They're angry over one of the most basic components of his character?
I was kind of joking about that post about how you couldn't make Blazing Saddles nowadays, but I guess it's just true. You can't even make Superman these days without them complaining he's woke.
these idiots even assume he'd vote republican JUST BECAUSE HE GREW UP IN KANSAS
MOTHERFUCKERS ONE OF HIS MAJOR VILLAINS IS AN EVIL BILLIONAIRE
AND THERE'S A BOOK WHERE HE BEAT THE ABSOLUTE COUSIN FUCKING STUPID OUTTA THE KLAN
He did it in real life, too.
Back in the 1940s, a guy named Stetson Kennedy went undercover to infiltrate the KKK in Georgia.
(Okay, actually, a bit of a note here first- Kennedy is the guy credited with all of this. He's also said that there were other infiltrators who he worked with, but didn't want to reveal their identities. Some people have said this should put his whole account into doubt. But whether he was the one who did it all himself or was just the point man, there's plenty of evidence he did a lot.)
So he infiltrated the KKK and decided to gather information to take them down- and quickly realized why that wouldn't work.
โIt was obvious with the police uniform blue and the Khaki uniforms of the sheriffโs deputies sticking out beneath the Klan robes โ and there were prosecutors and judges โ they were all in the Klan.โ
When he tried to go up the ladder and work with the federal government, basically ran into the same problem.
Stetson recalled trying to pass information on the Klan to agents of the FBI and โthey showed less than no interest. On one occasion, I recall an FBI agent waited until he followed me out to the elevator โ may have had his desk wired and didnโt want it on the record โ but saying, โWell, what do you know about black militants โ thatโs the real threat to America.โ He didnโt consider the Klan a threat at all.โ
He did get some stuff done- like putting together the reports that got the KKK to lose their status as a tax-exempt organization in Georgia. But if he wanted to do more, he needed to go bigger. So he went to a higher authority.
He went to Superman.
Specifically, he went to the people who made the radio show, The Adventures of Superman, and helped them on creating a story line where Jimmy Olson has been managing a youth baseball team and his star pitcher- an Asian-American kid- is getting terrorized by a group called the Clan of the Fiery Cross, a bunch of bigots who wear hoods and hassle minority groups- an obvious stand-in for the KKK.
But with Kennedy's help, it was a very specific stand-in for the KKK, to the point of supposedly referencing specific Klan secrets. And it didn't hesitate to make the villains appropriately, openly evil, while making Superman the defender of truth and justice.
And apparently, it made the KKK look dumb as hell. Members would see their kids playing "Superman vs. the KKK" and that the KKK were pathetic villains. And it pissed them off. The head of the KKK in Georgia tried to organize boycotts against the sponsors of the Superman radio show. (Cancel culture, tsk tsk.)
And, in the radio broadcast, when things are going downhill, and Matt Riggs, the local leader of the Clan, tries to go to the top for help? Well. He finds out what's really going on there.
Yeah. The writers of Superman were very straightforward about how the KKK's whole philosophy was dumb shit, and the people at the top were just using the outrage to manipulate the lower ranks.
And... Apparently this really had an impact on the recruitment of the KKK in the 1940s. So, yeah. Superman fought the KKK in our world, too. And he put them in their place.
It's unfortunate that we have to keep teaching people this lesson, though.
The radio shows are up on YouTube if you want to listen to them:
Also, the indented quotes above, I got from here:
Aaaaand the clip of dialogue from the show, I got from This American Life:
And let's not forget this classic image from the 1950s with Superman telling a group of kids that talking badly about anyone because of their race, religion, or nationality is un-American:
I've found that most people whining about comic books being "woke" and, in particular, characters like Superman being that aren't actually long-time comic book fans. They're just a bunch of misogynists and/or racists who use the popularity of comic book movies over the past decade or so as a talking point platform to push their own right-wing agendas, if not just using it to outright grift from people who fall for their uninformed babble. (The same was true when it came to that GamerGate nonsense some years before as well.)
Another possibly relevant Stetson Kennedy tidbit: when he ran (extremely unsuccessfully) in the 1952 election for Florida governor, his good buddy Woody Guthrie wrote a campaign song that included the lines
If we fix it so you can't make no money on war Well, we'll all forget what we was killing folks for
I'm always gonna be in favor of a Woody Guthrie mention.
