A friend of mine told me that he realized, in a sudden flash, that early readers of Batman must have identified him with the Ku Klux Klan. This shocked me, because once he said it, the similarities of imagery became unavoidable. He’s a masked vigilante who wears a cowl, a word used in only two contexts in the English language: Batman and the KKK. They both use the term "knight." And they share the same MO with the same attitude toward those they punish ("Criminals are a superstitious and cowardly lot. So my disguise must be able to strike terror into their hearts."). After all, is there that big a difference between dressing up as a bat and dressing up as the ghosts of confederate dead?
I first started this blog because I wanted to explore this topic. Then I did a little googling, and I decided that I didn’t want to be the first person on the web to open this particular can of worms. After all, it’s a serious thing to call someone a racist, even if they’re imaginary. But RevSF has got about a zillion articles about Batman right now, so I’ll just throw out one more.
So did readers look at Batman and see him through the lens of the Klan? 1939, Batman’s debut, came at a waning moment in the Klan’s political power. And the Klan’s big cultural apogee came more than a decade before with Birth of a Nation, a silent film that had probably not been in theaters for a while. A young reader of comics at the time may have had no more than a passing acquaintance with the KKK as something that their parents talked about.
If there’s a smoking gun linking Batman with the Klan, it lies in Batman’s roots in pulp detective fiction. Noirish Detectives and the Klan both see the world as a cesspit of declining values and predatory villains, and only a few brave men are angry enough and righteous enough to stand against it (the angry men can’t halt the tide of villainy, but it does justify whatever they want to do). Because of this dovetailing agenda, in 1923 the ground-breaking detective magazine Black Mask published an entire issue devoted to tales of the Klan, a series of stories that every independent observer agrees was a glorification of KKK exploits.
But that’s a pretty weak connection, and personally I’m not convinced.
And why dwell on perceptions that may or may not have occurred three generations ago? There have been a lot of writers and illustrators for Batman between then and now, and it’s unlikely if any in the modern era have drawn much inspiration from the KKK.
The problems the Batman franchise has with addressing race are the same as every other crime-fighting series from "CSI: Miami" to "Cops: Miami." This is America after all, and you can’t talk about crime without talking about class without talking about race. From a political standpoint there’s no question that "crime" is a code-word for race (look up The Southern Strategy for more on that).
If Batman has a rogues gallery that’s suspiciously free of non-whites (and Italians don’t count), to the point of being super-white (Mr.Frost, The Joker, The Penguin, etc.), it’s because you can’t have a rich white guy in a pointy cowl beating up folks of color at anywhere the rate of the police (in Austin the Police use force on blacks at a rate 7-times higher than white dudes) without it looking pretty bad. So we’ll just have to assume that Gotham, despite being a stand-in for Chicago, has essentially zero people of color. If you can believe that.
Sitting here thinking about Batman, the institution of crime-fighting super-heroes, and cop fiction in general, in my heart of hearts I can’t help but think they’re all racist. But it’s a vague semiotic racism, one that’s unlikely to do more than indulge some power fantasies, or at the very worst compel someone to vote Republican.
So it’s okay to like Batman.
I mean, c’mon, that movie kicked ass.