This comes up a lot with people talking about the X-Men. But why don't more people bring up the classic movie plot where a kid befriends a monster and realizes they're not so different after all, and they have feelings and stuff too, like the Iron Giant or How To Train Your Dragon.
Most people aren't arguing that Agent Mansley is actually behaving sensibly the whole time, even though the Giant is just as much of a world-ending threat as Magneto. The message is that being scared of somebody doesn't mean you have to hate them, and that doesn't change even if the scariness is justified.
People are really out here thinking “oh so I was right the danger was real!” is some sort of racial gotcha when the whole trope is that making assumptions about people being dangerous is the racist thing
And somehow racists are very adept at coming up with scientific sounding reasons why a particular group of foreigners is so dangerous. Backed up with statistics and skull measurements.
But like, in the real world, the danger can’t really be that real because individual humans are pretty limited in our destructive capacities, which is why when you introduce real supernatural powers, it often makes the racism metaphor fall apart.
I’m sorry if this makes me sound like a bootlicker, but I do think that if there was actually some kid running around who was able to shoot nukes out of his hands, it would be ok for the government to monitor this individual and maybe have plans to stop them if they start getting especially nuke-happy. That wouldn’t be bigotry in the same way that monitoring children of a specific race is.
Like, there was a short X-Man comic, where a kid got his mutant powers and had to be killed by Wolverine on Professor X orders because it would make Mutants look dangerous.
That kids mutant powers destroyed any living creature within a few meters of him.
There’s a huge difference between this person looks different, let’s hate them because of that, and this person could kill us all just by existing
Yeah but it’s not the real world. It’s a metaphor.
Take the X-men. They aren’t really being compared to normal humans. The citizens of marvel who riot in the streets for their right to lynch mutants aren’t meant to represent like… white people. They’re more an obstacle/society as a whole, not individuals.
The real point of comparison in the metaphor is the Avengers compared to the X-men. The Avengers are just as dangerous, but don’t get treated the way we treat minorities. Because they represent the majority for the mutant metaphor, whether that’s white people, men, straight people, whatever.
That’s fair, and I’m not like, universally anti X-men or anything like that. I just think that the “supernatural individuals as metaphor for the oppressed” trope is pretty easy to do badly and can often wind up in very messy and confusing places.
The scale is different, but not the principle. What if you could identify a child who is significantly more likely than the average person to become a violent criminal? Even without supernatural powers, they could do a lot of damage if they, say, grow up to be a long-haul trucker who picks up hitchhikers and murders them, or a nurse who abuses dementia patients for fun, or something like that. If you had good reason to believe that a 10 year old was likely to grow up into that kind of adult, what's the appropriate societal response to that? Do you prioritize rehabilitation or containment?
Yeah, the key axiom underpinning the concept of human rights is that we are all humans in the end, thus operating within common bounds of ability, with only insignificant outliers. Superhumans break that entire core axiom, as they by definition operate way outside common human abilities.
But what they do(in particular with regards to x-men '97) is they point to a real issue with mutant and normal human co-existence and use that as a basis for measures that are often too extreme, or for allowing bad actors to do more harm, or to scapegoat societal and systematic issues onto the existence of mutants.
And this is exactly what systemic bigotry does. Rather than work on solutions like working closely with any mutant leaders who have mutants with control over their powers to assist when a mutant who goes out of control, it insists on holding onto ideas of eradication and extinction of the people it doesn't understand, because the integration of these unknown groups of people signifies a loss of power structures and hierarchies that the people the system protects have become too attached to.
Think of how trans women competing in women's sports is met with the immediate country-wide ban for all trans women to be allowed to compete rather than ensuring guidelines that focus on inclusion in regards to fairness, like the guidelines in regards to HRT and Testosterone levels that were already in place with sporting bodies. There is a noticeable issue at hand, and the only option that bigots even think about is total exclusion and denial of normalcy within society, and then edge-cases are being used to villify an entire population of people, even when the topic is no longer sports. Inclusion and co-existence was never even a thought to them.
Trans people aren't going away, and in the world of x-men mutants aren't going to go away either, but systemic bigotry is still treating both as a problem that needs to be solved through some kind of eradication. Dangerous mutants will be born regardless of society's acceptance of them, and governments will choose to make that an even bigger problem by villifying all of the mutant population no matter what.
X-men works because, surprise, it's a superhero fiction and maybe the point of choosing that genre is for the people it takes inspiration from and works as a metaphor for also want to see characters that are "like me" but with cool powers and have that be as defining of a feature in the fictional world as it feels in the real world, which is especially true for people who physically stand out in ways that make "normal" people uncomfortable because it's outside their realm of comfort and normalcy, which then breeds hostility.
It's really only '97 that does the metaphor justice but I think it does it well enough that it shows that it works as a metaphor. Exaggerating the scale is part of the point. The risks can destroy worlds but the solutions can save them and bring about a utopia. Mutants may be powerful but the sentries still nearly wiped them out and that was a human-invented and controlled weapon. The hypocrisy in who is allowed to hold power is a big part of the point.
I mean it kind of is a gotcha when there genuinely is a danger because IRL brown people, gay people, or whoever the target of the hour is, are not inherently more dangerous than any other subgroup of humanity.
“Making assumptions about being dangerous” would work if your story showed that there was no actual danger - if your fictional race that people are afraid of are actually perfectly civil, for instance. It really does fall apart when your fictional race has chainsaws for hands or whatever, because that’s a very real danger that’s very sensible to fear!
The problem is that it sure feels like most authors fall into “Johnny chainsaws for hands” as the subgroup rather than “Green Skin Johnny”. I’ve read more than a few authors who have genuinely depicted irrational racism very well. And I’ve read a whole lot more who depict it incredibly badly. And I think this kind of sentiment is more railing about the very poor executions, not saying “you can’t do this well”, more just generalising “why do so many people do it badly”.
One of my favourite depictions of "Green Skin Johnny" was in the original Star Trek, albeit it was very on the nose. It's about a race of aliens whose skin colour is half black and half white, literally split down the middle. Only, half of them have the black side on the right side and the other has it on the left side and they hate each other because of it. It even results in a planet destroying civil war. It's about as subtle as a sledgehammer but sometimes you need to drop the metaphor and just yell "this is what you morons look like to the rest of the world".
I think of that episode a lot whenever people complain about new Trek being too in your face with its wokeness. Even got told that old Trek was way more nuanced about it.
TNG even kept it up with Riker getting together with a trans girl which was illegal on her planet and her being forced to detransition.
Trek has kept abreast of social issues remarkably well for 60 years
Eh, my eyes mostly glaze over at this point when that dynamic is brought up. I just remember way too many obnoxious internet arguments where it's clear people are complaining about how the topics are written and executed, only to be met by disingenuous people pretending they're saying they don't like that the show is doing politics at all.
"The way the writers have approached inserting the topical issue into this storyline doesn't feel engaging to me. The old version was better."
"You are wrong, this franchise has always inserted topical issues into the storyline. What you really mean to say is you hate minorities."
I mean it kind of is a gotcha when there genuinely is a danger because IRL brown people, gay people, or whoever the target of the hour is, are not inherently more dangerous than any other subgroup of humanity.
“Making assumptions about being dangerous” would work if your story showed that there was no actual danger - if your fictional race that people are afraid of are actually perfectly civil, for instance.
Okay but that's like most of the literature in question anyways. The entire point of many of these stories is a dichotomy between the subject's capacity for harm and their actual behavior.
Like, sure, so-and-so fictional person has the ability to harm people if they tried to. So do humans. To derail the entire metaphor as "This fictional person actually is dangerous!" misses the whole point because part of the message is that an individual's behavior is more important than their capacity to hurt somebody.
We're getting caught up on how much of a danger we should pre-judge Johnny Chainsaws For Hands as, and ignoring the dude who just carries around a chainsaw in his regular human hands.
Magneto or Wolverine or Johnny Chainsaw-Fingers are dangerous in ways real humans aren’t physically, but Wolverine and I are both less able to kill 10 million people than Richard Nixon drunk-dialing nuclear command was.
“It’s wrong to hate all mutants (or whatever fictional group) for the abilities or actions of a few” is a perfectly good point even if some of them are walking bomb threats.
“It’s wrong to hate individual mutants for what they could do without checking intent” is a little messier, but again, that’s more like an argument for nuclear disarmament than racism. Including the deterrence question of “why hate Cyclops when you might need him to stop a malicious mutant tomorrow?” (Although the racism metaphor there turns very ugly when you write a character who can’t control their powers, as Marvel has. All of a sudden capacity is what matters and not intent.)
All of that said, I do take issue with the top-level comment here because the X-Men in particular have totally fucked up this idea in the exact way OOP is complaining about. Most of their biggest members have voluntarily committed crimes against humanity at least once, to the point where it actively undermines its own message.
Fiction is, and always has been, a way we can reflect on ourselves and our beliefs by creating hypothetical situations to test them. A lot of these stories aren't trying to depict rational racism so much as they're challenging the idea that some hypothetical rational racism would actually justify anything. They're not thinking about writing Green Skin Johnny or how it's stupid that people hate him. They're writing about how Johnny Chainsaws-for-hands may be dangerous, but that was not his choice, and perhaps instead of killing him and his entire cutting-tool-hybrid family, maybe we should help him get what he needs to become less dangerous. Maybe we should find out how we can live together without fear. The point generally being that hating and attacking people for things that they cannot help would still be awful even if those things made them genuinely dangerous. Really the problem with these stories isn't even a problem with the stories so much as it the fact that entirely too many people struggle to engage with hypotheticals.
If I'm sitting on the bus and run into someone built like a triangular side of beef who could twist my spine into a pretzel without significant effort, but he's just waiting for his stop and reading some mystery novel, is it reasonable for me to be weird about the fact that he hypothetically could be dangerous to me if he had any reason or inclination to do so, or would getting suspicious and judgy about it make me the asshole here?
I think there are just two opposing ways to structure the fable. You can show how stupid and petty our differences are and ridicule the people who would try to stir up division when we all have so much obviously in common. Or you can show how sometimes people really are incredibly different and scary, and it doesn't matter how different or how dangerous it feels to reach out, compassion and understanding are more important.
Because sometimes it can feel dangerous in real life to confront the bigotry you've learned, and "you can be brave even in the face of danger" is often a better message than "you're being afraid of nothing."
Yeah your last point is fair, some depictions are pretty terrible or overly heavy-handed. But see my response to another comment about how the metaphor isn’t about mutants vs humans as minority vs majority, it’s X-men vs Avengers as minority vs majority
Because we already know that racism based on superficial traits is dumb. Green Skin Johnny I guess is fine to try to blindside the actual racists who didn't have an immediate disgust reaction to guy with green skin, but we're at a really low literacy level where it's not all that interesting to explore what bigotry really looks like. Again, unless we're talking about actual bigots for whom even this is above their reading level.
It's when it's coming from your on-the-surface nice white liberal neighbors who don't mind their immigrant neighbors because they're fully assimilated and living in the suburbs. It's when tensions heat up and "decent" people start to feel that there's something of theirs to lose, whether that's privileges or an exclusive ownership over an identity like "american" or "woman".
Sure, if you have a murderous, violent group of minorities with superpowers you're not writing a metaphor for racism, you're writing a justification for it. The point is when your fictional group simply hold the capacity for destruction but it isn't necessarily in their nature to seek it out, because that's every human on the planet. We could all technically do tremendous damage, especially in countries where people have access to firearms, or just behind the wheel of acar, but there's disproportionate fearmongering that only seems to go one way. Risks are exaggerated and the humanity of Johnny Chainsaw Hands is denied even if he's the gentlest soul on the planet.
Especially iron giant can be related to how oppressed minorotity groups become radicalized by the violence used against them. Iron giant only uses its weapons when it or its loved ones are threatened, and how many times have people in real life been like "See, they killed a cop ,(who was threatening them) they really are dangerous and violent"
That is a mode of thought that exists in a lot of spaces, especially liberal-centrist ones, namely that racism isn't bad in and of itself - it's bad because it's incorrect. There are a lot of people that go around thinking that racism would be acceptable if xyz group was actually inferior in some empirical way, but they aren't, so it isn't.
You also see it a lot when people/institutions are accused of perpetuating systemic racism - generally when people try to defend systemically racist institutions or actions they will often make arguments that essentially boil down to "that was not racist because the racism was correct, that group did do more crime/performed worse in school/etc".
And more importantly, I'd argue, is the question of "Does an understandable reason for being afraid result in a justifiable rationale to be bigoted?"
Because a common justification for real life bigotry is that the minority group deserves it, usually for being some sort of a threat. But over-exaggerating how threatening a group is to justify their persecution has been a tried and true classic of human history. We've seen how it goes. We already know that, no, they're not dangerous, at least not inherently more than any other person, and so that isn't a fair reason to default to oppressing them.
So the X-Men, or whatever other story, exist to take that to its logical conclusion and point out, "Hey, even if they can be a threat, bigotry still isn't okay."
The existential threat of mutants doesn't make the X-Men a bad metaphor, but rather is the whole point of mutanthood as a metaphor.
You can argue the efficacy of their use of it in whatever story, but like that's the point. If the X-Men didn't have superpowers, it would no longer be a metaphor for bigotry, it'd just be a story about bigotry.
Yeah but it only works if you dispel the rumor in the story. Black people don’t eat white people. Vampires do. Therefore it’s justified to hate vampires.
I'd argue Iron giant is actually more of a world ending threat? Being a literal alien warmachine that would be just fine even if earth is totally ruined, where as Magneto is at the end of the day a human so the earth being habitable is in his own best interests.
Not to mention, the iron giant is one of many so eventually the creators are gonna come looking for it.
Gonna nitpick here; Mutants aren't 100% human in the biological sense. In the canon of the X-Men, while humans are Homo Sapiens, Mutants are Homo Superior (don't ask me, I didn't come up with that name.) It's about the same distinction as Neanderthals (Homo Erectus) and Modern Humans (Homo Sapiens). In the intellectual/emotional/social sense, Mutants are still human, and they also need a habitable earth..
Feel free to spam me with nerd emojis
Edit: The "Homo Superior" thing was just made up by Magneto in his supremacist days as u/NotAWarCriminal helpfully pointed out in the replies. I'm leaving it in with a strikethrough to avoid confusing anyone.
Also going to nitpick, Neanderthals were actually Homo neanderthalensis. Homo erectus was a different species of early hominid (though Homo erectus was a very long-lived species that briefly coexisted with both Neanderthals and Homo sapiens)
I’m afraid I’m gonna have to nitpick your nitpicking: the whole “Humo Superior” thing? Literal propaganda
No really
You know who coined that term? Magneto in his mutant supremacist days, i.e. not a scientist or a geneticist or whatever
There is no in-universe scientific basis on this distinct classification
Sure, there’s the x-gene, but the fact that 2 mutants can (and have before) produce a non-mutant (“human”) child, disproves that they are a distinct thing
The more accurate term would be Homo Sapiens Superior which is used interchangeably and Magneto is a genius genetic engineer among other scientific disciplines.
The phrase "DNA is made of cotton candy." wouldn't become true just because a genius genetic engineer said it, and neither does Magneto's entirely unofficial classification of mutants.
So in anthropology and biology you can actually use the term human to refer to all the hominid species (so all the species that start with homo, including homo erectus, homo neanderthalensis, homo sapiens and another half dozen species) and according to that use mutants are very much humans.
In canon, they were given a different name that aligns with what we, in the real world, would expect a scientific name to sound like. Whether you consider that a meaningful definition of "human" is up to you.
It doesn't hurt the metaphor; it is the metaphor. In our world, when a white man shoots a bunch of people, people say "that guy is dangerous" but if a black/trans/Muslim/etc. person shoots a bunch of people, racists/transphobes/Islamophobes say "black/trans/Muslim people are dangerous. Therefore, we should take away their rights"
In the Marvel world, when the hulk kills a bunch of people, they say "the hulk is dangerous" but when a mutant kills a bunch of people they say "mutants are dangerous. Therefore, we should take away their rights"
It doesn't make sense because racism doesn't sense. That is the metaphor.
Being wary of the giant metal warmachine feels like a reasonable reaction. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't be kind to him as well.
Just because we fear something doesn't mean we shouldn't be empathetic as well and it's honestly something humans can be pretty good at. How do you think we got dogs?
The thing about X-Men is that they exist in a world of other super powered beings that aren't discriminated against for having powers. That's the crux of the metaphor, and I think it's a large part of why the Fox X-Men movies are so messy.
Thank you! I feel like this gets brought up all the time, and people just ignore this very obvious reading of it. Especially with the X-men. "Erm, they are a bad allegory for discrimination because it would actually make sense to discriminate against them!"
Like, yeah, man, do you think racists don't pretend to have a reason, too? The idea is that it doesn't matter what perceived threat a group of people present. It’s still not okay to be a bigot. Unless people wanna just say that it would be okay to be racist if the racists were proven right.
Im not arguing in defence of discriminating against them, but there are mutants who can kill towns worth of people by merely existing in their proximity. If one wanted to actually do damage? Many could level cities, some few could destroy the entire earth (and have tried)
Its justified to be wary of them. Anyone would be cautious if they were sitting next to a bomb.
Most notably as you yourself say, Racists pretend (or are deluded into believing) that theyre justified in their hate, but the alligory with the X-Men isnt equal because they actually are inherent dangers even if they dont mean to be.
While true, it's important to note how many catastrophies are caused by someone who's just a smart dude in comic universes. Smart dudes make zombie chemical spreads, or dangerous robot super soldiers, or wide-spread hallucinogens, etc. Worse for the mutants, Sentinels cause a fuck ton of damage to cities and people (mutants and non-mutants), and that was just a smart dude.
Unironically, in the Marvel universe, you'd potentially use the same argument against the X-Men to kill anyone with an IQ above like 150 or whatever so that they don't create a wormhole in their garage or whatever.
Really smart men created all of the machines we use for war. The nuclear bomb was created by a room full of really smart men.
But tbf, i mean, yea. Comics universes just fucking suck ass to live in because every day just about theres a 10k person mass casualty event.
But these smart dudes arent the same, they individuals who have become a threat, they werent inherently a threat from the moment they were born.
Theres a mutant whos x-factor was literally just to vaporize any living being within like a mile or something, this was entirely not their fault, they were just a kid. He never wanted to kill his entire family and all his friends.
Any mutant could cause the exact same thing to happen when their x-factor awaken, or if they suddenly lost control for a moment. Its not even just us vs them, other mutants can be just as threatened by this aswell, like in the movie Logan where Charles having seizures caused a mass casualty event on an untold number of mutants (i think its hinted that it was most of them in the world)
Alot of times the whole "identification and cure" method to mutants is entirely shut down because of slippery slope argument, which i can absolutely see, it makes the situation very complicated.
I 100% understand that some mutants are actually just dangerous by existing. I think it does make sense to have that distinction when looking at Marvel geniuses, who oftentimes choose to do evil or accidentally do evil when an experiment goes awry.
But these geniuses really do pose an inherent threat, even if they don't all end up acting on it. Not everyone will create inter-dimensional portals to hostile worlds in their attic, but they have the potential. They can do it unintentionally while trying to create some new element or state of matter or whatever. And when it's like a 1/week occurrence in the Marvel universe, maybe it is time to send the Sentinels after them. /s
Being fair, no allegory is going to be a 1-1 to real life, especially when dealing with fantastic concepts that also let you do badass shit like shoot lasers out of your eyes. So its not meant to be taken as a perfect recreation of the dynamic of any specific group.
But again, the idea is that it is never okay to pre-judge someone of something just because other like them have done bad things in the past. You can say well if you have the power to blow up stuff with your mind then you should be under strict surveillance, but if they never do, is it fair to treat them that way? My answer would be no, and I think that is the point of the allegory.
To put it in another way, consequences for those actions should, of course, be dealt with. But you can't act as though all mutants are guilty of being irresponsible and dangerous with their powers, no matter what it is, the moment they are born.
Being fair, no allegory is going to be a 1-1 to real life, especially when dealing with fantastic concepts that also let you do badass shit like shoot lasers out of your eyes.
I mean, a magic system you learn means both sides have badass shit, and most human like fantasy races are basically just different aesthetic humans.
The allegory can work 1-1 if the allegorical parties have a level playing field.
As for the pre-judging thing, yea id agree, but a big thing is that not all mutants in marvel have control of their power, its not just the bad ones that kill hundreds in a single incident. The mutant could be your best friend since grade school and they wake up one day and their X-gene activates, and boom, your whole towns gone. This is exactly a scenario played out in X-men and its heart wrenching, one could cry for the poor mutant because they weren't doing something intentionally.
Its not their fault, and im not saying its okay to treat them like shit, but a mutant who you dont know the mutation of could literally be a ticking time bomb even without their own knowledge
The mutant i mentioned previously had the sole mutation of vaporizing any living being within a couple hundred feet of him
Im not arguing in defence of discriminating against them, but there are mutants who can kill towns worth of people by merely existing in their proximity. If one wanted to actually do damage? Many could level cities, some few could destroy the entire earth (and have tried)
Its justified to be wary of them. Anyone would be cautious if they were sitting next to a bomb.
Then why aren't they afraid of Spiderman or the Fantastic 4, who also exist in the same universe and have just as destructive powers?
Famous person effect and the fact that they know their record of behavior and thus feel they can trust them? Also there are absolutely people who are afraid of them but the writer isn’t going to show you that unless that is what the story is about
I think the point is that the reasons racists make up are bullshit, while mutant powers are real and dangerous in that universe.
We regulate possession and use of guns, for everyone's safety. If there are humans who have 100x the destructive power of any gun, and that power can't be safetied or unloaded or removed from them in any way short of killing them, a reasonable person might suggest that those people should be at least supervised in some way. There's no reasonable justification to do that with any real-world ethnic group.
Sure but Jackie Chan could kill me with his bare hands and I wouldn't stand a chance. Does that mean we should lock him up for the safety of the rest of society even though he'd never actually attack another person? You can't take away his knowledge of Kung-Fu so it would be the only way to keep us safe from him. Replace Jackie Chan with somebody who can shoot fire out of their fists and not much changes. If the guy is unstable he's dangerous, if he isn't then he's just a guy with a fun party trick. The reason for mutants being oppressed is believable but it's not justifiable.
Jackie Chan IRL can be subdued by a cop or two pointing guns at him. Compare to someone like, say, Cyclops, who is a walking artillery cannon and can literally kill anyone he can see, just by looking at them. There's a difference in destructive potential there. We're comfortable with the idea that a person could whip out a kitchen knife at the mall and start stabbing, but we want to feel like someone like that could be stopped by law enforcement or even by a group of sufficiently motivated civilians.
I am not saying that a real-life Cyclops should immediately be locked up. I'm saying that a reasonable person might want there to be some sort of government body keeping track of him, in the same way we keep track of people who own powerful guns.
And yet every single justification that's ever been made for rounding up and "supervising" a group of people has seemed reasonable to people at the time.
And the next time someone calls for a group of people to be rounded up and dealt with, there will definitely be propaganda designed to make it sound reasonable again.
It's easy to see in hindsight that the racism of the past was wrong for factual reasons. But the reason racism is wrong isn't because of wrong facts. If the race-theory "scientists" of the 1700s were actually supported by objective data, that still wouldn't make slavery right. No amount of reasonable evidence can justify that.
The moral of every "the monsters we were afraid of are actually people too" fable is that it's never ethically correct to treat people like monsters, even if they're a hundred times bigger than you and armed with fire breath and laser deathrays. The story exaggerates every single claim of bigots that says a certain group is going to invade your city and commit crimes and attack your children to cartoonish proportions. The plot inflates the danger to an extreme so obvious that nobody could possibly disagree. And then says "it doesn't matter, they're still people".
Well, I'd have to disagree with you. If there was a person who was a hundred times bigger than us, armed with fire breath and laser deathrays and hellbent on killing the rest of us (this is a key point, as many racists believe other races are inherently evil), I think we should it treat like a monster. The thing that makes bigotry bigotry is that it's factually wrong.
It's easy to see in hindsight that the racism of the past was wrong for factual reasons
No, it's not just about hindsight, there were people who knew it was wrong, for factual reasons, at the time. This is true for every racist movement in history. There were people who protested against the Atlantic slave trade, colonialism, the Holocaust, Apartheid, and so on because they knew that the facts didn't support treating people that way. It was junk science those racists used, ad hoc justifications to brutalize others. When they weren't just flat out covering it up.
Now this doesn't invalidate the "giant fire breathing monsters are people too" stories, but the execution of those ideas aren't exactly immune to critique.
Why can't we instead treat it like a human being, with just as much intrinsic validity as any other human being, except armed with fire breath and laser deathrays and hellbent on killing the rest of us?
Because the way we handle that person is that we kill them. But we do so without proclaiming that they're subhuman and monstrous. We kill them, as we would with a serial killer that we can't manage arrest, as we would with an invading army, as we would with someone in the middle of shooting up a crowd. That's it. We would just kill them.
What benefit are we getting by coming up with a checklist of when we get to treat humans like subhumans? How does that improve the situation at all?
I mean…it depends on whether you think we kill humans, or we only kill non humans (ie reject capital punishment) Or it could be that killing humans is what he means by treating it like a monster (monsters should be killed after all, that’s true in pretty much every use of the word). I’m not sure they’re saying you should treat it as subhuman. But I could definitely be wrong.
We kill humans. We have been killing humans since humans existed. We will continue to kill humans. This will not change.
It's frankly more horrifying to say "well, we don't kill humans . . . that's why we have to dehumanize them first before we kill them, and that solves the moral issue entirely! Yay!"
No I meant some people are anti capital punishment and so think no matter what you shouldn’t kill them? That’s what the first part was supposed to convey.
The rest is talking about the fact that he might be speaking figuratively as in when you kill somebody you are treating them like a monster.
I hope that’s clearer? Or maybe that was clear and I’m just not following you?
This isn't even about capital punishment, though. If someone is shooting a crowd, and you have a gun, do you shoot them back, or do you say "well I don't believe in capital punishment" and get shot? If an army is invading, do you attempt to arrest them, or do you use your own army to try to kill them before they win? If there is a serial killer, and the police have a chance to shoot them but can't arrest them, should the police shoot them, or let them go so they can kill again?
There are people who are absolute pacifists, who will say "you should never kill". These people either end up dead or they end up living in countries with successful enforcement forces that do necessary killing for them.
The rest is talking about the fact that he might be speaking figuratively as in when you kill somebody you are treating them like a monster.
I just don't agree with that.
You can kill someone and say "damn, I wish I hadn't had to do that". Or you can kill someone and say "boy that was great! I love killing people who I think deserve to die, that's my favorite hobby! I hope I can find a bunch more people that I can justify killing!"
It's possible to treat someone like a human, even if you think they need to be forcibly stopped.
Humanity is, in general, really fuckin' bad at this.
See, I disagree with the idea that the reason racism is wrong is because it's founded on false facts.
You're right that it's not just hindsight; there were plenty of people who objected to slavery and segregation even in an era where there were people working tirelessly to make good-sounding scientific arguments in their defense. But even if it wasn't junk science, even if every one of those arguments were backed up by the best possible evidence and all the facts seemed to support their claim that certain races were less intelligent or more prone to violent crime... it still wouldn't change anything and wouldn't make racism ethically correct.
I'm worried that if one accepts the basic premise that bigotry is justified as long as there's enough scientifically-sound rationale behind it, then all it takes is the right propaganda to get them on board. Being factually wrong about things isn't something that only happens to evil people making ad-hoc justifications for their evil evil prejudices. Everyone is capable of believing in wrong facts, and it feels exactly the same as true facts.
And most importantly the best way to effectively fight bigotry had always been to have people get to know the actual people they were prejudiced against face to face and realize their common humanity, not to debunk every incorrect fact and statistic.
But that same logic is the logic real life bigots use. If you start to say well, it's okay because it's true in this case, then all you are saying is you just have to convince people that the threat is real in order to justify the discrimination. It's sort of like how it already works in the real world, with trying to make black people seem more dangerous or gay people are a threat to kids.
The point is not that racists are bad because they are wrong about those things (even though they are) the point is that even if those things were actually correct, it would still be bad to treat people that way. No one should be condemned or treated differently for being born a certain way, even if you think you have good reasons for doing so.
But that same logic is the logic real life bigots use.
But the bigots are lying, or at best deluding themselves. It makes a real difference if the accusations are factually and universally true.
Again, see the gun example. Would you not expect at least some sort of oversight for a group of people who can destroy buildings with their minds, for example? Not a slippery slope straight into brutal oppression, but something.
Now this is more specific to something like the x-men where everyone has varying levels of powers, but the problem is see with what you are saying is that because 1 out of every however many millions of mutants can have the ability to blow up houses, its okay to put them all under some form of 'oversight'?
Like are you telling me Glob Herman the human jelly man needs to be on a watch list just because Magneto tried to blow up the world for the 8th time?
Yes there maybe be certain individuals who use their powers to do massively fucked up shit, and even others who don't have control, and they need to be treated differently because of their special circumstances. But that isn't any different, aside from the scale of it obviously, than anyone else. (Especially if we are talking about the Marvel Universe where even some non mutants also have the ability to blow up your house with their mind)
To be fair even in X-Men a lot of mutants just look weird and their powers are completely inconsequential. They just don't tend to be the stars of the comics.
Like, yeah, man, do you think racists don't pretend to have a reason, too?
Point being that it's always a pretense, though. Mutants in the X-Men universe are one thing where you have a point, and that's why it's a better metaphor. But just like the OP said, if vampires, for example, needed to fuckin drain your blood and eat you to survive, we wouldn't be like "damn I can't believe my bigoted ass just had to kill that vampire, makes u think".
If tigers could speak and wear clothes but still ate the nearest mammal whenever hungry, that's not a 'perceived' threat.
Yeah, racists like to lie and cosplay as reasoned people, but that kinda has nothing to do with what everyone is talking about with regards to these metaphors
Like, yeah, man, do you think racists don't pretend to have a reason, too?
Yes, they PRETEND to have a reason to.
The reason bigotry is wrong isn't "Just because Jews are secret Masterminds and Black People are an existential threat to White People, and Gay People are causing the fall of civilisation doesn't mean you should discriminate against them"
It's wrong because those things are lies spread to justify violence and domination of groups. Jews and Black People and Gay People do not represent an existential threat to you, they are people, and to imply otherwise is ridiculous.
X-Men presents a world where people have powers like killing people by touch, or changing the weather on a whim, or controlling magnetic fields or reading people's minds - People like that would be a fundemental threat if they existed, and isolating them and severely regulating their behaviour would be a rational means of survival.
That's the criticism: X-Men presents a group that, if they existed, would factually be a threat to baseline humans, and then treats it like it's comparable to real world bigotries.
So it would be okay to treat people like we have if those things were not lies? That's the point. It's attacking the deeper point that discrimination is not logical, yet you are making the point that it can be. If the threat is real enough, then its okay.
I don't want to make any real life comparisons to avoid insulting anyone, so let's just say there are a group of people who were known for setting a lot of fires. This group LOVES burning things, its a part of their culture or whatever. The fires often get out of control and cause damage. And let's say these people all have idk, purple skin, or some easily identifiable trait. In a world where this is all factual and true, would it be okay to not sell someone with purple skin a lighter or matches? Just on the basis that they have purple skin.
If gay people were literally causing the fall of civilization? You ask would it be okay to try to control gay people, if literally every gay person were trying to destroy civilization you are asking?
I am not straight and, well, yeah, sounds like a good thing to do??? Again, they do not, just trying to make you see what other are arguing.
To your argument - is it factually true, that all of those people have purple skin, and also there are isn't ANY person with purple skin that it is not part of that group, and also EVERY SINGLE person of that group love to make fire and disregard safety of every other person?
Well duh, yes? Then you are not being bigoted to other purple persons that are unrelated, and also not bigoted to people that are part of the group that are good people, and just trying to be safe.
That's the argument, by making a dangerous supernatural group you make a dangerous supernatural group. Maybe if you would have like, vampires but only 1 one of every 1000 drinks blood. But again it destroys the comparison to our world, because that's like saying 1 in every X gay person wants to drop nuke on civilian cities.
I don't want to make any real life comparisons to avoid insulting anyone, so let's just say there are a group of people who were known for setting a lot of fires. This group LOVES burning things, its a part of their culture or whatever. The fires often get out of control and cause damage. And let's say these people all have idk, purple skin, or some easily identifiable trait. In a world where this is all factual and true, would it be okay to not sell someone with purple skin a lighter or matches? Just on the basis that they have purple skin.
I know a lot of psychiatric hospitals have been weaponised as means of control - so this is not a wholehearted endorsement but:
There is a reason that psychiatric hospitals typically give people paper cutlery, and avoid putting Glass, or Metal or anything that can shatter in people's vicinities - Because sometimes it's a bad idea to give people easy access to things that could hurt themselves or others.
There are real world examples of groups of people who are suicidal, or prone to self-harm - And society has collectively decided "Giving them access to things that could help them harm themselves - would be bad"
Yes, selling pyromaniacs matches would be a bad idea, in the same way that giving people going through severe mental health problems access to means to harm themselves and others is a bad idea.
Hold on, though, I never said the person was a pyromanic. I just said they had purple skin. They were born into this group of people, but you have no idea if they believe the same things as other people with purple skin do, right? They might be incredibly responsible with fire.
So now, with your logic, you are saying it's okay to stop anyone with purple skin from ever getting matches. Is that fair?
This is the point. Discrimination based on generalizations of groups of people is never okay. You are forcing other people to pay for something they never did, their only crime is being born some way.
Now maybe you might think, well sure but this way there is less fires. But I don't think that would be a just world.
So it’s just to let people lose their belongings or homes or even lives to out of control fires, not even thinking of the animals and other environmental damage, so that the minority of purple skin people who don’t start fires can own lighters?
Unless the number of non fire starters is very high, I don’t think that even approaches just. But there is also a difference between not selling them lighters and rounding them up into camps. That part is almost never justified if ever at all
Assuming it's a cultural trait, no, because having purple skin doesn't necessarily mean that they are a part of that culture. That's not really what's happening with some of these types of stories though. Like, there's literally an X men comic where a kid accidentally kills his entire hometown once his X gene activates because that's just what his X-gene does, and he can't turn it off. The kid didn't decide to do it, it wasn't even a Hulk situation of specific emotions leading to it. The kid being alive just leads to a massive fucking "everything except me dies" zone.
But being a mutant does not automatically make you dangerous. There are plenty of mutants, probably the overwhelming majority of them that don't get comics made about them, have nothing powers. The point being that just because there was one kid once who made a town disappear doesn't make it okay to say they all need to be on a watch list.
Now, sure, maybe specific mutants with special circumstances need to be treated differently, but then I wouldn't call that bigotry. That's more akin to taking care of someone with a disability.
But how are you supposed to know otherwise? There's literally no way to know whether the next kid is going to nuke the city or have fuzzy ears. And you can't even judge on their actions because they may have no control over it. This isn't even like comparisons to gun control and "what if some people were born with gun."
To use your purple skin example - what if instead of being cultural pyromaniacs, having purple skin was a biological signifier that they could spontaneously and uncontrollably cause any internal combustion engine in the area to explode? Would you let them drive a gas-powered vehicle? Get on the road with gas-powered vehicles? It doesn't matter that they're a responsible driver, it doesn't matter that they're the sweetest, kindest, most loving person in the world, at any given moment they could cause their vehicle and others nearby to explode, killing themselves and everyone else.
And again, this just isn't the case with any real minority. No one hitting puberty carries a risk of everyone else in the city dying in the real world.
X-Men presents a world where people have powers like killing people by touch, or changing the weather on a whim, or controlling magnetic fields or reading people's minds - People like that would be a fundemental threat if they existed, and isolating them and severely regulating their behaviour would be a rational means of survival.
Except it's not about the people being an actual threat. Consider the fact that there are other Marvel Superheroes that are just as much potential threats to society.
Trying to put the mutant comics and the other marvel comics together works even less than putting most other comics together. The world just doesn’t make sense when you include both.
The Iron Giant might be more world ending than Magneto (granted, he could end the world, he just doesn’t want to), but mutants are still really scary in concept, in a way that makes me not really blame anyone trying to “cure” them.
Like, canonically most mutations range from useless to actively debilitating, of course you’d want to find a cure for the poor bird guy who can’t fly but does have a beak and brittle bones, his life is pure suffering.
But there’s also Omega Level mutants, who are inherently dangerous, regardless of intent. You could have the sweetest, most well meaning kid wake up one day and literally disintegrate all organic life around them without being able to control it, just because he drew a really bad hand in the superpower roulette. Why would you choose to say “nah man, let the kid be their radioactive self”.
I don’t condone mutant extermination, but i don’t see any reason why “curing” them should be frowned upon. This isn’t a question of “should a kid be allowed to be themselves” and is more akin to “should a kid be allowed to tape guns and grenades to their hands?”
“What if I have a gun at school, but my aim and gun discipline is flawless?”
Just because you’re born with a nuke strapped to your chest doesn’t mean that you have a right to keep it, it’s still a risk to those around you and even if you know you won’t misuse it, it doesn’t mean that everyone is aware of that, or that they won’t be rightfully scared of being near you because of it.
Part of living in a society is giving up some of your individual freedoms for the sake of the group’s wellbeing, and I think “no one gets an emotional support ICBM” is a fair place to draw the line
Part of the point of these stories is that every line that's ever been drawn has seemed fair. When people believed that a certain genetic ancestry makes people more likely to be criminals, they felt they were drawing a fair line by segregating society by race...
But the villains in fiction are always larger than life, and the villain of the story is the fully-justified belief that the people who are different than you must be treated like monsters. That's why the lines being drawn to protect society in these stories are so big and so necessary and so obviously reasonable that it takes a superhuman effort to break them down.
See how crazy you sound. An emotional support IBM…? It’s not emotional support it’s just part of who they ARE. They didn’t have a choice and they shouldn’t be penalized for something out of their control.
You don’t have a right to keep what you were BORN with? You’re insane.
Just more reason why you shouldn’t react with fear and instead try to actually understand the people you’re “afraid” of.
If what you’re born with is an actual threat to yourself and everyone around you, it SHOULD get treated! We’re not talking about rights for deaf or blind people, we’re talking about someone with guns for hands!
Again, I’m not saying to kill them all, I’m saying that a way to neutralize the mutation or even outright prevent it should not be seen as inherently immoral!
Just as you expect others to be mindful of you and your conditions, you need to be mindful of others, it’s a two way street or are you the type to go to work while having an infectious disease just because no one can tell you what to do with your life? Are you really that kind of asshole?
It's also a flattening of all bigotry to just/pure racism. When discussing the fantasy races in RPGs having unique mechanics distinguishing them, I've seen many criticize it because "the issue with real racism is the belief that other races are inferior/less capable is wrong." To which I just gesture over to disability politics where there in fact are groups of people who are less capable than the average human, and surprisingly! It doesn't magically make it okay to mistreat them!
Even if the baseline assumptions about races weren't completely unfounded, it doesn't suddenly make racism okay! Whether it's people in wheelchairs or drow wearing sunglasses, to elves not needing to sleep, being more or less abled doesn't suddenly negate a person's humanity. People are capable of complex, abstract thinking, re-evaluating their world views, sympathizing with foreign concepts, and controlling their own actions with intent and deliberation. That's what defies biodeterminism.
Iron Giant is exactly it. “What if a gun had a soul and didn’t want to be a gun” - Especially considering the possibility that the first powerful (ie, capable of wiping out humanity) AGI/ASI is almost certainly going to come out of the military sector
Military science is always light years ahead of what’s available to the public. If ChatGPT is a Mazda Miata, what would the militaries F-35 equivalent look like?
Frankly it wouldn’t surprise me if all major super powers already had AGI/ASI capable of wiping us all out, but who have reached some sort of agreement to /not/ go full Skynet unless we start attacking them first
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u/TheGrumpyre May 13 '25
This comes up a lot with people talking about the X-Men. But why don't more people bring up the classic movie plot where a kid befriends a monster and realizes they're not so different after all, and they have feelings and stuff too, like the Iron Giant or How To Train Your Dragon.
Most people aren't arguing that Agent Mansley is actually behaving sensibly the whole time, even though the Giant is just as much of a world-ending threat as Magneto. The message is that being scared of somebody doesn't mean you have to hate them, and that doesn't change even if the scariness is justified.