👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀 nonblack America might lose their shit... But me personally... I would like to see the vision 👀👀👀👀👀
Look, I'm all for switching up character's races. But one, Patrick Stewart isn't dead. Two, Prof X is one of those characters where the race is important. Here's why.
Charles Xavier is privileged as fuck. Yeah, he's disabled, but that didn't happen until he was a grown man. He's white, male, cishet, Christian, well-educated, and wealthy. He spent years just traveling the globe for the fun of it. Charles Xavier is the epitome of privilege. Charles Xavier has never entered a room where his voice wasn't heard. He has always had that buffer where things come easily to him because of who he is. He expects that if he asks nicely, humans will treat mutants with respect. Of course he does! No one has ever taken an aspect of his identity and used it as a reason he shouldn't be listened to! He truly believes mutants will be fine if they help humans and follow all the laws and have conversations with men like Senator Kelly.
So the way Charles handles the treatment of mutants is totally different from how Magneto handles it. Magneto is Jewish and lived with Romani people for a while (presenting as Romani, while not being Romani himself). He watched his country turn against his family for being Jewish. His wife left him when she found out he was a mutant (also he killed a whole ton of people, but w/e). His daughter was murdered because he was a mutant. He has no belief that he will be accepted. He expects that his mutation will be rejected, and he's right. He expects the hatred that he grew up with. Magneto watched his father, a WW1 vet, ask a military friend for help only to be rejected and told that he was wrong for even asking, that he would expect an Aryan to treat him like anyone else. Magneto knows what happens when you ask nicely and play by their rules: you get put in camps. He knows that the legal system made by humans doesn't work. He knows it can be abandoned at any moment.
Charles Xavier is naive and hopeful, but that only works for a privileged person. I truly believe that in order for Charles Xavier to function as he is, in the role he plays, he needs to be a wealthy, cishet, WASP, white male. This contrast doesn't work any other way.
Jesus Christ.
Patrick Stewart not only doesn't own Xavier, he isn't even the only living actor who has played Xavier. I stopped reading after that sentence, because anything after that is going to be some kind of weird self-justification.
I think Black Xavier could work and be cool, but literally everything after that sentence is a pretty reasonable argument about how privilege is a relevant aspect of Xavier's character - it is not that much to read before completely dismissing their thoughts.
Like I don't agree with "It could never work" but it's a fair reasoning.
Having gone back and read it once I got less annoyed, I don't actually think that it is fair reasoning at all. Every bit of that reasoning presupposes that there is only one way for Xavier to become who he is, and one reason why he plays the role that he does. That is a very shallow way to view characters.
If someone's read of the character requires that Xavier come from unquestioned privilege, I really wonder how much of the history of the character that person can really understand. Since the 60s, common wisdom, and repeated statements from various writers, has been that "Xavier is MLK and Magneto is Malcolm X". How does that at all square with this idea that Charles has to be white?
Just off the top of my head, you could have a Charles Xavier who grew up as the child of 1960s civil rights leaders who were able to make political careers from their activism, and thus experienced a great deal of relative privilege in terms of his economic status, his education, his connection to powerful people from a young age. This is someone who gets as high in the world as a Black man is allowed to get, and yet he is never allowed to be really equal. The system has worked for him, most of the time, most of his life, and so he believes that the system can be made to work for everybody. (The more I write this out, the more I am saying, "kind of a VP Harris, tbh, with the very significant gender difference.") That is his contrast with Magneto, his belief in humanity and existing human institutions: he believes that what exists can be reformed and mutants can achieve freedom by that reform. That is the core of his conflict with Magneto, not his whiteness.
And then you put that up against a Black Jewish Magneto who has seen the best and the worst of humanity in all the parts of who he is — the solidarity and the racism within American Judaism along with everything else — and who believes that what exists must be destroyed for mutants to achieve real freedom.
There are so many very interesting ways to approach that contrast, and absolutely none of them require either one of them to be white. I would actually argue that a biracial Xavier played by someone like Esposito, who was born in Denmark, lived in Rome until he was 5, attended a private Catholic college in New York, and then struggled as an actor after his divorce due to being typecast as a "thug" until he actually actively contemplated killing himself for the insurance money to provide for his kids might bring something new to the role that speaks to where a lot of people are now. We literally have the Supreme Court saying with a straight face that "racism is over and we don't need the VRA anymore," and then handing the keys to the racism bulldozer to Louisiana, you know? What does "being equal and being free" mean in a world where we get a Black President and VP but it's followed by legal maneuvers that will probably decimate Black legislative representation for generations, and we get "marriage equality" but disabled people are still locked out of marriage in many cases, plus the fact that they lost Obergefell just meant that Republicans turned their hatred onto trans people as their next target? Can you meaningfully "reform" a system like that, or must it be razed to the ground?
The essential question of the X-Men is and always has been "reform the system" vs "destroy the system," and absolutely nothing in that question requires Xavier to be white.
It's a facile argument.
"They NEED to be white, you'd have to change EVERYTHING ABOUT THEM for then to be black, it doesn't work!"
My brothers the X-Men comics where started in the 1960s during the height of the civil rights movement as an allegory for racism to teach little white kids that hating people who are different is wrong. The fact that the characters are Jewish and white is due to the two men who created it being Jewish and white themselves and speaking from their perspectives as white Jews in America and trying to relate issues of race inequality to a predominantly white (and male) youth audience. To that point, and the fact that it's also a super hero comic about people with fantastical powers, many of the different aspects of the X-men miss the mark of the stated intent because the white men writing it could not speak authoritatively on the black lived experience, only mentally about the effects of bigotry and discrimination. The lessons on hate and injustice are left vague enough that in the 90s the X-men and their stories were repurposed to be about existing as queer instead of black.
Reinterpreting the characters as black does not even require that large of a reach. You can look right now at any slice of black politicians and see that exact dynamic at play: "we need to work with with the system and push it to be more progressive" vs "the system is unsalvageable and needs to be torn down to make room for a better one." They can still be Jewish. Fuck, make them more explicitly queer, too, while we're at it, why not. But the X-men, their story, was always about racial discrimination and the black experience as told by a couple white guys trying to relate it to a white audience. The fact that so many people just can not imagine Xavier and/or Magneto as non-white tells me you need to make a LOT more black friends.
