The 5 Most Insulting Defenses of Nerd Racism

The writer starts out insisting that the argument isn't about race and then spends the rest of the post talking exclusively about race. And this isn't a new sentiment among comic fans -- let's go back in time a bit and see what people thought when Marvel first debuted half-black/half-Latino Miles Morales as the new Spider-Man:

"Seriously, though, Daredevil is lame. End of discussion."

Apart from randomly taking a big shit all over Daredevil, this person insists that his anger over Spider-Man's race isn't about race, but the fact that Marvel is changing the race of one of the most iconic comic book characters. Which is still about race. Also, they aren't actually changing anybody's race -- Peter Parker is a white guy, but this Spider-Man isn't Peter Parker. So the person here isn't even mad about altering an existing character's racial background -- he's simply against Spider-Man's costume being worn by anyone but a white person. Which, again, is still about race. Maybe another quote will clear things up:

"Non-issues are the ones worth writing about!"

"Revealing that a big chunk of our fans are racist cockholes" doesn't seem like a great publicity stunt to us, but that's probably why we're not big-city publicists.

You'd think that, of all people, comic book fans would be the most accepting of change, what with all the time travel, cloning, and people constantly dying and coming back to life that occur in comic books all the goddamn time. You can't go more than a few years in a comic series without every character's backstory getting completely rewritten. Heck, changing Nick Fury from a white guy to a black guy became a celebrated move once people stopped complaining about it. Oh, wait, they still haven't, and it's been 10 damn years.

Also, making Sue taller and changing Reed's hair color don't sound that weird to us because, you know, they're fictional people. That's like being upset when January Jones got cast as the White Queen despite her skin not actually being made of diamond.

Who the hell wouldn't watch an all-black Star Trek?

Yeah, because Fantastic Four is a huge cultural litmus test, and we all know how much Hollywood loves casting black people in their movies.

This is courageously ignoring the fact that, even if Sue is white and Johnny is black, one of them could've been adopted. Or they could be half-siblings. Or any one of the thousands of possible explanations for a multiracial family. People are pointing right to the "But this character's race will change, too!" observation without bothering to explain why it's an actual problem in the first place ...

"And then what? Up will be down, dogs will marry cats, the Hot Pockets will microwave us!"

... which you should probably be thankful for, actually, because once people start trying to defend why having a black Sue Storm is a bad idea, things get awful pretty fast:

"Two black people is just lunacy!"

Waitaminute ... this person isn't really saying that having a black person in the Fantastic Four would ruin the team, are they?

Oh, whew. It's OK, everyone. It's not because he's racist, it's because he doesn't like the way black people make white people look when they fight crime together. Glad we got that cleared up. And evidently the Fantastic Four were created 80 years ago, back in 1961.

Because when you see a huge white guy in spandex (Clark Kent looks nothing like an average person -- he's a hulking man mass) punch a building across the highway while you're on the way to work, you think to yourself, "Oh, it must be Thursday." But if a muscular black guy did it (all black guys are big and muscular, right?), you'd freak out and drive your car into the ocean just to make the madness stop.

But this is nothing compared to what people thought about the new Spider-Man:

Incidentally, you can't see that he's black because Spider-Man's mask and costume cover every inch of his body, but the fact that this guy doesn't seem to know anything about Spider-Man's costume is actually the least of our concerns.

And things got really weird when people started arguing that Heimdall, a god from the Thor mythology, couldn't be played by Idris Elba, despite the fact that we would've happily watched Idris Elba play Captain America because Idris Elba is awesome:

If the silliest part of a movie about interdimensional gods with magic lightning hammers is that one of them is black, you are clearly racist. This is a non-argument anyway -- the Asgardians are gods, they look like whatever they want to look like. Hogun, one of Thor's warrior buddies, is clearly Asian in both the comics and the movies, and nobody is sitting around wondering where all the rest of the Asian Asgardians are. Also, what logical reason is there for all of the Asgardians to be white? Is that the default setting of gods?

As dumb as these arguments have all been, they're nothing compared to the last one ...