Orange Is The Superior Color

Sonic is one of those pop culture icons that doesn't show signs of leaving the public's eye. Each year or so, a new Sonic project comes out, hyping up old and new fans alike. Whether the projects are received well or crash and burn is another conversation I won't get into. There just always seems to be a glimmer of hope that the next big Sonic project will eventually come out. If not, we have the assurance of older games, comics, and cartoons to fall back on. 

A huge part of what makes Sonic projects so beloved is the character himself: Sonic has an impressively effective design that’s simple, dynamic, and even has some cute factors. Meanwhile, his personality aligns well with the ever-so-rebellious youth culture. To put it in simpler terms, Sonic’s a cool guy. 

With that said, it’s a shame that so many non-Black fans have forgotten that Sonic’s character is heavily rooted in Blackness. Black-American culture specifically. 

For instance, according to Sonic’s co-designer, Naoto Ohshima, the shoes are inspired by Michael Jackson's Bad album cover. Looking at it now, I wouldn’t be surprised if Michael's “Bad” outfit inspired designers to add the gold belt buckle in future iterations. Because fans recognized that shoes are a big part of Sonic’s character, they often make custom sneakers from sports shoe brands often associated with Black-American fashion. Even Timberland did an official collaboration. 

(Custom Sonic shoes by NikeID)

In terms of music, Sonic's themes and soundtracks are mainly composed of hip-hop, rock, and R&B, most of which are sampled from Black artists. Even Malcolm X quotes found their way into the games. Listen, having the song Wrapped in Black play the phrase “Too Black, Too Strong” in the background is oddly specific, no matter how that segment made its way into Sonic Rush. Especially when it’s playing while Sonic AND Blaze(his dimensional counterpart, so wink wink) are fighting the Big Boss in their super forms. I'm not complaining tho, shit was peak

And how can we forget all of Sonic’s Black voice actors, which, while that pool is small, still help to push for more Black voice actors in a field where they’re often discriminated against. If you thought things got better just because Jaleel White voiced classic Sonic (and his Sonic Underground siblings, so again, wink wink) for a good while, y'all should have seen the racist reactions of supposed fans when Deven Mack voiced Sonic in Prime. And he sounded practically the same as Roger!

With these and so many other culturally Black influences that contributed to making the speedy lil blue guy we know today, it's no wonder fans, especially Black fans who clock these factors, envisioned Sonic as a Black kid. Which makes it all the more bizarre when you do see primarily non-Black people argue day and night over this. Considering that Sonic and most of his friends are colorful anthropomorphic animals, you have to wonder what they could possibly take issue with Sonic being Black? 

Apparently, there's an unspoken rule when it comes to creating humanized depictions of anthropomorphic characters like Sonic. When it comes to their perceived race, they should only be represented by a racial identity they are “most likely” meant to be associated with. Odd, this is the only time these guys understand what character coding is; you gotta wonder what's the catch. Then you hear them list out their reasons, and the puzzling narrative starts to fit together (by mashing everything in).

Sonic is allowed to be Latino (white/white-passing) because of Shadow’s weird fascination with Latinos (idk why that’s a reason). I also hear he can be Japanese because he's part of a Japanese franchise (sounds more reasonable at least, but bar’s in hell). But, the race Sonic would most likely be, according to these fans, is white. Why? “He just seems like he would be,” is at best the typical answer you'll get. Now, when it comes to Black Sonic, get this: even with all the reasons shared in the paragraphs above AND THEN SOME, Black is the only race that is just not well-suited for Sonic in any capacity.

I know, it don’t make any kind of sense. Unfortunately, plenty of us have had the displeasure of witnessing the same ole “I’m sorry, but Sonic is such a white boy,” comment every time there is art featuring Sonic as a Black kid. Does anyone ever ask? Nope. It opens with a false, apologetic tone, followed by some variation on this condescending statement meant to sound ridiculous in practice. It’s out of the question: Sonic is white, he can never be Black. Plain and simple…only it’s not.

Quite honestly, I never get a sound reason for why Sonic has to be white. When you’re not dealing with overtly racist fans that would rather cry about forced representation and calling you slurs, you meet the fans that want to appear nice as they turn down any suggestion of Sonic being Black. The moment you question the logic behind this thought process, the same individual, if they're attempting to dial down the tension they needlessly started, would claim, “I mean, c’mon, it’s obvious,” which, cool. That should make it really easy to answer then. But apparently not, as these people exit the conversation at this point (which again they first prompted). Needless to say, there’s a lot of pushback when it comes to making the statement, “Sonic the Hedgehog is Black."

After observing and asking other fans about this experience, here are some possible reasons why non-Black people have a difficult time accepting Sonic is Black.

Why can’t Sonic the Hedgehog be Black?:

His muzzle and belly patches appear closer to a peach colored skin tone

He’s silly and goofy, “like a white boy"

City Pop is not “Black” music

He's very mellow compared to SOME characters

Skater/Surfing culture that y'all link to whiteness

Sonic isn't tied to an obvious real culture like other characters 

He’s associated with American music and counter-cultures, which again, y'all associate with whiteness

Here's a big one I do see people bring up: Jaleel White himself stated he wanted Sonic to come off as someone without a race

Let's talk about Jaleel's statement first, because I have a feeling a lot of y'all sighed in relief, assuming the Black man gave y'all the OK to not acknowledge a character's Blackness. He starts talking about this at 2:06

Essentially, what Jaleel meant was that he didn't want fans to perceive his take on Sonic as “the Black one.” If I had to use Miles Morales as an example again: Do you see Miles as his own individual character, or do you see him as just The Black Spiderman? Note that this Does Not mean Blackness is not an important aspect of his character. If you take away Miles’s Blackness(as fans attempt to do), you no longer have Miles. We are saying that regardless of his background, Miles is a hero because he’s Miles. Same reasoning with the hedgehog: Sonic is a hero because he’s Sonic. Jaleel recognizes that as an actor, and as a voice actor, guess what? He’s going to be trained to perform the voice of a character in a way that others after him would be able to copy. That’s standard industry practice.

Also, let's be real here: most of y'all heard “raceless” and still find yourselves defaulting Sonic to white. What I don’t think Jaleel recognized at the time was that ambiguity in gender expression, body type, class, and any other aspect of human identity always defaults to whiteness. Everything else is classified as “the other” or “the people with the labels.” That’s why people have a hard time imagining that Black people can ALSO be women, or disabled, or rebels, or any other marginalized identity. We can even overlap with multiple labels, that’s just how human beings are, we’re complex. Just because you have only seen non-Black people partake in some activities above, don’t outright assume Black people weren’t involved. In many cases, they were the original influencers that just went unnamed, like rock 'n roll or country.

City Pop is typically performed by Japanese artists, but the music is HEAVILY influenced by Black American music. I promise you, your favorite City Pop artist has praised the likes of their favorite Black artist as major sources of inspiration. They most likely did a collab; it happened all the time. Michael Jackson had a known relationship with SEGA (the company that makes Sonic games), to the point it was rumored he helped work on the music of Sonic 3. If not, SEGA has definitely sampled his works and created a game based on his movie, Moonwalker. Hideki Naganuma, the composer of Wrapped in Black, is also known for drawing inspiration from Black music genres.

“But Sonic speaks in white surfer/skater talk! Black people don’t do that stuff!" First off, Sonic speaks in AAVE(African American Vernacular English). “Ahh yeah, this is happening!” sounds a bit silly when delivered by a white VA following a Japanese direction, sure, but you can tell the English localization was trying to make Sonic sound like a cool American. They just didn’t understand that AAVE, “the cool language,” is a specific form of English, with its own grammar rules. There’s a reason white suburban parents hated this type of speech, and everyone associated with it. That’s what makes Sonic the rebel. I should also bring up that this sentence was Sonic’s FIRST speaking line in mainline games; they wanted everyone to know what this guy was all about. Poorly delivered, but they still intentionally made this decision for a reason. Most of y'all aren’t even in the skater scene to verify what counts as “skater speech” to begin with, so idk where y’all are getting this information. Aside from all of that, Sonic is a skater and parkour enthusiast at best; he ain’t getting in that water. He sinks, remember? If I want to be funny, I should mention how y'all still believe Black people sink when we get into the water, and never acknowledge that the reason many don’t know how to swim was through segregation laws (Link 1, Link 2, Link 3)….but I won’t…… Thirdly, roller skating and skateboarding are popular outdoor activities among young Black Americans. We weren't allowed on beaches or most rinks (oh look at that, I still got to mention segregation, funny how this works), and our neighborhoods were constantly gentrified and paved over for industrialization and urbanization (this plot sounds familiar). So the Black youth figured that surfing on the concrete playgrounds of L.A. and inner cities was the next-best solution. I get that Tony Hawk and white skaters are more publicly represented in the sport, but Black skaters have been here since the beginning. Most of y'all have been quoting Black skaters’ AAVE w/o even realizing it. Remember the “Wack!” Black skater vine? Jamal Smith is a professional skateboarder who speaks the same AAVE that you hear Sonic constantly say. So yeah, we have definitely been in the scene much longer than y'all believe. We’re just more likely to be harassed by the police when skating. White skaters might get a stern talking to for loitering(made-up crime, racist in origin), but Black skaters often find themselves in the back of a police car doing the same thing. In any case, this highlights a major aspect of Sonic’s character: he's anti-authoritarian. Cuz ACAB 

Of course, this core aspect of Sonic has slowly lost its identity in recent years. Even most Sonic fans can agree that the games have lost its attitude themes. Sonic became “too safe,” essentially. No, I don't think Sonic would have a cop as an adoptive dad. Nor do I believe Knuckles would align himself with anyone who supports genocide and war crimes. But I guess that’s what happens when you start appealing more to white audiences, who’d rather keep the status quo rather than risk their own “peace” in mind. Sorry, not sorry, but part of Sonic's rebellious attitude, which everyone finds cool, came from being a literal Freedom Fighter who was always starting shit. Going back to the earlier point I made where Black neighborhoods would get gentrified to push for industrialization, this is the literal plot of Sonic 1. “Can't white people be like this too?” idk, y'all clutch your pearls hearing rap music, and cry about not getting your coffee flavored sugary milk concoction due to boycotts; and have the audacity to call yourseves rebels, nah. I’m just making the observational parallels here. Sonic is the kind of person most of y'all would throw a fit over for not being quiet and actually FIGHTING the system. I shouldn’t be surprised, MLK made y'all mad too.

Any other attempts to downplay Sonic’s Blackness are the usual anti-Black sentiments. Can’t even make the muzzle color argument, given that everyone in the series gets extremely light-washed over time, and also Sonic is just blue. Name me a blue hedgehog, I’ll wait. Then there’s the fact that light-skinned Black people exist, which people still despise when they are unapologetically Black about it. Similar to my points made in my Disney Black Prince post: if you can’t imagine a Black boy being silly and witty, and fun and lovable, then you have to confront that bias yourself. When you do, you start to realize there's no genuine reason why Sonic can't be seen as a Black kid. Cuz he very much is.

Now, with all that said, I still have some things to say to folks who do draw human Sonic brown, and his relation to other characters. Sonic Adventure 2 is where the character, Shadow, was introduced. Shadow is described as Sonic’s lookalike rival. In fact, that was a whole plot point in the game, where Sonic and Shadow get mixed up by the authorities. Which (looks left, looks right), cops do this with Black people irl.

Where am I going with any of this? My point is: if you make Sonic light-skinned, Shadow has to be light-skinned. If you make Shadow dark-skinned, Sonic has to be dark-skinned. Otherwise, how else do they get mixed up so frequently? I mean….other than cops assuming all Black people alike, or just finding an excuse to harass the nearest one they could find.

My main issue is when y'all apply these colorist ideas onto the characters, it ends up defeating the point of acknowledging who gets to be Black or not. Colorism is still racism. Y’all can accept Knuckles or Shadow to be dark-skinned, but only because you chose to see them as aggressive, violent, and bitter individuals. For Knuckles, y'all reduced his character down to the “dumb one” after having that one experience of him being vulnerably gullible. I know if y'all saw him as white, he wouldn’t have been reduced to this aggressive, dumb brute, often adultified compared to Sonic and his friends. At the very least, y’all would have called out on this deliberate character assassination for what it is. When it comes to Shadow, y'all wanted to do the Yin-Yang thing with him and Sonic badly. Now, instead of this complex character, he’s this stoic, unfeeling, prone to violence dark-skinned hedgehog, as opposed to the light-skinned/white happy-go-lucky Sonic. Sonic is a Black skaterboarder boy, and Shadow is a goth rollerskater boy; they’re both cringe on the same coin, but boy, do they like starting shit. Get over it.

What’s especially aggravating is when fans correctly point out that the Black cultural factors that apply to Knuckles (his quills inspired by dreads, his shoes representing the Jamaican flag, his rap tracks) allow him to be coded as Black. However, when using that same line of evidence for Sonic, it’s all of a sudden not enough, which gestures to this entire post

Y'all gotta learn how to cope with the fact that Sonic is Black. Without Black culture, there is no Sonic. 

She was booked into the county jail. The headlines wrote themselves. A grandmother running a pot bakery. It seemed like a joke to the legal system, a quirky local news story about an older woman behaving badly.

But Mary wasn't baking for fun. And she certainly wasn't baking for profit.

To understand why Mary risked her freedom, you have to understand the silence of the early 1980s.

San Francisco was gripping the edge of a cliff. A mysterious illness was sweeping through the city, specifically targeting young men. Later, the world would know it as AIDS. But in those early days, it was just a death sentence that no one wanted to talk about.

Families were disowning their sons. Landlords were evicting tenants. Even doctors and nurses, paralyzed by the fear of the unknown, would sometimes leave food trays outside hospital doors, afraid to breathe the same air as their patients.

Men in their twenties were wasting away in sterile rooms, dying alone.

Mary knew what it felt like to lose a child.

Years earlier, in 1974, her daughter Peggy had been killed in a car accident. Peggy was only 22. The loss had hollowed Mary out, leaving a space in her heart that nothing seemed to fill.

When the judge sentenced Mary for that first arrest, he ordered her to perform 500 hours of community service. He likely thought the manual labor would teach her a lesson.

He sent her to the Shanti Project and San Francisco General Hospital.

It was a mistake that would change American history.

Mary walked into the AIDS wards when others were walking out. She didn't wear a hazmat suit. She didn't hold her breath. She saw rows of young men who looked like ghosts—skeletal, in pain, and terrified.

She saw "her kids."

She began mopping floors and changing sheets. But soon, she noticed something the doctors were missing. The harsh medications the men were taking caused violent nausea. They couldn't eat. They were starving to death as much as they were dying of the virus.

Mary knew a secret about the brownies she had been arrested for.

She knew they settled the stomach. She knew they brought back the appetite. She knew they could help a dying man sleep for a few hours without pain.

So, she made a choice.

She went back to her kitchen. She fired up the oven. She started mixing batter, not to sell, but to save.

Every morning, Mary would bake. She lived on a fixed income, surviving on Social Security checks that barely covered her rent. Yet, she spent nearly every dime on flour, sugar, and butter.

The most expensive ingredient—the cannabis—was donated. Local growers heard what she was doing. They began dropping off pounds of product at her door, free of charge.

She packed the brownies into a basket and took the bus to the hospital.

She walked room to room. She sat by the bedsides of men who hadn't seen their own mothers in years. She held their hands. She told them jokes. And she gave them brownies.

"Here, baby," she would say. "Eat this. It'll help."

And it did.

Nurses watched in amazement as patients who hadn't eaten in days began to ask for food. The constant retching stopped. The mood on the ward shifted from despair to a quiet sort of comfort.

Mary Jane Rathbun became "Brownie Mary."

For over a decade, this was her life. She baked roughly 600 brownies a day. She went through 50 pounds of flour a week. She became the mother to a generation of lost boys.

She washed their pajamas. She attended their funerals. She held them while they took their last breaths.

She did this while the government declared a "War on Drugs."

By the early 1990s, the political climate was hostile. Politicians were competing to see who could be "tougher" on crime. Mandatory minimum sentences were locking people away for decades.

In 1992, at the age of 70, Mary was arrested again.

This time, the stakes were lethal. She was charged with felonies. The district attorney looked at her rap sheet and saw a repeat offender. He threatened to send her to prison.

One prosecutor famously whispered to a colleague that he was going to "kick this old lady's ass."

They underestimated who they were dealing with.

They thought they were prosecuting a drug dealer. In reality, they were attacking the most beloved woman in San Francisco.

When the news broke that Brownie Mary was facing prison, the city erupted.

It wasn't just the activists who were angry. It was the doctors. It was the nurses. It was the parents who had watched Mary care for their dying sons when the government did nothing.

Mary turned her trial into a pulpit.

She arrived at court not as a defendant, but as a grandmother standing her ground. The media swarmed her. Reporters asked if she was afraid of prison. They asked if she would stop baking if they let her go.

Mary looked into the cameras, her voice gravelly and firm.

"If the narcs think I'm gonna stop baking brownies for my kids with AIDS," she said, "they can go fuck themselves in Macy's window."

The quote ran in newspapers across the country.

The court didn't stand a chance.

Testimony poured in. Doctors from San Francisco General Hospital wrote letters explaining that Mary’s brownies were medically necessary. Patients testified that she was an angel of mercy.

The charges were dropped.

Mary walked out of the courthouse a free woman. But she didn't go home to rest. She realized that her personal victory wasn't enough. As long as the law was broken, her "kids" were still in danger.

She needed to change the law.

August 25 was declared "Brownie Mary Day" by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. It was a nice gesture, but Mary wanted policy, not plaques.

She teamed up with fellow activist Dennis Peron. Together, they opened the San Francisco Cannabis Buyers Club—the first public dispensary in the United States. It was a safe haven where patients could get their medicine without fear of arrest.

But Mary wanted more. She wanted the state of California to acknowledge the truth.

She campaigned for Proposition 215. She traveled the state, despite her failing health. She spoke in her simple, direct way. She didn't talk about liberties or economics. She talked about compassion. She talked about pain.

She forced voters to look at the issue through the eyes of a grandmother.

In 1996, Proposition 215 passed. California became the first state to legalize medical marijuana.

It was a domino effect. Because one woman refused to let her "kids" suffer, the public perception of cannabis shifted. The Economist later noted that Mary was single-handedly responsible for changing the national conversation.

She never got rich.

She had always joked that if legalization ever happened, she would sell her recipe to Betty Crocker and buy a Victorian house for her patients to live in.

She never sold the recipe. She never bought the house.

Mary Jane Rathbun died in 1999, at the age of 77. She passed away in a nursing home, poor in money but rich in legacy.

Today, over 30 states have legalized medical marijuana. Millions of people use it to manage pain, seizures, and nausea.

Most of them have never heard of Mary.

They don't know that their legal prescription exists because a waitress in San Francisco decided that the law was wrong and her heart was right.

They don't know about the 600 brownies a day.

They don't know about the thousands of hospital visits.

Mary didn't set out to be a hero. She told the Chicago Tribune years before she died, "I didn't go into this thinking I would be a hero."

She was just a mother who had lost her daughter, trying to help boys who had lost their way.

She proved that authority doesn't always equal morality.

She proved that sometimes, the most patriotic thing a citizen can do is break a bad law.

Every August, a few people in San Francisco still celebrate Brownie Mary Day. But her true memorial isn't a date on a calendar.

It is found in every oncology ward where a patient finds relief. It is found in every dispensary door that opens without fear.

It is found in the simple, quiet courage of anyone who sees suffering and refuses to look away.

Mary taught us that you don't need a law degree to change the world. You don't need millions of dollars. You don't need political office.

Sometimes, all you need is a mixing bowl, an oven, and enough love to tell the world to get out of your way.