This is cultural bias in effect. General (generally white) audiences never question why characters are white and blond. If a character could be white, that’s usually justification enough. Whiteness as default becomes logical and comfortable. Only non-whiteness requires an explanation.

Indeed, if a character is not white, some people will cry out that their racial identity is the product of political agenda-driven tampering. If a character is white, the same people will comfortably assume that he or she came out of the box like that.

It should be noted that we’re not even talking about the broad US census category of “white”, which covers people whose families hail from Europe, North Africa or the Middle East — including many people with tan, olive or ruddy skin.

In comics, whiteness is predominantly represented by the pale pink complexions of Northern Europeans — the color once problematically referred to as “Flesh” on Crayola crayons, until Crayola changed it to “Peach” in 1962. Real world white comes in many shades, but in comics all white people seem to trend towards hex color #FFCFAB. (Individual colorists may of course bring more nuance to their work, but how many white superheroes can you name who are consistently portrayed with bronze or olive-toned skin?)

Superhero comics don’t actually favor whiteness; they favor a subset of whiteness that borders on Aryan idealism. We ought to regard that as uncomfortably fetishistic, because it’s an aesthetic that the industry has chosen.

All fiction is manufactured. Authors make their worlds and choose what goes in them. It is always possible to contrive a fictional justification for a character looking whichever way the author wants, up to and including finding a way to make a white person the hero in a story about, say, feudal Japan, or ancient Egypt, or Persia during the Islamic Golden Age. A white hero is not the most likely scenario, but it’s always a possible scenario, so in that way it always becomes justified.

The decision to cast Michael B. Jordan as the Human Torch has been called out by message board posters as evidence of an agenda at work — but white heroes in these non-white settings are rarely called out as similar evidence of an agenda. It’s all artifice, it’s all contrived. Fiction exists in service to an author’s design. All fiction serves an agenda, whether it’s articulated or not.

Andrew Wheeler, “Radioactive Blackness And Anglo-Saxon Aliens: Achieving Superhero Diversity Through Race-Changing” (via fyeahlilbit3point0) All of this. As I’ve noted before, putting people of color or gay people or a realistic number of women (hi there, crowd scenes with 17% women!) in your world isn’t an “agenda.” It’s acknowledging reality. NOT having gay people, people of color, etc. is an agenda. And if it’s not intentional, that doesn’t really excuse it. The idea that it can happen and be unintentional is a more stinging condemnation of our society’s racism, sexism, and homophobia than the existence of the Klan or Proposition 8 or any other active example. Sane people can all get behind the idea that the KKK is a bad thing. Increasing numbers of sane people are getting behind the idea that it’s not really the business of anyone who’s not invited to the wedding which two consenting adults get married. But the passive acceptance that people who do important things, people who are worth telling stories about, people who are worth listening to, people who are worth being seen are automatically white (and straight, and male) is the severed artery that’s bleeding us out. It paves the way for actively terrible things to happen, and for people to shake their heads and tsk and acknowledge that it’s terrible, but it’s the way the world works, so what are you going to do? It’s not the way the world has to work. And acknowledging in our stories that humans—and heroes—don’t have a default race or gender or orientation is a good way to start changing it. (via jessicalprice) (via jessicalprice)