On Mutant Allegory and the Rise of the Black Cop Trope

December 6, 2019 7:50 AM

"Blackness is a superhero origin story." says David Dennis, in a Medium post contrasting how HBO's Watchmen series looks at race with the X-Men franchise shying away from its own racial allegory. On the other hand, Steven Thrasher (the inaugural Renberg Chair of social justice in reporting at Northwestern's Medill School) notes in a Twitter thread that "we have a LOT to consider (in terms of news, politics, history, law & culture) to think about WHY we are getting the Black cop, how they exist, and how this figure is rising in our collective consciousness."
posted by Etrigan (17 comments total)

I think the Krakoa storyline is actually hinting at racial allegory entirely different from what we've seen in the past. The X-Men have long referred to themselves as homo superior. With the current storyline, I'm getting a strong whiff of mutant/white supremacy. (How do I interpret the "law" MAKE MORE MUTANTS other than the X-Men's "we will not be replaced"?) They've moved a long way from being a persecuted minority to a self-segregating enclave. Very different from the old "Children of the Atom" days.
posted by SPrintF at 8:07 AM on December 6, 2019 [1 favorite]

As a public service, here is the link to the Watchmen discussion on FanFare, which is really really good (the discussion as well as the show). [spoilers, natch]
posted by chavenet at 8:33 AM on December 6, 2019

One thing to consider when talking about the rise of Black Cops on screen is the actual percentage of minorities that are cops in any given city. You can find this information here, and it's interesting - it varies wildly from city to city. There are cities like Atlanta where the police force is majority-minority and Black police officers are actually disproportionately represented. Or you can look at Kansas City or Nashville, which are fucking terrifying.

In general, white people are typically disproportionately represented in urban police forces, but the problem seems to be worse in mid-sized to smaller cities rather than the largest urban areas. But it's not like representation is accurate anywhere else on the screen, so why is the strive for representation happening in the police department, anyway? It might be less about why we're featuring black people in cop shows and more about why the few stories about black people that make it to the screen are disproportionately about cops.

Also - thinking about South Side's officers, Turner and Goodnight: Turner is from the area, generally open for bribery and corruption, Goodnight is from the northwest suburbs and just sort of bumbles into police brutality. And it's the most uncomfortable part of watching that sitcom for me. Like, the entire premise is to have a show about south side of Chicago in a way that's not about people dying, but it's too close and too placating to be funny, in a way a lot of the other shitty circumstances that they're skirting are not.
posted by dinty_moore at 9:12 AM on December 6, 2019 [3 favorites]

Also, I'm behind on watching Watchmen, but I don't think his take on Watchmen as black cops fighting white supremacy is correct outside of the first episode, maybe. I generally do think it's interesting to consider the reasons why we're seeing so many black cop stories right now and what the motivations might be behind finding these stories marketable, but I think that's really selling Watchmen short.
posted by dinty_moore at 9:34 AM on December 6, 2019

I'd say it's directly related to why we see so many damn cop shows in the first place.

It says something about US culture when people who say they're tired of the sameness of superhero show celebrate the latest "After a tragedy a big city cop moves to a small town." And then there's the creepy way so many unaffiliated concepts like Lucifer get shoehorned into a police procedural. Americans are obsessed by cops, and it's how they show "This person is the valuable part of society."

So black people being subsumed into the authoritarian power structure via cop shows? Completely unsurprising.
posted by happyroach at 10:00 AM on December 6, 2019 [8 favorites]

I'm a little puzzled by the suggestion that this is a rising phenomenon. There were major black cop characters on just about all the major law-and-order-type shows from the 80s onwards: Bobby Hill on Hill Street Blues, Lieutenant Van Buren (and some of the detectives) on Law and Order original recipe, Ice-T on L&O: SVU, the captain, Pembleton, and Meldrick on Homicide...Speaking very generally, it's a way of casting black men especially in a nonthreatening role (because although they wield authority they've clearly accepted the legitimacy of policing generally). Lieutenant Fancy was a particularly depressing example of this, being used on NYPD Blue to help launder its comprehensively bigoted lead Sipowicz. To the extent any show is responsible for any cultural phenomenon, I hold NYPD Blue responsible for a lot.
posted by praemunire at 10:56 AM on December 6, 2019 [3 favorites]

They've moved a long way from being a persecuted minority to a self-segregating enclave. Very different from the old "Children of the Atom" days.

Also, mutant separatism has been around for a long time in the comics--I'm not even going to try to summarize the various Genosha plotlines, but you get the gist in Dark Phoenix (it's where Magneto is living). Speaking on a more serious level, I think one needs to be quite cautious in opposing the two concepts you've set up. A persecuted minority choosing to withdraw from society is not necessarily reproducing the same power dynamics that gave rise to its persecution in the first place.
posted by praemunire at 11:01 AM on December 6, 2019 [4 favorites]

I'm a little puzzled by the suggestion that this is a rising phenomenon.

Same. The Wire was a powerful counterexample, with black cops that were good, bad, and all of the show's multitudinous shades of gray in between, all while absolutely not papering over racism. Someone brings up the show in Thrasher's Twitter thread, and he rather tartly replies, "I didn’t say that they didn’t exist before", before repeating again his wonder at the fact that Denzel "Malcolm X"* Washington's son has played cops twice now, as if his father's past choice of roles should determine his.

*Not to mention that Denzel has played cops numerous times in his career.
posted by Halloween Jack at 12:20 PM on December 6, 2019 [5 favorites]

How soon we forget Virtuosity.
posted by RobotHero at 12:31 PM on December 6, 2019 [2 favorites]

Someone brings up the show in Thrasher's Twitter thread, and he rather tartly replies, "I didn’t say that they didn’t exist before"

I guess the counterargument would be to show that there are proportionately more, or higher-profile, but the cop show has been a staple since, I don't know, the 70s? And you had Ron Harris of Barney Miller. Not all of these roles fit into the legitimizing function being discussed (neither Harris nor the black cops of Homicide, I think), but the character archetype has been there since early on. There are a lot more TV shows now, which I think makes it easy to think that [x-type character] has increased prominence when really if we had the same number of shows as we did back in 1983, we'd have a roughly equivalent number of x-type character. I would bet that at its height, NYPD Blue had more viewers than all the non-network cop shows of today put together.
posted by praemunire at 2:22 PM on December 6, 2019

*Not to mention that Denzel has played cops numerous times in his career.

I wouldn't be surprised if it was ten times. Didn't he win the Oscar for Training Day?
posted by praemunire at 2:28 PM on December 6, 2019 [1 favorite]

FWIW, here are the 10 movies where Denzel plays an actual cop or other law enforcement (as far as I can tell):

The Mighty Quinn
Virtuosity
Fallen
The Siege (FBI agent)
The Bone Collector (forensics expert)
Training Day
Out of Time
Inside Man
Deja Vu (ATF agent)
2 Guns (DEA agent)
posted by mhum at 3:17 PM on December 6, 2019 [2 favorites]

He was a cop in Ricochet too.
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 3:24 PM on December 6, 2019

My feeling from the X-Men reboot is kind of the opposite of white supremacy - mutants are sick of being second class citizens and defining themselves in relation to the majority culture. Mutants can still live in the wider world if they want but they've got a place now where they can live without fear of persecution. I like this bit of dialog from Cyclops to the Fantastic Four in House of X #1 (the first issue of the reboot):

My family has spent our entire lives being hunted and hated. The world has told me that I was less when I knew I was more.
Did you honestly think that we were going to sit around forever and just take it?

In House of X #4 they do a great job of showing what the mutants have suffered over the last few years - there used to be millions of mutants and now there are only a couple of hundred. Why do they need to take it anymore? And what do they want? A place of their own and to be left in peace. Can't they at least have that?
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 3:32 PM on December 6, 2019 [1 favorite]

Dang it, I knew if I wasn't careful I'd miss at least one.

Meanwhile, while I think Thrasher's twitter thread might be overstating the recency and/or the rise in portrayals of black cops, there's definitely something there regarding how the presence of black cops in media serve as a kind of fig leaf (or bandaid?) over the underlying white supremacy of real-life policing.
posted by mhum at 3:37 PM on December 6, 2019 [3 favorites]

there's definitely something there regarding how the presence of black cops in media serve as a kind of fig leaf (or bandaid?) over the underlying white supremacy of real-life policing

In Toronto we have this in real life where our black police chief defends carding. Although it does illustrate that the system is racist and not necessarily any person in it.
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 4:21 PM on December 6, 2019

I suspect a lot of the creators think that if they didn't have black cops they would make black people look bad, and don't think at all about the way it would make the cops look bad. It's their way of going, "See, we know not all black people are criminals, some of them are on the good side." They take the goodness of the police as a given and then bestow that goodness upon chosen black characters.
posted by RobotHero at 8:22 AM on December 7, 2019