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The stereotypes through which American popular culture often interprets and represents racial identity operate not only as tools of defamation but also as vehicles for far more subtle manipulations of race. In his 1946 essay "Twentieth-Century Fiction and the Black Mask of Humanity," Ralph Ellison observes that stereotypes of African Americans, whatever other purposes they might serve, become a means "by which the white American seeks to resolve the dilemma arising ... between his acceptance of the sacred democratic belief that all men are created equal and his treatment of every tenth man as though he were not" (28)-a means, in other words, of reconciling the contradictions between an ideology of democracy and a history and practice of prejudice. Whether these stereotypes assume the form of unrealistic portrayals of racial minorities or an equally unrealistic invisibility, they often fulfill this double function of oppression and reaffirmation.
Comic books, and particularly the dominant genre of superhero comic books, have proven fertile ground for stereotyped depictions of race. Comics rely upon visually codified representations in which characters are continually reduced to their appearances, and this reductionism is especially prevalent in superhero comics, whose characters are wholly externalized into their heroic costumes and aliases. This system of visual typology combines with the superhero genre's long history of excluding, trivializing, or "tokenizing" minorities to create numeorus minority super-- heroes who are marked purely for their race: "Black Lightning," "Black Panther," and so forth. The potential for superficiality and stereotyping here is dangerously high. Yet in recent years, some comics creators have demonstrated that the superhero genre's own conventions can invite a more nuanced depiction of minority identity. Race in contemporary comics proves to be anything but simplistic. If some titles reveal deceptively soothing stereotypes lurking behind their veneers of diversity, then others show complex considerations of identity.
This article begins by addressing previous critical debates over the function of race in comics. I then investigate the portrayals of race in several mainstream superhero comic books of the 1990s. The series Legion of Super-Heroes serves as an example of a comic which espouses platitudes of diversity while actually obscuring any signs of racial difference. This attitude, however, is offset by other series such as Black Lightning and Xero, both of...