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In Terms of Race, do comics offer stereotypes?

In terms of race, I would say that comics do offer stereotypes. Before the 1960’s, most of the comic book characters were all white. Comic book creators rarely added any other races to their stories, not even in background images. Even so, there were still stereotypes used in comic books that weren’t always related to race. In Black is the Color of My Comic Book Character: An Examination of Ethnic Stereotypes, Davenport discusses how stereotypes are used in comic books to provide readers with something they can relate to. He goes into detail on how this applies to various kinds of stereotypes, one of the main ones being racial stereotyping. One great example of this is Luke Cage, the first black superhero that was given his own series. In the first issue, he was portrayed as an angry and aggressive black man who obtains his powers in jail. Right away, we see the stereotype used in this comic series. Cage was meant to represent the common African American during the Civil Rights movement. As a result of this movement, African Americans were seen as an angry race. Another reason that Luke Cage is a great example of racial stereotyping is the type of speech the characters used. In his work, Davenport discusses how Cage’s creators used “Black English” as the main form of speech. This term refers to African American inability to speak standard-English due to the stereotype of blacks as poor and uneducated. This clearly shows how that in terms of race, comics do offer stereotypes.

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