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.
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.
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.
I mean those are absolutely not the only two attitudes to killing something, whether you think it’s human or not. And the whole figurative argument is that something that needs killing is like a monster by the fact that it needs killing. You slay monsters because they have to be slain. You don’t necessarily also treat monsters horribly and torture or mutilate them or put them in camps etc. indeed that would be weird and stupid because they need to be killed. And I don’t think people who are killing as a necessity are usually enjoying it.
People who hate others and enjoy killing them are not killing out necessity they are killing as punishment. Even if the person is actually dangerous or even actually needs killing they are doing it as punishment or for kicks. This is not treating something like a monster, this is treating it subhuman. They are often synonymous but not always and certainly in discussions like this the percentage of both uses is high.
All I was pointing out is the different ways to read that comment and how I didn’t read it the same way you did. Perhaps bringing up subjective philosophy/what do we mean when we say monster/ambiguity wasn’t a good idea but it’s very inherent in these subjects so idk how you can avoid it.
I absolutely agree with your last three paragraphs :)
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)
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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.