Civil Rights and the Metaphor of X-Men

Laypeople fail to see the connection between the King/X debate and the DuBois/Washington debate—that they are but temporal extensions of the decision between willful integration and self-imposed segregation—but this discussion has existed, unresolved, and continues to exist so to this day (though full willful segregation is a ship that has long since past, with Marcus Garvey’s spirit aboard it). With due respect to the presidency of Barack Obama that the path to coexistence is the more heavily traveled, coexistence is far from peaceful. There are still virulent acts of racism and coded—and others not so much. Regardless, there is a President today who would have 200 years ago been a slave. By comparison, we get Cyclops’ brother Havok as a commander of a team of Avengers, giving orders even to Captain America. It seems coexistence is in both the fictional and actual worlds has been a proven attainable goal. It would seem that neither world can manage full peace, the full realization of the dream of judgment based on the content of character, or even full acceptance of coexistence as prejudice still runs high in both realities—only totally mitigated by the deculturalization of the individual via “soft language” such as political correctness and the encompassing euphemism of classism in the real world.

As the years wore on different writers approached the Xavier/Magneto argument through different lenses, Chris Claremont even placed Magneto at the head of Xavier’s dream for a while, putting him in charge of Xavier’s School for several years, but in the end the conversation in the real world required that the two remain distinctly different. The difference of that distinction has evolved drastically. Charles Xavier fell from sainthood as his character was developed; Magneto become more complicated (with the revelation of his past as a Holocaust survivor made him increasingly the evil that made him) and eventually evolved into something of an anti-hero rather than a villain. This is only possible because the complexity of the real word issue changed drastically and—one might argue—the philosophies rooted in DuBois and Washington found themselves compromising into each other rather than distinctly separating as they had in years past. The rise of the minority millionaire—the black millionaire especially–has given way to the phenomenon of the minority entrepreneur, and the philosophical impasse (or some might say imposition) of “giving back to the community”. Investing one’s personal wealth for the benefit of the community is, in today’s America where money is legally viewed as free speech, the same as activism.

While black individuals have been able to integrate in business, they then have reinvested into the communities they came from to strengthen in and give opportunities—a chimera of the defining points of the two philosophies which were both rooted in development through education and entrepreneurship. Traditionally, Xavier always did this, with his Xavier School for Gifted Youngsters (a sort of Tuskegee Institute for Mutants, if you can handle the philosophical inversion) where he trained students to use their powers for free. Now we see more and more minority millionaires offering college scholarship—famously Oprah has put more than 500 black men through college—which has allowed them to become the segregated “black business class”, while some can even crossover to just being “business people”. These people then return the favor by (ideally) by reinvesting in needy minority youths. With the softening of the self-segregationist philosophy, Magneto himself was able to become a more reasonable character, with only a varied perspective and a checkered (nee genocidal) past. Charles Xavier, perhaps still in parallel to his philosophical basis, had some skeletons revealed in his closet but remained revered all the same. It is fair to assert however, that Professor X and Magneto ceased being Dr. King and Malcolm X a long, long time ago—if ever they truly were, seeing as there seem to be cherry picked pieces of integrationist and segregationist philosophy imbued upon both leaders.