his treatment of every tenth man as though he were not" (28)--a means, in other words, of reconciling the contradictions between an ideology of democracy and a history and practice of prejudice. Whether these stereotypes assume the form of unrealistic portrayals of racial minorities or an equally unrealistic invisibility, they often fulfill this double function of oppression and reaffirmation.

Comic books, and particularly the dominant genre of superhero comic books, have proven fertile ground for stereotyped depictions of race. Comics rely upon visually codified representations in which characters are continually reduced to their appearances, and this reductionism is especially prevalent in superhero comics, whose characters are wholly externalized into their heroic costumes and aliases. This system of visual typology combines with the superhero genre's long history of excluding, trivializing, or "tokenizing" minorities to create numeorus minority superheroes who are marked purely for their race: "Black Lightning," "Black Panther," and so forth. The potential for superficiality and stereotyping here is dangerously high. Yet in recent years, some comics creators have demonstrated that the superhero genre's own conventions can invite a more nuanced depiction of minority identity. Race in contemporary comics proves to be anything but simplistic. If some titles reveal deceptively soothing stereotypes lurking behind their veneers of diversity, then others show complex considerations of identity.

This article begins by addressing previous critical debates over the function of race in comics. I then investigate the portrayals of race in several mainstream superhero comic books of the 1990s. The series Legion of Super-Heroes serves as an example of a comic which espouses platitudes of diversity while actually obscuring any signs of racial difference. This attitude, however, is offset by other series such as Black Lightning and Xero, both of which use the convention of the secret identity--a genre staple as old as superheroes themselves--to represent issues of racial and sexual identity. Both comics also indirectly draw upon the concept of double-consciousness to construct their models of racial identity. But before turning to more widely-known critical race theory, I need to offer a brief overview of the criticism on comics and race.

Historically, critics have long associated comics with the perpetuation of racial stereotypes. Frantz Fanon forges this connection in passing in Black Skins, White Masks (1967), writing, "Look at the children's picture magazines: Out of every Negro mouth comes the ritual 'Yassuh, boss'" (34). Fredric Wertham had offered far more extensive criticisms in Seduction of the Innocent (1954), in which he argues that comics "expose children's minds to an endless stream of prejudice-producing images" (100) in which whites are always handsome and heroic whereas non-whites are inferior and subhuman. Wertham believes these representations not only motivate individual readers toward prejudice, but affect society as a whole by normalizing racist standards through repetition. This process of normalization and indoctrination is, Wertham writes, "where a psychiatric question becomes a social one" (105). Yet the writings of Wertham, Fanon, and other early critics of comics stereotypes tend to apply this formulation only in rev erse: Beginning with the social problems of racism in society, they arrive at a condemnation of the internal oppressions comics construct within readers' minds.

Fanon proclaims that "to make [a black man] talk pidgin is to fasten him to the effigy of him, to snare him, to imprison him, the eternal victim of an essence, of an appearance for which he is not responsible" (35), casting the imprisonment as a psychological, existential sentence rather than a social one. Even Wertham, who concludes that the negative images in comics stem from "not an individual condition of children, but a social condition of adults" (394), nevertheless centers his arguments on the psychological harm comics wreak on individual readers. The psychological focus is particularly strong in Wertham's section on race, where he first argues that children develop "the seeds of as individuals (101), then attempts to "analyze children's psychological processes" as an explanation of how comics transmit racial stereotypes (103-04). Contrary to his rhetoric, Wertham--like most critics of racial representations in comics--rests his arguments almost solely on the purported effects comics have on their read ers' beliefs and identities. (1)

This sort of psychological criticism has come under sharp attack by Martin Barker in Comics: Ideology, Power, and the Critics (1989). Barker argues that criticisms of stereotypes in comics, especially those which imply that stereotypes exert some manner of influence over readers, are built upon a shallow understanding of comics. For Barker, these criticisms rest upon "an unsupportable distinction between textual messages and devices" (109); in other words, they consider racial images purely as ideological messages transmitted by the comics, whereas Barker considers these same images as generic types which draw upon comic-book conventions rather than racial beliefs. Barker claims that comics incoporate racial stereotypes so fully into their conventions that the images become mere formal devices:

Just because a witch-doctor appears, it does not mean he can be directly related to the mythical witch-doctor of racist legend; he is a witch-doctor within the transforming laws and structure of [the comics]. Therefore he can "reinforce" nothing. (127)

Barker rightly challenges any criticism which presumes that comics hold a deceptive, seductive power over a completely passive audience. In doing so, however, he also drastically isolates comics from their own content, never considering that comics might retain meanings or connotations beyond their own generic and formal functions. This results in a strange theoretical paradox. Barker justifies his focus on form and exclusion of content by citing the Russian formalists, including Mikhail Bakhtin and Valentin Volosinov (Barker 262-74), yet Barker never considers the quintessentially Bakhtinian possibility that comics might heteroglossically incorporate the ideological assumptions of the imagery they draw upon. Even Barker's own theoretical framework could be used to locate stereotypes in comics rather than obscure them.

Yet Barker's very concept of "stereotype" leads him to deny it any ideological significance. He defines the term, rather optimistically, as "a shorthand image which fills in gaps in our knowledge" (196). Barker easily dismantles this definition on epistemological grounds, never addressing the possibility that stereotypes might also embody ideological beliefs. He instead collapses racial, ethnic, and other ideologically based stereotypes with formally based story and character types, writing, "It makes no difference whether it is a stereotype of a plumber, a tax inspector, a policeman, a black person, a demented pig or coward. For the purposes of the strip, all are equalised" (116). Barker forgets that, in the society outside the comics, stereotypes of blacks often have very different motivations and consequences than do images of irascible farm animals.

The issue of race in comics needs a less dogmatic approach, one which can set aside claims that stereotypes govern readers' minds while still holding comics accountable for their ideological assumptions. Ian Gordon offers such an approach in Comic Strips and Consumer Culture, 1890-1945(1998), one chapter of which traces the appearance, and the disappearance, of African American stereotypes in American humor magazines and comic strips. Gordon argues that the same racist humor which stereotyped African Americans in minstrelsy also prevented those stereotypes from fueling successful comic strips; for Gordon, financially successful strips had to be "poly-semic" (62), capable of being read with a multiplicity of meanings, a trait which the reductive stereotypes of racialist discourse lacked. Comic-strip creators were forced to deracinate black stereotypes in order to give their humor more widespread appeal; Gordon suggests that "funny animal figures" like Felix the Cat, Krazy Kat, and, perhaps, Mickey Mouse, posse ss characteristics of trickery, innocence, and dumb luck which "owed something to stereotypes of African Americans" (75).

Other critics have delivered similar readings. In Comics as Culture (1990), M. Thomas Inge writes that

... comic book heroes also tend to fit most of the classic patterns of heroism in Western culture. ... Spider-Man belongs to the trickster tradition among folk heroes. ... It is interesting to note that the trickster figure in African folklore is often a spider. Most of the heroes of the world of comic books likewise fit these patterns which are as old as Western civilization. (142)

Yet African folklore is not Western civilization, as "the West" is traditionally defined; Spider-Man, like the funny-animal tricksters before him, may incorporate an African and African American character type, transmuting it into a deracinated comic-book image. Inge is nevertheless accurate when he asserts that "comic books have continued to maintain and develop these patterns [of cultural lore], translate them into forms more suitable to a post-industrial society" (142); racial images may be yet another "pattern" incorporated into the fabric of comics, through the processes Inge and Gordon describe.

In his book Super Heroes: A Modern Mythology (1992), Richard Reynolds offers an acute, if brief, analysis of the role race plays in superhero comics. Reynolds finds it difficult to ascribe one particular ideological function to minority characters because he views the superhero as a multivalent sign which "supports a varied and contradictory battery of readings. He is both the exotic and the agent of order which brings the exotic to book" (83). Such contradictions always lie at the heart of superhero comics for Reynolds, who takes an almost textbook structuralist approach in defining the genre as the product of numerous internal conflicts and tensions. These tensions result in a sort of equilibrated stasis which, according to Reynolds, "has made it difficult for black superheroes to inscribe any ideological values of their own" (77); instead they are absorbed into the generic ideology of the superhero, in which exotic outsiders--and few are so exotic in the comics as black superheroes--work to preserve Americ a's status quo. Any examination of race in superhero comics must consider these innate tensions, as the handling of race is forever caught between the genre's most radical impulses and its most conservative ones.

One such contradiction can be seen in the long-running DC Comics series Legion of Super-Heroes. Created in 1958, the Legion has always featured dozens of idealistic super-teens, each hailing from a different planet in the far future; for this reason, Legion writers of the 1990s cast the team as a symbol of multicultural cooperation and diversity. Yet upon closer examination, this diversity proves to be only skin-deep.

For nearly twenty years, the Legion's supposed racial diversity was mitigated--if not virtually negated--by the fact that, of all the races represented in the comic, only one group existed in real life: the white characters who comprised the bulk of the Legion. The first nonwhite characters were Brainiac 5, who was colored green only because of his connection to the preexisting Superman villain Brainiac, and Chameleon Boy, a shape-shifting alien with the ability to assume any appearance at will. Chameleon Boy would become the start of a long Legion tradition of locating racial difference in characters of no fixed physical form. In general, however, the Legion represented race in a manner very typical of Silver Age comics, replacing Earthly races with alien ones who differed from the normative white characters only in the exotic pastel colors of their skin. (2)

In the April 1976 story "The Hero Who Hated the Legion" (Superboy no. 216), for example, four members of the Legion of Super-Heroes meet an African superhero named Tyroc and induce him to join their organization with this appeal: "When it comes to race, we're colorblind! Blue skin, yellow skin, green skin...we're brothers and sisters... united in the name of justice everywhere!" (Bates and Grell 12; see fig. 1). The Legionnaires cite their own skin colors as proof of their inclusivity. Significantly, no race is assigned to the first character in the tableau, the white Superboy; even though he hails from an alien planet, his white skin normalizes him and, by the logic of the comic, marks him as not belonging to any "race." The character Karate Kid, who was represented as Asian during artist Mike Grell's tenure, is presumably the bearer of the "yellow skin"--such was the cultural sensitivity of 1970s comic books--while the other two characters are racialized by their blue and green skins. Both "races" are paten tly fictitious, yet it is their inclusion which permits the Legion's easy but hollow claim to racial harmony. This practice of locating racial difference only among fictional, alien races was assailed by Denny O'Neil in an historic issue of Green Lantern/Green Arrow (no. 76 [Apr. 1970]), in which an elderly black man righteously tells Green Lantern:

I been readin' about you...how you work for the blue skins...and how on a planet someplace you helped out the orange skins...and you done considerable for the purple skins! Only there's skins you never bothered with--!...The black skins! (6; see fig. 2)

In other words, superhero comics represented every fantastic race possible, as a means of ignoring real ones.

With the introduction of Tyroc, however, the Legion gradually expanded to include members of more extant, nonwhite races and cultures: Writers introduced a Native American Legionnaire, and retroactively determined another member was Jewish. Mike Grell was already drawing the Karate Kid with Asian features, although subsequent artists would return to his original, Caucasian appearance. If the 1970s' vogue for socially relevant comic books encouraged just this sort of artificial tokenism, it nevertheless gave the Legion's diversity some real-world referents; and if the Legion's roots were still racially homogenous, then everybody pretended not to notice.

In the 1990s, however, two Legion writers decided they wouldn't settle for diversifying the Legion's future--they wanted to integrate its past. Tom and Mary Bierbaum retroactively wrote a black character named Kid Quantum into the Legion's early history (Legion no. 33 [Sep. 1992]). But Kid Quantum was not all that he seemed; the young black man was actually a Protean, yet another species of shape-shifting alien. This undercut the Bierbaums' goal of diversification, and added yet another fantastic race to the Legion's ranks. The Legion writers had once again decided, as had earlier writers with Chameleon Boy, that their emblem of racial difference would be a character who could pass as any race.

Interestingly, both Kid Quantum and Chameleon Boy belong to races which suffer from discrimination even in the enlightened future of Legion of Super-Heroes. Chameleon Boy is a Durlan, one of a race that is all but quarantined to its home world because other planets fear the Durlans' shape-shifting abilities; in a 1994 issue, even one of the Legionnaires says, "Durlans aren't allowed to roam free on Earth! Lousy morphs can't be trusted!" (Waid and McCraw 6). The Proteans had an even worse lot: For decades, other races viewed them as unintelligent house pets, only recently acknowledging their sentience. These histories of discrimination are signs that Legion writers have tried to address real-world issues of racial difference through allegories of science fiction: It is the discrimination, sadly enough, that fleshes out the Durlans and Proteans as distinctly different races. Unlike most of the Legion's "alien" species, which tend to be depicted as white Americans from the 1950s, these shape-shifters bear a raci al overdetermination enforced upon them by other species. However, these shape-shifters also demonstrate that, for nearly forty years, Legion writers equated any racial difference with complete racial indeterminacy and mutability. The same characters who most clearly exhibit racial difference in the Legion's future are also given the powers to collapse all racial boundaries, and the "difference" with which they are branded in their world becomes virtually meaningless in ours.

The Bierbaums and co-writer Keith Giffen conducted a similar experiment with gay identity. When they wanted to "integrate" the Legion with a gay character, they didn't introduce a new member or retroactively change an existing one's orientation. Instead they revealed that Shvaughn Erin, a female supporting character, was secretly Sear Erin, a gay man who had been taking Profem, a drug which changed his gender and allowed him to pass as a straight woman (Legion no.31 [July 1992]). Not only did the Bierbaums stop short of introducing a gay Legionnaire, they chose to acknowledge sexual difference only in a character who had access to a technology which conveniently sidestepped divisions of gender and sexuality. This story was published a mere two months before the introduction of Kid Quantum initiated a similar sham of racial integration.

In his 1993 novel Japanese by Spring, Ishmael Reed characterizes race relations in America with a metaphor that, significantly, draws its vehicle from the comics:

It was usually the whites and the blacks who were seeking separation from each other, though any examination of American culture would show that they couldn't do without each other and that the blacks had become a sort of Schmoo of American culture, Al Capp's creature, who was an all-purpose thing. You could hate it, love it, exploit it, despise it, enjoy it.... (83)

Legion of Super-Heroes enacts this metaphor in a surrealistically literal manner; the Bierbaums and other writers create diversity in the Legion's future by locating it in protean characters who serve as free-floating signifiers for the racial "other" without representing any real-world races. In this sense, Legion of Super-Heroes perfectly illustrates the contradictory treatment of race in many superhero comics: Torn between sci-fi fantasy and cultural reality, Legion ultimately erases all racial and sexual differences with the very same characters that it claims analogize our world's diversity.

Some writers, however, have used superhero comics to address race and identity with greater, rather than lesser, complexity. Tony Isabella's short-lived 1995 run of Black Lightning provides one such example. Black Lightning always was one of the more postmodern black superheroes; even the afro he sported in the 1970s was merely a wig worn to conceal his secret identity. And this concept of the secret identity" lies at the heart of how some recent comics have capitalized on, rather than been confined by the contradictions of, the superhero genre's conventions in representing issues of race.

Richard Reynolds includes the secret identity as one of his seven definitive traits of superheroes (15-17), but burying it in a list may not adequately convey the important role that the secret identity plays in distinguishing superheroes from other genres of popular culture. The secret identity, and particularly its public component, the costumed identity, is the most readily apparent trait that unites such disparate characters as the alien Superman, the god Thor, and the strictly human Batman in the category of "superhero." Even characters whose identities are publicly known, like the Hulk or the Fantastic Four, often have a noticeable and visually characterized division between their private selves and their public, costumed identities; indeed, the Hulk alternates between two entirely different bodies. Thus, superhero identities need not be secret, but they should be split, to maintain the contrast of "the extraordinary nature of the hero...with the mundane nature of his alter-ego" (Reynolds 17).

The idea of the split identity, one of the most definitive and distinctive traits of the superhero, is also one of the most powerful and omnipresent figures used to illustrate the dilemmas and experiences of minority identity. The concept has a long pedigree in theories of race, beginning in 1903 with W. E. B. Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk and his concepts of the veil and double-consciousness. In describing the psychological tolls of institutionalized racism, Du Bois writes,

The Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,--a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others....One ever feels his two-ness,--an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body....(16)

Fanon casts this divided self in more existential terms in Black Skin, White Masks; in the chapter on "The Fact of Blackness," he describes how white onlookers continually reinscribe their concept of black identity upon him through their racist observations--all of which boil down to a little girl's cry of "'Look, a Negro!'" (109). As a result of this overdetermination from without, Fanon argues, "the Negro has been given two frames of reference within which he has had to place himself" (110), and the black psyche becomes split.

Nor is this psychological split unique to racial groups. In his book Disidentifications (1999), Jose Esteban Munoz offers a theory of identity which is not limited to race, but also considers other distinctions such as sexuality and gender. Attempting to both refute and balance essentialist and social-constructivist narratives of identity formation, Munoz regards identity as "a site of struggle where fixed dispositions clash against socially constituted definitions" (6), a conflict and interaction between the internal and external visions of the self. In a sense, Munoz offers a more poststructurally savvy but equally dialectical version of Du Bois's account of minority identity formation; Fanon, too, refuses to relegate race to either an "essence" or a social construction and attempts to balance both in his existential phenomenology. (3) All three writers structure identity as a conflict between or emergence from the individual and social conceptions of the self. This dual or dialectical origin leads easily t o divided identities, especially when the conflict between the individual and social constructions is extreme--as it is when racial, sexual, and other minorities encounter prejudiced, hateful, ignorant, or overdetermining social constitutions of their identity.

Significantly, Munoz regards comic books as a major site for representing, transforming, and "disidentifying" cultural images of racial and sexual identity. He suggests, for example, that Superman is a racial mediation between anti-Semitic myths of the Ubermensch and Jewish cultural tropes (40-41). (4) I would further argue that the superhero genre itself supports such racial negotiations through its central convention of the split identity--a convention which perfectly mimics the dialectical, existential, or differential split which Du Bois, Fanon, and Munoz ascribe to racial and other categories of minority identity. The secret identity provides a perfect narrative means for exploring these real-life split identities. As an aside, the identities of the Legion of Super-Heroes are among the least split in comics; the characters have civilian names but otherwise tend to show little difference between their superhero and civilian selves. Perhaps the Legion comics' bizarre erasure of race has emerged, in part, b ecause they effectively lack the concept which has been fundamental to the representation of minority identity, both in comic books and in critical race theory.

Tony Isabella, however, shows a keen awareness of costumes and splitidentities in Black Lightning no.5 (June 1995). In this issue, Black Lightning has just been attacked in his secret identity as schoolteacher Jefferson Pierce; Walter Kasko, a fellow teacher, has died saving a young student while Pierce stood by paralyzed. As Pierce languishes in the hospital, he cannot tell the doctors that his depression stems from his failure to act as a superhero when the situation demanded it--a conventional enough split-identity dilemma.

However, Pierce learns that Walter Kasko had secrets of his own when he meets Samuel Daly, a hospital lab worker who was Walter's lover. Samuel draws a connection between their homosexuality and Pierce's double life, telling Pierce, "Some of us keep our secrets better than others. But you know all about secrets, don't you?" (Isabella no. 5: 20). Isabella then further analogizes superheroics to homosexuality when Samuel tells Pierce that a doctor "ordered a metagene test.... The records will show you tested negative. I figure Walter would have wanted it that way" (20-21). This conjures ominous shades of an HIV test; while a "positive" result on the metagene test would not reveal a life-threatening virus, it would effectively end the "Jefferson Pierce" life by destroying its separation from Pierce's costumed career as Black Lightning. Thus, in the pages of Black Lightning, where we might expect to see a treatment of superheroes and race, Isabella has also associated superheroism and homosexuality. Both, Isabell a says, can lead to secret identities and double lives--an analogy entirely consistent with Munoz's analysis of the dialectical divisions within both queer and nonwhite identity.

The fifth issue of Black Lightning would also have provided a perfect illustration of Munoz's claim that comic-book icons can negotiate cultural formations of race and sexuality, since it is a story about the difficulty of coming to terms with a double life. Jefferson Pierce begins the issue repulsed by his own double life, a repulsion reflected in his disgust with the many costumes that appear in the comic. As Pierce is transferred out of intensive care, he reports, "The orderlies offer to swing me by a costume party in the children's wing" (6); the orderlies are dressed as a witch and Frankenstein's monster, their horrific costumes reflecting Pierce's inner revulsion at his secondary, superheroic identity (see fig. 3). Unsurprisingly, Pierce declines their invitation. He later recalls the death of his friend Peter Gambi, the tailor who sewed his original costume and inspired him to become a superhero (8, 12). Finally, Pierce reads a sinister significance into a more realistic form of costume when he laments , "We live in a stupid world--a world where kids shoot other kids over the color of a shirt" (22); only three issues earlier, Pierce and Kasko had interceded when a gangster mistook an honor student's blue Superman t-shirt for gang colors (Isabella no. 2: 2-3). Isabella wryly, bitterly associates costumes with death and casts gang colors as this world's most widespread and deadly costume.

However, despite Pierce's grave dissatisfaction with costumes as the external trappings of superheroics, Isabella's comic ultimately locates true heroism in the characters who have split identities. At the beginning of issue no. 5, Pierce cannot comprehend Kasko's death, thinking, "He wasn't a damn super-hero like me. Walter Kasko was a real hero. I can't remember his face" (2). After learning that Walter also had a secret life, however, Pierce can accept the fact that he and Walter are two of a kind; he then remembers Walter's face, whereupon the issue's grim black-and-white art returns to a more conventional palette of full superheroic color (24). Pierce must learn of Walter's double life in order finally to accept his own. Isabella links the "double life" of homosexual identity in a heterosexual society to secret identities, superheroism, and the visual signifiers of comics--costumes and color--in a demonstration of the split-identity convention's power to analogize, even valorize, other categories of mino rity identity.

This representation of the superhero as a mask which splits and scars the psyche bears a deep resonance with queer theory and critical race theory-- or, perhaps, with the realities of life for minorities. Because superhero comics have evolved their own conventions for representing the dilemmas of a divided self, they have the potential to become perfect vehicles for exploring minority-group identity; similarly, from the perspective of the comics, minority groups may be ideal subjects for these same reasons. Superhero comics can literally personify the otherwise abstract ontological divides of minority identity, assigning each sell its own visual identifier, its own body, and then charting the effects as these bodies house and are housed by the same mind. Those few comics writers who already use the superhero split identity to portray this aspect of minority identity generally present race and sexuality with richness and complexity, free of the tokenism and erasure which have dominated the genre.

Tony Isabella is one such writer; another is Christopher Priest, who with artist Chris Cross infused the short-lived series Xero (1997-98) with a constant awareness of race and identity. Xero is Coltrane Walker, a black government agent forced by his superiors to disguise himself as a blondhaired, blue-eyed superhero. In his other cover identity, Walker is a roughand-tumble basketball player; a mock sports-magazine article written for Xero no.8 says Walker's fans are "a range of loks, OG's, murderous felons" (23) and calls Walker himself "a thug. A deviant. Six feet, six inches, 220 pounds of militant black rage that no legitimate NBA team would touch" (24). Walker is thus trapped between two highly artificial and mutually exclusive roles, the black gangsta basketball player and the Aryan superspy, and the series chronicles his attempts to rebuild some sort of inner life between the demands of these two stereotypes. Priest and Cross constantly exploit this racial duality; one of Cross's most recurrent images depicts Xero with half of his white face ripped off, revealing the black face underneath (Priest no. 8: cover; see fig. 4). Cross frequently leaves the top of Xero's mask and his cybernetic eye intact, allowing the superhero costume and the nonhuman, cyborg identity to mediate or provide a transition between the black and white faces.

Priest is no less aware of this racial division and its connection to superhero convention. In issue no. 6, Xero defeats the supervillain Dr. Polaris-- who himself suffers from a split personality which pits his civilian and costumed selves against one another--by removing his costume and white skin, revealing his true appearance. Xero tells Polaris, "I'm a man of two distinct personas--just like you" (19), a comparison which suggests that Xero's own identities may be just as antagonistic as Polaris's. In this same issue, Xero is attacked by fearful villagers who mistake his costumed persona for a supervillain; by issue's end they are only too eager to assist the internationally famous basketball star Coltrane Walker. Xero no. 6 implies that Walker's undisguised black identity is healthier and perhaps even more heroic than his white, superhero one and the internal conflicts it creates. Such a story is typical of the middle of Xero's run, in which Priest begins hinting thai the costume and its false identity u ltimately do Walker more harm than good.

The next two issues are flashbacks which chronicle Xero's origin and the creation of his false identity. When Xero's agency rebuilds his body after a catastrophic injury, their final addition is his white mask. A rival agent named One delivers the mask and mockingly tells Xero, "Think of it as kind of backwards affirmative action. Bro" (Priest no. 7: 22). One's irony does not obscure Priest's point: The agency is attempting to program Xero's loyalty by subsuming him into an artificial racial identity and then testing his devotion to it. Their final test, a test which Xero repeatedly fails, requires him to repeat on command the racial slur "Niggers sho' is stupid" (Priest no. 8: 10). Were he ever to pass the test, it would mark his complete abandonment of any internal racial identity which is not controlled by the agency. This test also suggests that both of the identities the agency supplies, the white mask and the black "thug," are based on overdetermined, racist stereotypes of African Americans; Walker's as sumption of the white Xero identity is contingent on his recitation of the slur. Thus, the fabricated identities in Xero are not simply social constructions, they are also instruments of societal control.

Priest escalates this idea of identity fabrication throughout the series. In the grand finale, he reveals that no one is what he or she seems: One, who has been posing as an Asian man for years, turns out to be a woman of indeterminate race, and Draza, the comic's major villain, turns out to be a facade for Frank Decker, Xero's boss. Gender, politicial allegiance, and morality prove as easily manipulable as race, and the only lesson, if we can extract one, seems to be that these manipulations usually serve the ends of mysterious authority figures like Decker. Xero posits that all categories of identity, including race, can in fact be mutable constructions built upon externally imposed stereotypes. In this sense, the series presents a nightmarish version of Munoz's schema, in which all identities are assigned by external, social pressures. Whereas Tony Isabella saw the split identity as an opportunity to analogize and praise superheroes and minority groups, Priest views the concealed identity as a deadly chara de with devastating moral consequences. Both writers, however, portray the psychological costs of split identities, using superhero conventions to represent metaphorically the dilemmas of racial and other minority groups.

Xero and Black Lightning also demonstrate the enduring power of the divided identity and double-consciousness to shape contemporary discourses on race. Even after nearly a century, double-consciousness remains a cornerstone of critical race theory. Ronald M. Radano expresses a common attitude when he writes that "no critical notion has proved more crucial to modern investigations of African American expressive culture than the idea of double consciousness. ... [it] has supplied what is perhaps the fundamental interpretive tool of modern black criticism" (71). However, the concept's very venerability has also generated arguments that criticism should move beyond it--or that literature already has. Arnold Rampersad suggests that "the greatest of postwar black fiction, notably that of Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison," abandons double-consciousness to use more openly psychological models for black identity, a shift which Rampersad credits to Wright's "deep interest in psychiatry, which sprang from his own relati onship with Dr. Fredric Wertham" (199).

Yet any such shifts into psychology, or even existentialism, may simply represent a turning away from the surface trappings of Du Bois's Hegelian formation of the double-consciousness. The underlying concept of divided identity still survives in African American literature and in critical theories of race. Indeed, Ralph Ellison's treatise on the psychology of race in "Harlem is Nowhere" (1948) proposes that black identity at the middle of the twentieth century was suspended between primitivism and modernity, a dialectical split resulting in a culture-wide masquerade (296-98). Ironically, "Harlem Is Nowhere" is nominally written about the Lafargue Clinic and Dr. Fredric Wertham; for Ellison, at least, the exposure to psychiatry does not seem to have eliminated his investment in the ideas of double-consciousness and the divided self.

While the historical intersection of Wright and Ellis on with Wertham hardly negates the utility of Du Bois's ideas, it does bring this article full circle to one of the earliest critics of race in comics. Many of Wertham's allegations remain relevant today: Comics still perpetuate stereotypes, either through token characters who exist purely to signify racial cliches or through a far more subtle system of absence and erasure that serves to obscure minority groups even as the writers pay lip service to diversity. However, superhero comics also possess a highly adaptable set of conventions; a few titles display the genre's and the medium's potential by using the generic vocabulary of the secret identity to externalize and dramatize the conditions of minority identity in America. In so doing, these comics also demonstrate that the concepts of double-consciousness and divided identity remain artistically viable techniques for representing race, as valid in the popular culture of today as they were in Du Bois's s tudy nearly one hundred years ago.

Notes

(1.) As a social psychiatrist, Wertham strongly believed that society bore responsibility for social and psychological problems (Nyberg 90-92); in his anti-comics arguments, however, he holds society accountable primarily for tolerating the comics, not for contributing to juvenile delinquency in other ways. James Gilbert has noted that Wertham downplayed his critique of racism in the comics, and his larger indictment of mass cultures role in promoting racism and violence, in order to avoid alienating "the very social conservatives to whom his most effective arguments appealed (Gilbert 98).

(2.) Among comics fans and historians, the term Silver Age refers to a creative and financial renaissance in American comic books, especially superhero comics, from 1956 until the early 1970s.

(3.) Lewis R. Gordon, in Fanon and the Crisis of European Man (46-57), has addressed Fanons problematization of both social constructivism and essentialism.

(4.) Munoz also notes that the Milestone Comics character Icon performs a racial disidentification on the trope of Superman by rewriting the character as an African American (205n7). However, Icon is not merely a black Superman, but also yet another shape-shifting alien who "passes" as a black human; Milestone Comics may have represented an advancement for diversity in comics, but it also repeated this common device for undermining such diversity.

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Marc Singer recently received his Ph.D. in English from the University of Maryland, College Park, where he completed a dissertation on temporality in twentieth-century American literature. His previous critical work on comics has been published in the International Journal of Comic Art.