Whitewashing
Comic Books Have a Whitewashing Problem
Damian Wayne, Batman’s biological son and the youngest incarnation of the sidekick Robin, is a character very close to my heart. Like me, Damian is mixed; I am half-white and half-Chinese, and Damian is a mix of white, Arab, and Chinese. One day, I was doomscrolling on Twitter when I saw a tweet saying “STOP WHITEWASHING DAMIAN WAYNE ESPECIALLY WITH THIS KID,” referring to a tweet promoting Aidan Gallagher (the white actor famous for playing Number Five in The Umbrella Academy) to play Damian in the upcoming movie The Brave and the Bold from DC Studios. Oh no. I spent the next hour or two looking at tweets speculating on the casting for Damian Wayne in the DC Universe, with some advocating for a darker-skinned Damian and others insisting on a white Damian.
Damian is the son of Bruce Wayne (Batman), a white man, and Talia al Ghul, an Arab and Chinese assassin. Although in many recent iterations Talia has a darker complexion, her skin color has not been drawn consistently throughout her existence. In live-action movies, Talia and her father, Ra’s al Ghul, have been played by the white European actors Marion Cotillard and Liam Neeson respectively. Damian is usually depicted with light skin and, until recently, his ethnic heritage has rarely been addressed. In short, Damian and his family have been whitewashed.
Whitewashing is a larger trend in comics. Inconsistent coloring for people of color has a long history in comics, starting with twentieth-century printing processes that made Black characters look green or gray because they were not developed with dark-skinned characters in mind. And even since racial biases in printing technology have been addressed, characters of color are still whitewashed all too frequently. In DC Comics alone, characters like the al Ghuls, Connor Hawke, and others have been colored inconsistently and/or drawn with light skin and white features despite explicitly being non-white. Cartoonist Ronald Wimberly describes how his editor at Marvel instructed him to draw a mixed Latina character with lighter skin, despite the diversity of skin tones Latinx people can have. All these problems with characters of color in comics are expressions of colorism, where light skin is treated as the default.
A common defense for mixed characters like Damian having lighter skin is that he is half-white, so he could just as easily have inherited his father’s skin tone rather than his mother’s. To some extent, I am actually a physical embodiment of this; I am a light-skinned mixed person. Most people do not know I am half-Asian unless I tell them. But despite appearances, a light-skinned Damian Wayne is not the best representation for mixed people like me.
When colorists visually erase characters of color, comics writers often erase their non-white backgrounds too. Although I am white-passing, I grew up with a mix of cultures. Around December, I’d help light the menorah for Hanukkah, then, a month or two later, I’d don red clothes and receive hong bao for Lunar New Year. All the traditions, customs, and norms I grew up with—big or small, Jewish or Chinese or American—helped shape my identity and my perspective. My culture is a hybrid, and my identity does not fit into neat boxes.
Mixed characters like Damian would also experience and be influenced by different cultures in this way. In Damian’s case, he spent the first ten years of his life (give or take) with his non-white family outside of America, so even if he inherited his father’s skin tone, he would still be influenced by Arab and Asian culture instead of only white American culture. However, the hybridity of cultures and the nuances that would add to mixed characters’ identities are often lost along with their melanin. As much as I would love to see a character like Damian grapple with the complexities of being a mixed-race person with white privilege like I do, current comics writers rarely tell stories like mine, even if they have characters that look like me. So, despite Damian’s unarguably mixed background, he ends up looking and acting like just another white-skinned, dark-haired Robin—another white superhero.
The overwhelming whiteness of comics is part of a larger systemic issue with diverse representation in media. In 2018, half of children’s books featured white characters, and there were more books featuring animals than books featuring people of color. In 2019, the publishing industry overall was 76% white. And most racial minority groups are still underrepresented in film in front of, and especially behind, the camera. Fortunately, many of these statistics actually indicate a downward trend in the overwhelming whiteness of media, but there is still more work to be done to ensure diverse voices are represented and heard.
Whitewashing in comics takes on another dimension when you consider how characters of color are translated onto the big screen to reach a wider audience. For example, Sunspot, an Afro-Brazilian Marvel character, was played by a white Brazilian actor in the film The New Mutants, a choice the director defended as simply casting the best actor for the job. This has been rightfully criticized. The “best actor” defense is usually used to justify whitewashing characters on screen, but it is rarely applied to racebending, or when actors of color portray previously white or racially ambiguous characters. When Black actress Anna Diop was cast as the orange-skinned alien Starfire, for instance, several comics fans derided the choice as inaccurate and a “diversity hire.” Why isn’t repeatedly casting white men like Liam Neeson to play an Arab character like Ra’s al Ghul seen as inaccurate to the original comics? By further whitewashing comics characters in film adaptations, the popular image of these characters becomes synonymous with the white actors who play them, turning what little, imperfect representation people of color might have had into yet another white role.
How do we move beyond the white default? How do we incorporate diversity into comics in meaningful ways? For starters, we need more diverse people working in comics. All the characters of color I have mentioned were created by white writers and artists. By including more diverse voices and listening to people of color, comic book publishers can create more honest and responsible stories written by and about people of color. Whitewashing and inconsistent skin coloring should not be a mistake that goes unnoticed by comics editors, or anyone involved in the creation of comics. If the comics industry steps up, and if readers support comics with diverse characters, then more people can see themselves in superhero worlds.
Seeing yourself reflected in stories is powerful. When I see mixed characters like me, I feel a kind of affirmation that I don’t get from stories with just white people; there’s a sense of a shared identity and belonging that shows people like me can exist in spaces I never imagined myself in before. However, it took me until adulthood to find white-Asian stories like mine, and only after I sought them out. When mixed characters like Damian are conceived but then only allowed to be white, I am left with breadcrumbs, hungry for more reflections of my reality. So, please, stop whitewashing Damian Wayne. I am tired of starving.
Melissa Logan (’24) is a student at Susquehanna University with a double major in English literature and publishing and editing, and a minor in women and gender studies. She has recently worked as a web designer for her university’s Common Reading program. She is from West Windsor, New Jersey.