“It’s better to die on our feet than live on our knees.”
General Emiliano Zapata of the Mexican Revolution
and
Magneto of the Brotherhood of (Evil) Mutants (“Enter Magneto, X-Men: The Animated Series)
The murders of two unarmed Black people, Michael Brown and Eric Garner, by white police officers exploded conversation about police violence and brutality into the headlines of mainstream press in 2014, with resistance against that violence crystallizing in the Black Lives Matter movement. With statistics coming out like those put forward in Malcolm X Grassroots Movement’s Operation Ghetto Storm report—that a Black person (men, women, and trans) is killed every 28 hours by police or a white vigilante, we have seen questions emerge about the role of police—historic and current—in our society.
Mainstream publications like Rolling Stone have run headlines like “Policing is a Dirty Job, But No One’s Got to Do it: 6 Ideas for a Cop-Free World,” exploring the history of modern police forces as mechanisms of social control of the urban poor, and, as scholar Kristian Williams proves in his book Our Enemies in Blue, enslaved Black folks by proto-police forces, which were called slave patrols. The Rolling Stone article goes on to advocate for concrete alternatives to policing, such as unarmed mediation teams, restorative justice, and community patrols.
Though some reading the article may think this the first time they are encountering the revolutionary idea of alternatives to police, I can guarantee it’s not.
The first time the majority of us encountered the idea of alternatives to the police was the first time we bought a superhero comic book.
Superheroes fundamentally critique the criminal justice system that exists in these imagined worlds, whether it’s Metropolis or Gotham City (worlds clearly based on our current political realities). If the police were doing their jobs and the system was functioning in an efficient manner, there would be no need for superheroes. By picking up the red phone, turning on the bat signal, calling in the X-Men, or relinquishing control to Dr. Manhattan, authorities acknowledge their system of justice is broken. If it wasn’t broken, they wouldn’t need superheroes.
Of course, alternatives to police aren’t politically radical by default (think Ku Klux Klan, militias, The Minute Men, George Zimmerman). The existence of superheroes means something isn’t working, but peeling apart these comics’ premises will allow us to explore and critique the superhero theory, pull out what is useful to the creation of community-based alternatives to police, and construct a framework that is more reflective of visionary values and politics.
Nietzsche’s Superman Reinvented
In 1938, Superman burst onto the scene as the first fully actualized superhero with the tagline “Truth, Justice, and the American Way.”
There had been other heroes before Superman, no doubt, but Superman was the first to combine the costume, vigilante justice, and fantastical powers based on at least a pseudo science (Superman being an alien who has crash-landed in the cornfields of the Midwest who, conveniently for him, happened to come out looking the model of an all-American white straight cis-gendered man).
Superman quickly became the prototype for other superheroes, and the prototype that later comics continue to respond to, critique, and complicate.
Illustration by Stacey Robinson
Superman’s powers make him one of the most powerful beings in the universe, which could be an incredibly terrifying thought to the establishment. But luckily for them, for the majority of his existence, Superman remains entirely a tool of the dominant establishment. From his tagline to his red, white, and blue uniform, Superman personifies the idea of ultimate power being used to maintain the “American Dream.”
“[Superman’s] loyalty and patriotism are above even his devotion to the law. This entails some important consequences for a superhero such as Superman who is beyond the power of the armed forces, should he choose to oppose state power,” writes Richard Reynolds in his book Super Heroes: A Modern Mythology (15). Superman’s potentially terrifying powers are held in check by that blind patriotism to America, and so instead of challenging oppressive state rule, we see him breaking laws to uphold American hegemony. Superman is the ultimate cop for a nation that roots its mythology of lawmen in the colonization of the West, where laws were more suggestions, where the sheriff’s racialized concept of what was just ruled. With the massive discretion give to police officers today about whom they stop, what laws they enforce, what neighborhoods they patrol, and the racial lens they use to make all of these decisions, we see a clear continuation of this mentality into the present.
Superman and other superheroes uphold an idea of justice that protects the weak physically, while maintaining existing exploitative power structures. Traditional superhero conceptions of justice most often mean punishment (usually long stretches of imprisonment or even death) for the “guilty.” This may mean superheros break smaller laws, but it is always done in the greater spirit of American democracy. “Superman’s first ever exploit involves breaking into the state governor’s bedroom in order to save an innocent woman from the electric chair. Superman does, however, leave the real murderer bound and gagged on the governor’s lawn” (Reynolds 14). In this example, while Superman acts to challenge a criminal legal system that sentences the innocent to die, he ultimately reinforces that same unjust process by leaving the one who has done harm to its machinations. We end up with the idea that sometimes “the system makes mistakes,” rather than a nuanced critique of how policing and incarceration work.
The Superman mentality assumes that both the idea of American “democracy” and the way this country implements the concept of justice are pure and above question. This blind loyalty became increasingly difficult for Americans to swallow during the 1960s and 1970s, in the wake of the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights/Black Freedom Movement, and global Third World liberation movements. We begin to see characters reinvented to reflect this. As Reynolds points out, Captain America, the paragon of patriotism, abandons his superhero role during the 1970s in the wake of the Watergate scandal. The 1970s is also when we see the beginnings of the War on Drugs under the Nixon administration and the beginning explosion of the prison population. The writers for Captain America incorporated these real life politics, as well as the sense of disillusionment with the established system that went with it: Steve Rogers hung up his shield to take on the mantle of the Nomad—an apt alter ego for a generation looking for a moral home (Reynolds 75).
Exploring the uglier side of the world of superheroes was the mission of the Watchmen series, published by DC Comics in the 1980s. Watchmen takes place in an alternate timeline where superheroes emerged publicly in the 1940s and 1950s and changed the course of this country’s politics, helping to win the Vietnam War.
Each of the superheroes in Watchmen explores a different historical archetype of superhero, exploring their more twisted psychology. In one scene, the Watchmen are in New York during a police officers’ strike. They have been brought in as official law and order, and the citizens are enraged to the point of rioting. One protesters screams, “We don’ want vigilantes! We want reg’lar cops!” which is a clear critique of a complete lack of accountability under this form of “justice” (Moore Ch.1 17). (Though, again, looking at the everyday functioning of police in this nation, highlighted most recently by the brutal responses to demonstrations and public dissent in Ferguson, perhaps this cry was a tactical one – it’s easier to battle police versus super strong beings who can shoot lasers out of their eyes and such).
Nite Owl, the voice of the liberal superhero, looks around in horror, and comments, “This country’s disintegrating. What happened to America? What happened to the American dream?” The Comedian, a brutal psychopath in the vein of the Punisher, cavalierly replies, “It came true. You’re lookin’ at it. Now, c’mon… let’s put these jokers through some changes” (Moore Ch.1 18).
This exchange gets to the fundamental question about issues of police brutality, corruption, and murder. While we hear ad nauseam the framework of “a few bad apples,” the Comedian’s response challenges this and instead highlights what those who advocate for the abolition of the police system say: the system is not broken, it is functioning exactly as it was intended. That the system of policing was not intended to keep citizens safe but instead was intended as a means of controlling and exploiting potentially rebellious communities, namely enslaved Black people and the urban poor. Rather than the deluded Nite Owl, who claims to believe in the ideals of democracy but continues to further an oppressive agenda, The Comedian is very clear about his role in maintaining social control as a representative of the criminal legal system.
Who Are the Real Criminals?
Every superhero needs a supervillain, and throughout the 70-year history of comics, there have been a mind-boggling array of costumed cads. At the same time, however, superheroes also spend a significant amount of their time responding to common street criminals: stopping muggings, foiling bank robberies, tracking down thieves.
This is a clear parallel to the role that police play in our society today, especially when it comes to the drug trade. We are told the War on Drugs will get these drug kingpins, the people who run the international cartels that make drug networks possible. However, the reality is the vast majority of police arrests are of those addicted to drugs, those using them, and not those selling them. The drug sellers who are arrested are overwhelmingly low-level subsistence dealers (often making what equals minimum wage or less), and these arrests are further filtered through a highly racialized lens. As Marc Mauer writes in Race to Incarcerate, “The results of a Los Angeles Times analysis, which examined prosecutions for crack cocaine trafficking in the Los Angeles area from 1988 to 1994… [showed] not a single white offender was convicted of a crack offense in federal court, despite the fact that whites comprise a majority of crack users…. As is true nationally, the Times analysis revealed that many of the African Americans charged in federal court were not necessarily drug kingpins, but rather low-level dealers or accomplices in the drug trade” (Mauer 172). We cannot imagine that superheroes, who base their ideas of “justice” on these same racialized frames, are policing the streets much differently.
What is left out of the analysis completely, whether policing is done by cops or superheroes, is an understanding of institutionalized oppression and systemic unequal access to resources. Ozymandius from Watchmen speaks to this reality when asked why he stopped being a superhero: “What does fighting crime mean, exactly? Does it mean upholding the law when a woman shoplifts to feed her children, or does it mean struggling to uncover the ones who, quite legally, have brought about her poverty? … I guess I’ve just reached a point where I’ve started to wonder whether all the grandstanding and fighting individual evils does much good for the world as a whole. Those evils are just symptoms of an overall sickness of the human spirit, and I don’t believe you can cure a disease by suppressing its symptoms” (Moore Ch. 11, 30).
With grand juries overwhelmingly voting not to indict in the case of police who murder unarmed people, thereby reinforcing that these executions are legal—the system working normally—we would do well to begin to ask ourselves these same questions.
Arkham Asylum: A Case Against Rehabilitation
Next to Superman, Batman is probably the most well-known superhero of all time. Batman, aka Bruce Wayne, is a wealthy playboy by day. But because he watched the murder of his parents at the hands of a street criminal (working on the orders of organized crime), at night, Bruce Wayne becomes Batman.
We can use Batman to look at several of the themes already explored— the vigilante nature of superheroes; the focus on street violence as the major threat to society and not institutional oppression; the eradication of redemption. Added onto that, however, are issues of classism and the idea that rehabilitation is impossible.
Originally debuting in DC Comics just a year after Superman in 1939, Batman was the first modern superhero to have no special powers. He does not hearken to the concept of an advanced being who, because of their superior powers, has the right to rise above every day law and implement their own vision of right and wrong. (Not that this sort of eugenicist ideal is a positive one, but it at least is understandable why some might consider the virtually indestructible and alien-born Superman to administer justice.)
The only thing that makes Batman special? He’s rich. He has enough money to buy himself vengeance, first on the people who murdered his parents, and then on the larger Gotham City itself. Batman’s existence and acceptance as a superhero clearly supports the capitalistic ideal that those with money have the right to supercede laws, and have a greater grasp of the common good. No wonder Reynolds referred to Batman as a “social fascist” (67).
The Batman world also serves to reinforce the idea that rehabilitation does not work, manifested in the form of Arkham Asylum. This fictional psychiatric hospital is the destination for every supervillain Batman captures. But the Asylum has an escape record that would make Houdini whistle in admiration. We see images of the Joker or Two Face in a straitjacket with a cell door clanging shut in their face, and we readers know they’ll probably be out on the streets before Batman has taken off his chestplate.
While the treatments received at Arkham are often vague, we know whatever they are doing isn’t working. This leads to the conclusion that rehabilitation is a fallacy, that people cannot change themselves or their situations, that there is a psychological, perhaps a genetic, need to commit crimes. The safest thing for the good people of Gotham, the narrative in Batman leads us to deduce, would be to stop sending these nuts to a psychiatric hospital, and instead send them to a maximum security prison and throw away the key, or better yet, for Batman to finish them off once and for all. The Batman phenomenon supports the idea of control and containment over the idea of support and rehabilitation; warehousing over healing.
Keep Humanity Pure
The X-Men are one superhero team that provides more positive lessons for organizing around alternatives to policing.
The main characters, hero and villain alike, in the X-Men world have mutated genes which result in special powers. In this comic, genetic mutations are clearly an analogy for exploring race, a fact that the creators were well-aware of. “A Wizard magazine article … confirmed that comic book creators Stan Lee and Jack Kirby had indeed come up with the X-Men concept while following the Civil Rights and Black Power movements of the 1960s that unfolded daily on their television screens” (Reloaded 2).
One of the biggest differences between the X-Men and other superheroes is that while the X-Men definitely battle supervillains, their biggest enemy is the established social order. Governments of the world have enslaved mutants, engineered viruses to kill them, created mutant internment camps reminiscent of those built for the Japanese during World War II, and have even built giant robots called Sentinels, whose sole purpose is to hunt, capture, and kill mutants.
We readers are told the biggest concern is not street crime; it is not a purse snatcher, it’s not even a mad scientist with a ray gun. It is a mad scientist with a ray gun in the employ of institutionalized power, power that would do anything to maintain the unequal status quo. X-Men often attempt to address those questions Ozymodious raised, of how to challenge heinous crimes that are completely legal.
X-Men work as a team, furthering the idea that it will take more than one man to change the political landscape. While most superheroes work independently as quintessential loners, the X-Men operate as a collective, and are clearly much stronger for it. Replacing individuality with collective struggle is the key to creating real, lasting alternatives to the police, and de-centering the narrative of white straight wealthy male saviors.
There Can Be Only One…?
To find the quintessential exploration of collective superhero power, we turn from comics to the small screen, to the world of Joss Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
Buffy follows the main character, a blonde cheerleader turned vampire hunter. In the show’s mythology, since the beginning of time, vampires have roamed the earth. And as the opening of the show tells us, “In every generation there is a chosen one… She alone will stand against the vampires, the demons, and the forces of darkness. She is the slayer.”
Though Buffy did work with a team, her “Scooby Gang,” she was the only one with the powers of the slayer, and ultimately the fate of the entire world rested on her shoulders.
Until the seventh and last season. While there is only one true slayer at a time (with a couple notable exceptions), there are thousands of young women around the world in every generation who have the potential to become the slayer. When the slayer dies, one of those girls will receive her powers.
In season seven, an ancient evil attempted to kill all potential slayers; that way, when the current slayer died, there would be no one to take her place. To battle and ultimately defeat this ancient evil, Buffy had to do something that had never been done before: she had to give up being special.
Through a magic spell, her witch friend Willow activated all of the potential slayers; they all had the power of the slayer. Only in this way did they have enough strength to push back the evil.
It was in no way an easy decision for Buffy. Buffy was the unquestioned leader because of her powers. Like Batman, she had the authority to reshape the world in the way she saw fit. Unlike Batman and his grounding in white supremacist classist patriarchy, Buffy’s decision to share power is one based on a collective, nonhierarchical viewpoint that sees the intersections of gender, race, sexual identity, class, identity, and privilege.
We have all been socialized, through westerns and comic book heroes and history classes and the nightly news and family stories, to view those who already have power as the ones who should continue to wield it, who should make and enforce concepts of justice. We see through Buffy, though, that instead of looking to external forces such as the police to secure our safety, we have to activate the slayer, the superhero in all of us; share the responsibility for the health, safety, and wholeness of our community; and use our collective power to reshape the world around us.
Bibliography
“Enter Magneto.” Jim Carlson. X-Men: The Animated Series. Fox News, New York. 27 November 1992.
“The Chosen.” Joss Whedon. Buffy the Vampire Slayer. UPN, New York. 20 May 2003.
Martin, Jose. “Policing is a Dirty Job, But No One’s Got to Do It: 6 Ideas for a Cop-Free World.” Rolling Stone. Web. 16 December 2014. <http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/policing-is-a-dirty-job-but-nobodys-gotta-do-it-6-ideas-for-a-cop-free-world-20141216>
Mauer, Marc. Race to Incarcerate. New York: The New Press, 2006.
Moore, Alan. Watchmen. New York: DC Comics, 1987.
Reloaded, Morpheus. “Beyond Children of the Atom: Black Politics, White Minds and the X-Men.” Playahata.com. May 8, 2003. Web. November 9, 2009. <http://www.playahata.com/pages/morpheus/xmen.htm>.
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Williams, Kristian. Our Enemies in Blue: Police and Power in America. Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2007.