Is Hollywood OK yet with a black Superman?
• Perhaps it is time to begin to grapple with what it would mean to have a saviour with a melanin-rich skin
Diversity has become a watchword for Hollywood over the past few years — and rightly so. Campaigns such as #OscarsSoWhite have resulted in welcome changes to the makeup of the Academy Awards voting blocks and resulted in nominations in 2021 that recognised the work and contributions of actors, filmmakers and crews of colour.
The Golden Globes, and the Hollywood Foreign Press Association that runs them have, on the other hand, been unwilling to answer accusations of bias and racism in their ranks, and are on the receiving end of a backlash that has led to the announcement by NBC that the network will not carry next year’s award show. And actor Tom Cruise returned his three Golden Globes in protest against the Hollywood Foreign Press Association.
In mainstream Hollywood, where the moneymaking, action packed, multi-story adaptations of the Marvel Comics Universe and the Disney Entertainment Universe reign supreme, diversity has begun to make an impact on blockbuster tent-pole franchises in films such as Black Panther and the soon-to-bereleased Chloe Zhao directed Eternals, which will feature the Marvel Comics Universe’s first deaf and openly gay characters.
The comic geek world is abuzz at the announcement by Warner Brothers that the studio is preparing a reboot of the origins story of Superman, the hero whom MSNBC columnist Hayes Brown described as “the American legend, an archetype from which all iterations of the superhero mythos flow”.
The reboot will be written by celebrated African American writer and essayist Ta-Nehisi Coates, produced by ultimate fanboy JJ Abrams and star a black actor as the man of steel.
It’s not yet known who will direct, nor which actor will land the coveted role, but the news has set the internet on fire. Zach Snyder, the director of the previous Superman reboot Man of Steel, much loved by comic fans, has welcomed the announcement, even though his Superman, British actor Henry Cavill, is apparently less than happy with the news.
Of greater cultural significance, it must be remembered that while Superman fights for “truth, justice and the American way, he is also white”. In 1979 when Christopher Reeve donned the red cape, the US was a different country and, as Brown notes, Superman’s “whiteness has been inseparable from the suspension of disbelief required to believe a man can fly. Reeve perfectly embodied a character who at the time could only be white”.
But in the wake of BlackLivesMatter, the protests that erupted across the US after the killing of George Floyd in 2020, and the subsequent multiple announcements by US corporations, including Disney, of their commitment to diversity, perhaps it is time for the US to make room for a black Superman and, as Brown writes, to begin to grapple “with the significance of what it would mean to have a saviour with melanin-rich skin”.
Superman was originally created by two Jewish teens from Cleveland, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, who were firstgeneration Americans. When they unleashed their hero — in Action Comics #1 published in July 1938 — Superman offered a vision of a hero shaped by the experiences of his creators.
Siegel and Shuster were the sons of immigrants who fled persecution in Europe to arrive in the fabled promised land and committed themselves to utopian ideals that, in spite of the prejudiced realities they experienced on the ground, they firmly believed in. Krypton or Latvia, the pressures were much the same for outsiders at the time.
The 1930s was one of the most anti-Semitic periods in US history but Superman, who served as a voice and force of reason in the face of ignorance and prejudice, fought for the oppressed and marginalised and held a firm belief in the founding principles of the US.
At the time, black Americans were excluded from this vision, but there is enough momentum now and change is in the air to offer a writer as prodigious as Coates an opportunity to reimagine a man of steel as committed to the fight for diversity and acknowledgment of the black experience.
Coates’s final script is due to be submitted in December, but for now the news that he is working on it throws up, as Brown observes, a slew of urgent and fascinating questions: “What does it mean for a country built on the notion of black inferiority to have a black man as its protector? What would it take for America to trust someone so far outside its control? Superman is, like most superheroes, a protector of the status quo — but what does it mean to safeguard a world with such an unequal application of justice to people who look like him?”
IT’S NOT YET KNOWN WHICH ACTOR WILL LAND THE COVETED ROLE