MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

Despite the significant achievements of the Civil Rights Movement rooted in the early postwar United States, Americans entered the 1990s still uncertain about issues of race and multiculturalism. Facing what some commentators labeled a looming “minority majority,” scholars such as Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and Ronald Takaki debated just what this increasing diversity meant for American identity. The broader public similarly struggled to come to grips with broad socio-cultural changes that, sadly if unsurprisingly, often provoked defensive responses that culminated at times in violence and murder. It was a vexed issue, to be sure, and even seemingly positive attention could function very differently, as demonstrated by the increasingly popular notion of Asian immigrants as “model minorities,” a stereotype that was used both to homogenize the experience of immigrants from the East and to denigrate African Americans. Comic book superheroes of the decade could not escape this aspect of what some termed the “culture wars,” and a closer examination of two Asian American heroes—Marvel’s Psylocke and DC’s Atom—can help us better see and understand how the inability to recognize non-whites as human beings too often impeded progress in achieving what was by now a long-delayed racial equality. Comics creators, indeed, embarked upon a ‘90s campaign for inclusion, but their efforts reflected the muddled cultural context in which they worked, and it quickly became clear that just adding non-white crusaders hardly solved the problem. In the end, white-to-Asian replacements worked or didn’t work as a result of the care and effort put into their creation and use. When deployed carelessly and with little thought, the continuing power of stereotypes limited or even eliminated possibilities for progress. When treated with more nuance and humanized, such replacements suggested at least a hint of progress.