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The question of consuming media that is older presents us with uncomfortable truths sometimes. And chief amongst those discomforts is depictions of different cultures or ethnicities, particularly in Western media. Both Sam Wilson's Harlem and Batroc "Ze Leap-air"'s horrendous French accent are reminders of times when stereotype was an accepted shorthand regardless of how insulting or misinformed that stereotype may have been. Really, as they do today, comics writers should trust that if a character is French, we can imagine them speaking with an accent, rather than having to Inspector Clouseau them for us. This is, of course, not to accuse any of the creators involved in such use of stereotype of any kind of bigotry - it's simply that that was the accepted, and available, language for such depictions at the time.
What this usually reminds me of is a conversation with a friend who pointed out that we, as kids in Western society, consumed a really startling amount of very racist content without even realizing it. I recently had a dig through a large collection of weekly British comics, The Beano and The Dandy and such, but literally every issue had some very problematic depiction of race, usually Native American people, and, honestly, Dennis the Menace and his constant bullying of his shy neighbour is some heavy-handed homophobia, really. Tough to get through, and hence back into storage for a while. I think that, for me, one of the processes of recognizing my privilege is this necessity of re-examining so much of the media of my formative years. So much programming took place at such a fundamental time. It's jarring to go back and recognize how fucked up everything really was (and still is, of course), and how I need to reshape the bits that were bent out of shape.
More to follow.
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