The X-Men and Racial Integration
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Most of you are probably familiar with the X-Men through the Fox films, and perhaps even the cartoons or comics.
I want to discuss a theme in Grant Morrison’s X-Men run from a couple years back.
I stopped reading most superhero stories years ago, not because I stopped loving them, but because the stories were adolescent and stagnant. In any storytelling medium, I tend to follow writers. If a writer I appreciate and admire jumps onto a title or franchise, I will read it or watch it, regardless of whether it is crime, science fiction, lawyer drama, children’s stories, philosophy, or superheroes. Over the last few years, there has been a recent surge of gifted writers moving into the American superhero genre.
Not too long ago, one of my very favorite authors in the world, in any medium, agreed to write X-Men. His name is Grant Morrison, and he is one of the most brilliant and madly-creative people I have ever had the privilege of reading. He’s currently writing All-Star Superman, the finest superhero comic coming out today, and probably one of the finest of all time. He is, in fact, largely responsible for the “integral” nature and vision of this website, as he strongly recommended Ken Wilber’s “Theory of Everything” to his readers, and I took his advice and read it.
The final story arc on his recently ended X-Men tenure took place several hundred years in the future. The world was unrecognizable, with humans, mutants, aliens, genetically-manipulated hybrid mutant clones, and intelligent machines all running around killing each other. The X-Men fought to make one last stand against an intelligent bacteria colony which had taken over the Beast’s body and was mass-producing hybrid soldiers to exterminate humans and mutants in an attempt to usher in an age of an artificial third sentient organic species ruled by him.
Just so you know.
What really interested me was who Morrison had picked for the roster of his future X-Men. He picked several mutants, one of whom had brutally attacked and slaughtered innocents in the past but was now reformed, an alien entity, a sentinel machine, a hot sentient mutant chick robot, and a human (who wore X-Men gear).
At first, I thought to myself what kind of crazy shit is this dude trying to pull now? Then I sat back and thought about it, and then I realized how subversive and sophisticated his idea was. The “Xavier Creed” has always been what Morrison describes as “integrationist.” The X-Men fight for equality, respect, and peaceful co-existence. If they are always “special,” if they are always mutants first and foremost, this can never occur. Morrison hints at this when he states in earlier issues that Xavier intends to open his school to human students.
Any “truly” developed X-Men, then, MUST include any sentient lifeform that requests inclusion (as long as it can the kick the asses of evil beings). A.I.s, aliens, and humans are all intrinsic and necessary parts of Xavier’s mandate, if it is to seriously work toward integrated coexistence, which recognizes and transcends differentiation.
So yes, my geekiness aside, I know this seemed like a really complicated way to explain something that sounds simple and obvious, but the implications, rationale, and insight required to understand and implement something like this are significant.
A human can be an X-(Wo)Man. That’s how it has to work, if you want to have a truly integrative organization.
So can racial organizations today effectively do this? Can whites be included equally in black or Asian activist groups? It’s not as simple as “yes.” Even Morrison’s story takes place in the future, and Xavier’s plans were ruined in the present by racism and xenophobia on BOTH sides.
And this leads us to the notion that racial organizations are PHASE-SPECIFIC structures: that is, they are appropriate for a certain phase in the development of individuals and cultures, and they change their functions for those individuals and cultures as time moves on. I’ll leave discussion of this for another day.
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