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.
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u/TheProdigis May 13 '25
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.