>(Which wasn't 100% serious to begin with)
>
>But we need to examine another side of this.
>
>I don't think white writers in general have any sort of racial
>agenda behind their fiction. What I think it comes down to is
>characters, and the fact of the matter is, the more you can
>relate to a character, the easier it is to write for them.
>>>>>>>

While to an extent its true that white writers don't have any sort of overt racist agenda in their works, the absence of minority characters until creating criminals does say a lot about their thinking.


>Stan Lee didn't write about white males because he thought
>white males were the ideal, but rather because as a white
>male, those characters were probably the easiest for him to
>understand and write for.
>

I think its more likely that the idea of making a minority heroes didn't occur to him unless he was going to make the fact that he was a minority the focus of the book. Hence the Black Panther.


>As many of us know, some of those earlier attempts to write
>for minority voices yielded disastrous results. And as a Prep
>Time Posse blog recently explored, with there being so few
>minority characters in comics, that puts a huge burden on
>writers to get it right. Because when you're writing for Luke
>Cage, you're writing for like, 1/6 of the black superhero
>population. That's a lot of pressure. So writers get a little
>race/gender shy, I imagine.
>

I've seen a general dmaned if you do, dmaned if you don't sentiment when writers speak on creating black heroes.


>Of course, as a result you have less minority kids who can
>relate, thus less minority fans, thus less minority fans who
>grow up to become comic book/sci-fi/whatever writers. And so
>on and so forth.
>
>It's a vicious cycle, but maybe one day we can break it and
>begin living together in harmony in our mothers' collective
>basements, geeks united.

I gotta disagree with the idea that minority fans are less likley when there's less minority heroes. The fact of being a minority means that you're going to be immersed in representations of the majority population. That goes for comics, tv, and movies. I'd say its the majority that has the problem of relating to the minority.