TO ME, MY X-MEN - or ENGAGING IN OUR OTHERNESS
What I Learned at Professor Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters
Before I got to university I didn’t have a lot of models for writing race, much less understanding it. No real ones. My family did race all day long in the typical fucked-up Caribbean campesino sort of way, but they didn’t talk about it.
They weren’t alone on this front, either. No one around me talked race, not in critically audible way that would help me understand it, that would clarify. Not the news, not my friends or neighbors, not the books I had access to, not my teachers. In those days diverse books weren’t a thing at all, and not once did anyone ever recommend I read something that might resonate with my identity, that might illuminate who I was. As a poor Afro-liminal Dominican kid growing up in Central Jersey in the 70s and 80s, I experienced racist hate and racial confusion and racial silences but not a drop of racial understanding.
No mentors, no mirrors, no insight.
Just gaps and erasures, evasions and distortions, and a whole lot of white supremacy that agonized me but whose strictures I swallowed without question.
I lived race in the dominant mode without the minimal understanding. The rare moments of resistance, the inner perturbances, the resistant glitches — quickly smoothed over, anesthetized. I was stuck in the sunken place, in the Matrix with no red pill in sight. Nightmare doesn’t begin to cover it. Under those conditions, no chance I could comprehend the reality of America or my family or my own self, much less write about it.
MUTANT METAPHOR
What I did have, though, were the X-Men.
Yes, the comic books.
I began reading the X-Men in 1977, just as the legendary Claremont-Byrne run was kicking off, picking issues off the spinners at Kresge and I doubt you have patience or I the space to fully expand upon how batshit I went for the Marvel Mutants. I was at the right age for the hunted hated X-Men and their awesome melodramas — in the right place for Professor X, Storm, Wolverine, Cyclops, Phoenix, Nightcrawler (bampf!) — and, in issue 129, Kitty Pride. In those long-ago days I loved me some X-Men with a fremen fervor, loved their powers, their contretemps, their delirious operatic lives, the villains (Brotherhood of Evil Mutants and Hellfire Club forever) but when all is said and done what I really resonated with, what made this particular pop object utterly indispensable for me, was the mutant metaphor at the heart of the X-Men: unlike the vanilla superheroes of old, the X-Men depicted a world where a mutant’s superpower (the expression of their X-gene) transformed “normal” people into a despised, discriminated, physically other minority.
In effect, the X-Men’s mutancy othered these heroes in metaphorically powerful ways, but chief among these alterities was the obvious racial allegory.
A racial allegory made marvelous and majestic — and inescapable — by the central presence of Ororo Munroe, aka Storm. One of the first major black characters and major female black characters in comics, Storm, along with Wolverine, were the X-Men for me in those days.
Some books, like some songs or dances or movies or meals, change us. The X-Men definitely changed me, acting like an X-gene, triggering the long anfractuous process of my Fanonian awakening. The X-Men were both a mirror and a window into my own experience as a poor immigrant person of African descent in Central New Jersey, and like anyone who is starved for something that I’d been long denied, I battened onto the X-Men like my life depended on it — because in a way it did.
The X-Men were the first books that got me thinking about race in a critical way (we take what we can get) and more to the point got me thinking about doing race at a representational level. After all, one of the essential dramatic components of the mutant metaphor was that all the best X-Men had ambivalent relationships to their alterity, to their mutancy, to their otherness. They, in other words, had a relationship to their race and that was something that I had never imagined before, that blew my fucking mind because it made me understand that I too had a relationship with my otherness, one that had been previously naturalized to the point of invisibility.
That was an X-lesson I didn’t have to wait to become a writer to internalize or to put into practice. In those pre-writing days, I was roleplaying nonstop and my group had a special love for superhero games (Champions, Villains and Vigilantes, DC Heroes), and as the gamemaster I had to create countless superpowered NPCs for the players to interact with, and because of what I learned from the X-Men I always wrote out for each of my home-brew Mutant characters, not only their stats and their powers, but also how they felt about their superpowers.
This was the First Order Racial Relationship.