#redface

Redface commission I did for Roth1000

From the series: “Manipulated Memories “

R.Tanaka

Now, I’m sure at least half the people looking at this post are already starting to type out replies that it doesn’t count as redface because it’s fantasy / I’m overreacting / I’m too sensitive / “cancel culture” is bringing on the death of society, etc. Take a goddamn breath and for once in your fucking life, try listening to and taking seriously what a Native person says about anti-Native racism in media.

Marvel has a long history of using Vision as a stand-in for POC, specifically comparing racism to him being ‘oppressed’ for being an android. Here is an example from Avengers #114 (1973), where Wanda reflects on how she defensively tries to blend in with humans, and subsequently forgot about society’s hate and fear of mutants, and, she adds, androids:

This is a point-blank metaphor about racism and whitepassing privilege. (It’s also directly related to Wanda doing the same thing in separating herself from her Roma roots she grew up with, once joining the Avengers in America - something she much later in comics reconnects with.) 

More modernly, Marvel creators have specifically co-opted racism against Indigenous peoples and applied it to Vision. And when I say co-opted, I mean literally, not even metaphorically. In Vision #4 (2016), the issue is centred around using anti-Native racism as a literary device to show that Vision’s family is unwanted in the community they move into:

Haha, get it? “Fighting R*dskins”? Get it? It’s a super funny joke about a racial slur and caricature applied to an android! //Sarcasm

But even without this history with the character, I would still have a hard time letting this slide past labelling it as redface. The same way if a white woman was hired to play Starfire and they painted her skin bronze, I would have a hard time not labelling it as brownface. Vision is an android and Starfire is an alien, but the historical and ongoing use of makeup to mask people as a different race, both as a caricature and as a ‘performance’, contextualizes this.