Sometimes a superhero gets to be a
real-life good guy – or girl.
At least three Captain Marvels have had stories in which they face,
and battle, bigotry, prejudice, and disctimination. In "Mr. Tawny Gets a
New Home" from 1947, the original Captain Marvel helps Mr. Tawny
against a neighborhood group that doesn't want tigers moving into the
neighborhood. Marvel Comics' Captain Mar-Vell, as a "white" Kree, not of pure "blue"
Kree blood, found himself to be a pawn of the political maneuverings of
Zarek, a high government official who hated the "inferior" white Kree.
Monica Rambeau faced the "glass ceiling" as a woman at her job in the New Orleans
Harbor Patrol, and later appeared in a one-shot issue about racial
bigotry on a college campus.
Now the new Ms. Marvel it taking on anti-Islamic sentiment on the streets of San Francisco.
Not too long ago the mantle of Ms.
Marvel was dropped by Carol Danvers, the character who had carried it
from its inception as that of the “First Feminist Superhero” in
the 1970's. Now it has been taken up by Kamala Khan, a teenage
Muslim Afghan-American girl in New Jersey. She has the power to make
herself or parts of her body change shape or grow bigger or smaller
according to her imagination and willpower.
In both cases these heroes have stood
for a minority that had recently become talked-about in the news and
were finding their voice. The feminist movement had grown in the
1960's and hit the mainstream in the 1970's with Ms. Magazine and the
drive for the Equal Rights Amendment. Since the attack on the World
Trade Center on 9/11/2001, Muslims in America have become more
visible, even if a lot of that visibility comes from people noticing
them for the first time and associating them with the terrorists who
committed the attack.
One particular example of this
attention has over the past few years, been coming from a group
calling itself “The American Freedom Defense Initiative.” This is
a group founded by Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer in 2010 and also
goes by the name “Stop Islamization of America,” which pretty
much tells you everything you need to know about its political
leanings. (the Wikipedia listing is at
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_Islamization_of_America,
and if you want to see what they write about themselves, go to
http://freedomdefense.typepad.com/)
One of the things for which it has
become known is buying ads on buses. In the particular instance of
interest to the Captain Marvel diaspora, is this one (shown in versions seen on Washington DC and San Francisco buses, respectively):
It purports to show one Grand Mufti Haj
Amin al-Husseini, “Leader of the Muslim world,” in conference
with Adolph Hitler, leader of Nazi Germany
I looked up this Grand Mufti on
Wikipedia and a few other sites. He is a very interesting character
with an adventurous history of wars, revolts, riots, nationalism,
conflict and cooperation with various sides of colonial issues,
arrests, etc, etc. His title of “Grand Mufti” was apparently
gained through some nifty maneuvering and assistance by British
authorities, and though it did give him great influence over many
Muslims and Islamic organizations and leaders, he was not exactly
“leader of the Muslim world,” as the poster says. Nonetheless, he
did have meeting with Hitler and did actively work to forward the
cause of Axis victory. He did state that he wanted to rid the Muslim
world of Jews, although whether or not he supported their
extermination seems to depend on which website you read.
The point here, however, is that this
poster attempts to equate Islam with hatred of Jews, and that we
therefore should hate Islam. There are some people in this world who
object to characterizing Muslims this way.
It just so happens that the new Ms.
Marvel is Muslim, an Pakistani-American teenage girl in Jersey City,
New Jersey named Kamala Khan. She has proven to be a very popular
character not only among Muslims and girls, but comic readers in
general, even expanding her popularity beyond the general comic book
audience.
In a brilliant piece of unsanctioned
guerrilla usage of a culture-specific superhero icon, someone in San Francisco used
images of Ms. Marvel and text expressing indignation against hatred,
bigotry, and Islamophobia to deface the bus ads there, covering them up
almost entirely. The only words left clearly visible were “STOP THE
HATE...to Islamic countries.”
Ms. Marvel writer and Kamala Khan writer C. Willow Wilson tweeted about this, supporting the First
Amendment rights of free speech of both the advertisers and the
artists, and supporting the message her character was being used to
spread.
You can see accounts or this at the
following websites:
Most of these acounts dscribe the
artist as “anonymous,” but
The defacement was clearly illegal, and
the ads were protected by the First Amendment of the US Constitution,
but implying that all Muslims have the same objectives as Nazi
Germany is wrong.
I think the most insightful comment
about this was these tweets by Ms. Wilson, who supports the right t
the AFDI to post their ads:
“To me, the graffiti is part of the
back-and-forth of the free speech conversation. Call and response.
Argument, counterargument.”
“To me that says free speech is
working--it is enabling and fostering public exchange.”
What do you think?
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