Years ago, I had a conversation with a professor of literature in which I mentioned off-hand that Alexandre Dumas was a black man.
He was shocked to find this out and my initial reaction was one of pride that I had a piece of knowledge that a man far smarter than I am did not. I felt as if I’d surprised Stephen Hawkins with some black hole trivia. Then, after some reflection, I- and I’m hoping he- had a “woke” moment. His surprise over Dumas’ skin color didn’t come despite his vast knowledge of Dumas’ work but because of it. There’s no surprise regarding the skin color of Maya Angelou, Richard Wright, Alex Haley or Langston Hughes. Their characters, plots and writing all reflect the viewpoints of persons of color and reflect upon the difficulties imposed by the evils of racism. Dumas steadfastly avoided mentioning race or racism in any of his literature. The Count of Monte Cristo, The Man in the Iron Mask, The Three Musketeers, D’Artagnan- all white men. Dumas’ failure to address race or even to have any black characters was remarked upon by Frederick Douglass:
We have nothing to thank Dumas for. Victor Hugo, the white man, could speak for us, but this brilliant colored man who could have let down sheets of fire upon the heads of tyrants and carried freedom to his enslaved people, had no word in behalf [of] liberty for the enslaved.
Dumas and Douglass had different goals. They both lived to see their dreams become reality. Douglass’ dream was to see the end of slavery, Dumas wished to become the most successful writer of his time. Had Dumas done as Douglass wished and let down “sheets of fire” upon the tyrannical white man, his dream certainly would not have come to pass. Even with Dumas’ steadfast refusal to address race in his writings, he still faced steady racism as shown in the cartoons shown below.
His fellow novelist Balzac referred to him as “That negro”. Dumas’ chief competitor’s attacks were largely racist, Eugène de Mirecourt writing, “Scratch Monsieur Dumas’s hide and you will find the savage … a Negro!”
All this was despite Dumas’ refusal to address his skin color and to have characters that looked like him. Had he chosen to follow the path Douglass described there’s little chance that his stories would have sold to the extent that his literary creations are still ubiquitous.
This brings us to Ben Shapiro who responded to Henry Cavill leaving the role of Superman and potentially being replaced by Michael B. Jordan with this tweet:
Superman was created by two Jewish kids from Cleveland, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster. Their famous creation didn’t reflect their background because they wanted that creation to be famous. I would like to think they considered making his name Caleb Cohen rather than Clark Kent but I’m under no illusion. I’m sure it never even occurred to them that they could depict him as anything but a white, Christian, straight man. Just as it never occurred to Dumas to make D’Artagnan anything else.
Stanley Martin Lieber, better known as Stan Lee only had one of his prominent characters, The Thing, as an uncloseted Jew. Even he was part of the Fantastic Four and not a lead character. He certainly hinted that Peter Parker aka Spider-man is Jewish (he speaks more Yiddish than my mother) however he dared not say that outright.
Stan Lee’s response to a black woman, Zendaya, being cast as MJ his love interest was “If she is as good an actress as I hear she is, I think it'll be absolutely wonderful”. Fine, but when he created the character in 1965 it was illegal in many states for a white man to marry a black woman. Had he depicted MJ as a black woman there would have been a racist uproar that would have destroyed the future billion-dollar franchise in its infancy.
Whenever there’s a reassignment of roles there’s inevitable cries of “SJW”!, or snide remarks about directors and writers being “woke”. Whenever a character is depicted as gay there’s always a homophobic lament of how the homosexual agenda is being “shoved down our throats”.
This has never been the case. Dr. Watson, Lana Lang, Miles Morales, Jimmy Olsen and all the others were reassigned not because of overzealous producers SJW zealotry, but rather them being freed from the shackles of racist and homophobic conformity. What’s absurd isn’t the present, but the past. It’s bizarre that Tarzan lord of the Apes, from deepest Africa was a white man. Strange that half Jewish Cecille B. Demille knew he had to cast White Christian Charlton Heston as Moses and white Yul Brynner as Egypt’s Pharaoh. Bizarre that Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson shared a career, a home, a life but couldn’t share a romance.
So, these reassignments are a form of cultural affirmative action. They are doing what Dumas, Lee, and Wilde could not. These reassignments are justified from hundreds of years of oppressive straight white-male conformity. Directors and writers are no longer forced to depict their characters as belonging to only one color, gender and sexuality. Writers can write stories of people that look and act like they do. Directors are telling stories about gay people, Hollywood is casting people of color and woman to play characters played previously by white men not because producers are making them do so in Politically Correct fervor, but because they have stopped capitulating to society’s systemic racism.