Superman and the Displacement of Race

Abstract

This chapter discusses how race is represented in Superman, following the whitening influence of pop culture discussed in Chap. 6. It discusses the comics’ stereotyped nonwhite representation and their symbolic erasure of Americans of color. It also describes Superman’s hometown, which is less like the world Superman’s creators knew personally and more like the one they saw in pop culture. The creation of a mostly male, white, middle-class world made it easier for the comics to retain their stark New Deal populist dualism. The chapter also relates the comics’ world-building to American anti-Semitism, then at an historical peak, arguing that Superman’s world’s slightly larger welcome for vaguely ethnic characters, and its lack of recognizably Jewish representation, was, in a sense, a “normalization” in absentia of American Jews.