White privilege weightlifting

Grunting children are pretty funny.  I've taken my boys, age 2 and 7, down to the weight room.  Not as spotters, but just to keep an eye on them while I pound out the day’s stress on some cast iron.  It’s good for them to see a mother lifting weights instead of kitchen pans.

 

They fight over who can use the 5 lbs and who can manage the 10s.  They boast.  They strut.  They drop barbells on their toes and wince and whimper and then pretend it never happened.  Not so different from the grown-ups at the gym: preening in mirrors, absorbed with counting reps, taking themselves very seriously.

They gather around me and marvel at my strength as I bench the equivalent of their bodies.  They smooch my lips and giggle every time I come down from a sit-up.  They play between my legs as I squat and lunge.  Weight-lifting with small children is not for the impatient.  The reward?  I feel like Nike, triumphant and fertile.   The Greek goddess, not the shoe brand. 

Once we land in the kitchen for some ice-water and snacks, my eldest starts complaining that all the other boys in his class have bigger muscles than him.  He vows to catch up.  His classmate, whom I’ll call Jamie, has the biggest, he proclaims.  Jamie, it turns out, can lift “30 times” what he can.  Teasingly, I remark,

“Wow.  Jamie sounds like a superhero.  Are you sure he’s not a superhero?”

My son stares at me incredulously.

“Mum, Jamie can’t be a superhero.  He’s brown.  There’s no brown superheroes.”

Now it’s my turn to stare, shocked.  The ice cracks in my glass.  My son tries to fill in the silence by explaining his seven-year-old interpretation of the world the best he can.

“Mum, you know Jamie.  Jamie’s skin is dark.  You know, his skin is sort of that brown color.  Superheroes don’t look like that.  Batman, Robin, Spiderman, that badguy girl that’s like a cat, Superman, Ironman, they look like us.”

He starts rattling off all the superheroes he can think of.  I’m still in shock.  We don’t really watch superhero movies or play superhero video games at home, so he’s passively absorbed this from school, posters, TV commercials, wherever his little eyes and ears might have been when I wasn’t there to point out the gender biases or racial inequalities, or worse, when I wasn't even paying attention to them.  My librarian brain is on fire trying to name a black or Latino superhero he would recognize and I’m drawing a blank.  I’m ashamed to admit in that moment I can’t think of a single one.  I know they exist, but none of them have the staying power of Batman or Wonder Woman in the flawed storeroom of my mind.

How do I make good on this example of passive racism to my young children without diving into the entire sordid history of our prejudicial Hollywood and comic book culture; without making excuses for white dudes who draw comic heroes that they wish they could look like and comic heroines they wish they could bed?  There is no way I can comfortably explain black exploitation to a child his age.  But this isn't about my comfort.  How do I tell my innocent kids that the world isn’t fair and that even though Jamie has the best muscles in the class the media doesn’t celebrate his likeness?  There may be the occasional minority superhero character that pops up here and there, but they are rarely the star, the hero, the guy all the other little boys want to be when they grow up.  I realize for the first time how hard it must be to be Jamie in a classroom full of white kids.  In a world full of white superheroes.  

The whole episode makes me profoundly sad.  I vow to search out minority superheroes portrayed in a flattering light.  It sounds as daunting as finding well-rounded female supers that aren’t reduced to eye-candy or damsels in distress.  My first stop is to remind him of Frozone in the Incredibles, a movie he loves. 

What are your suggestions of comics and movies with minority heroes for an elementary audience?  What can we do to change this, so Jamie can see himself in the heroes our culture puts on its screens?